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MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal
Open-source pioneer and Novell Vice President Miguel de Icaza Thursday for the first time publicly slammed his company's cross-patent licensing agreement with Microsoft as he defended himself against lack of patent protection for third parties that distribute his company's Moonlight project, which ports Microsoft's Silverlight technology to Linux.
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Speaking on a panel at the MIX 08 conference in Las Vegas, de Icaza said that Novell has done the best it could to balance open-source interests with patent indemnification. However, if he had his way, the company would have remained strictly open source and not gotten into bed with Microsoft. Novell entered into a controversial multimillion dollar cross-patent licensing and interoperability deal with Microsoft in November 2006.
"I'm not happy about the fact that such an agreement was made, but [the decision] was above my pay grade; I think we should have stayed with the open-source community," de Icaza said. He was speaking on a panel that also included representatives from Microsoft and open-source companies Mozilla and Zend.
De Icaza is a well-known technology prodigy from Mexico City who cofounded the GNOME open-source project and whose company Ximian was purchased by Novell in 2003. He remains one of the company's most well-respected and best-known open-source proponents.
De Icaza's comments came as he received questions from an audience member about the Moonlight project, Novell's open-source project to bring Microsoft's Silverlight to Linux. Silverlight is cross-browser runtime for building and delivering applications on the Web.
During the discussion, de Icaza explained that while anyone who downloaded Moonlight from Novell was protected by the company's licensing of Silverlight codecs from Microsoft through the company's own cross-licensing agreement. Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering from Mozilla, then raised the question that if he downloads and then distributes the code for Moonlight, would he get the patent protection?
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Nerdapalooza Orlando, Florida, July 4-5 2008.
LinuxWorld Conference and Expo San Francisco, August 4-7, 2008.
Linux Plumbers Conference Portland, OR, Sept. 16-19, 2008.
FreedomHEC Santa Monica, November 8-9, 2008.
RE: MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal By Bob on March 7, 2008, 8:55 am Reply | Read entire comment Fire the trader!!!!!
The deal has been good for Novell...so far By Tim Wessels on March 9, 2008, 12:18 pm Reply | Read entire comment When Novell and Microsoft announced their agreement on November 2, 2006 it came as a surprise to many people both inside and outside Novell. Novell is not a "pure...
Well respected? By grakker on March 9, 2008, 3:18 am Reply | Read entire comment As far as I could tell, he was respected from a programming standpoing, but his strange truculence with mono and MS made him more than a bit of a pariah within the...
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