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.
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?
"There is a patent covenant for anyone that downloads [Moonlight] from Novell," answered de Icaza, who then acknowledged that "as to extending the patents to third parties -- you have to talk to Microsoft."
This answer led Schroepfer to point out the inconsistency between having products that are called open source but are "patent-encumbered." "There are a lot of complicated IP patent-licensing restrictions," he said. "Even if you have open-source [products], you can't get the end result you're interested in."
Schroepfer said that Mozilla does not have any patents or any form of indemnification for anything in its products that may violate other company's patents -- something de Icaza said certainly must be the case.
"We are as protected or unprotected as anyone else," Schroepfer said. "It's a fairly equal scenario."
De Icaza shot back that it was "unfair" of Schroepfer to paint Novell as the only company protected by patent covenants, as many companies have signed licensing agreements not only with Microsoft, but also with other companies such as IBM that have a large patent portfolio.
He also said that while it's commendable that Microsoft is attempting to be more open by allowing other companies more access to application programming interfaces, discussion and haggling over OSes and patents slows the industry as a whole's move to fully take advantage of new Web 2.0 business models, as Google has.
Comments
Microsoft could easily port .Net and Silverlight to Linux and release them under valid licenses - even if they were binary only licenses. There are few organizations promoting a cross-platform product that do not support the other platforms themselves. Adobe does it for the Flash Player. Real Networks does it for their Real Player. If Microsoft ported their .Net to Linux, Silverlight would likely come without any further work too. So this just goes to show how much Microsoft really is behind cross-platform solutions - they're not. If they were, they'd do it themselves. As is, Mono and Moonlight will always have less functionality than Microsoft's equivalents, and will always be behind Microsoft's versions.
Perhaps this is a new twist on Microsoft's FUD campaign. Make them think that they can do it, then later come in and rip it apart when the Patent/Interop Contracts run out and the EU and US DoJ are no longer watching.
Of course, Microsoft does risk losing control of .Net and Silverlight if Mono/Moonlight took off and gained a larger user base - which would happen if Windows was no longer the dominant OS. If that happens, expect Microsoft to toss out their own .Net/Silverlight versions for Linux, Mac, and other OS's - which they likely already have running in-House for just such a scenario. (They'd be stupid not to, and Microsoft is anything but stupid.)
He doesn't really criticize as much as he refuses to accept responsibility for his actions. This coming from a guy who has been a vocal supporter of the deal and such things as OXML. He's become nothing but a clown now, a corporate shill. This is most evident on his attack on Google when (not) answering the patent protection question and the openness of the project.
He continues to singlehandedly infect Linux via his association with Novell and the Gnome project. He continues to treat the community like idiots with both his words and his deeds. At least, Ballmer doesn't mince words. Icaza is still trying to convince people he cares about the openness of these projects, the liberties they will insure and the goodness of Microsoft via attacks on their competitors.
Nice going there Icaza - nobody cares what you have to say.
Interesting comments.
So you say Microsoft is not behind cross platform for Silverlight? Silverlight is available for Mac OS X directly from Microsoft.
You think Microsoft is evil because they won't do a Linux implementation for Silverlight? Consider three points: Linux has a sub-1.0% market share.[1] Mac has a 7.31% market share. Novell, being the parent of SUSE and Mono, will certainly be willing to make the Linux version of Silverlight. Now imagine you run Microsoft. Would you bother supporting desktop Linux knowing all of that?
A Nieves, it was funny to read your extreme rant followed by the claim that nobody cares what Icaza says. You obviously care very much.
There's too much nonsense in your post so I'll just pick one thing. Regarding "attacks on their competitors", all these companies criticize each other. Quit acting like it's a crime or unique to any one of them.
By the way, in case any readers are confused by the above rants, Novell Mono really is open source under various licenses including MIT and GPL. You can download the source any time you want. For those of us using .NET, it's nice to know that we can also use our languages and libraries on Mac and Linux on an open source platform.
[1] Apple is Killing Linux on the Desktop
@Esterbrock
How many times can you use the word rant in a comment? Sheesh... My point regarding his Google attack was that it had *nothing* - I repeat... nothing to do with the questioned asked. This guy is trying to defend himself against charges regarding a LACK of patent protection and he goes off on a tangent about another company. You can sit there and believe whatever you please as delivered by corporate shills such as Icaza OR you can ask questions and demand answers.
You obviously don't care about any patent issues entering what is billed as FREE Open Source Software and are completely satisfied with his only slippery response "you have to talk to Microsoft".
Well... did YOU talk to Microsoft?
The word "rant"? I used it just twice in 5 paragraphs.
I don't need to talk to Microsoft because I downloaded Silverlight from their site. Just like I downloaded Flash from Adobe. And gtalk from Google. Can I even get the gtalk source code? I can get the Moonlight source and presumably strip out any bits deemed dangerous. Maybe even fork it if I'm inspired to spend the time on that.
Btw the article doesn't emphasize this very well, but my understanding is that those codecs are written by other companies that MS has paid license money too. If it really bothers you that much, you could try striking your own deals with such companies or writing your own open source codecs. I don't see how what MS and Novell are doing remove your ability to pursue other avenues.
AFAIK the answer to the "Sounds like fun, right?" is yes
Credibility, once lost, cannot be found again with a whimper of complaint long after its way too late.
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