Above my Pay Grade: Miguel de Icaza and the Novell-Microsoft Agreement
,----[ Quote ]
| What's this about pay-grade? It's a military term, often misappropriated by
| civilians who are avoiding an ethical decision. It's a good excuse in the
| military: politicians are accountable for the decision to enter a war, while
| the military are oath-bound to follow orders at pain of court-martial and
| possibly execution, and are only accountable for the conduct of the war. But
| Miguel is no soldier. He's the founder of a company previously merged into
| Novell, and would not be subject to treason charges or capital punishment
| over this issue. Others, like Jeremy Allison, chose to leave the company
| while Miguel stayed.
`----
http://technocrat.net/d/2008/3/10/37412
Very interesting comments from Bruce. Worth reading.
The unholy quad: Miguel, Mono, Moonlight and Microsoft
,----[ Quote ]
| Nevertheless, this Usenet conversation has some points of interest. It
| illustrates again the way in which de Icaza, who by all accounts is a man
| with a very high IQ, refuses to look down the line and draw reasonable
| conclusions.
|
| When asked "To what degree do you trust Microsoft, either in terms of their
| promises; their motivations; or their commitment to a competing platform like
| Linux?" he chooses to trivialise the question by responding "This is a
| question that is suitable for Teen magazine or Cosmo."
`----
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/17069/1090/1/0/
Related:
Miguel does a backflip on patent licensing deal
,----[ Quote ]
| I haven't laughed as loud and as long as I did this morning when I read that
| Miguel de Icaza has now started criticising the patent licensing deal which
| his employer Novell signed with Microsoft in November 2006.
|
| he Pope has turned Anglican. John McCain has become a Democrat. Fidel Castro
| has sworn off Communism.
|
| Whenever de Icaza does something, there is always a good reason. But like all
| people who flip through 180 degrees, de Icaza generally does not reveal such
| reasons.
`----
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/17036/1148/
,----[ Quote ]
| However, De Icaza is being disengenious. Consider this remark of his just 15
| months ago:
| http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/Nov-04.html
|
| "Why did you guys work this deal with Microsoft?
| Although I did not take part of the actual negotiations, and was only told
| about this deal less than a week before the announcement, I had been calling
| for a long time for a collaboration between Microsoft and Open Source and
| Microsoft and Novell.
| There are numerous interviews that touch on this topic and most recently my
| interview in Microsoft's Port25
| In the past I had called for this same kind of cooperation with other
| companies. "
|
| [...]
|
| So, the question arises: Why is De Icaza criticizing the "deal" now? What's
| changed? The terms of Icaza's employment? His salary? His VP status? His
| duties? GNOME's GPL status?
|
| It's time De Icaza comes clean.
`----
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2008-03-07-011-26-NW-BZ-NV-0004
,----[ Quote ]
| Scoble: "I saw that internally inside Microsoft many times when I was told to
| stay away from supporting Mono in public. They reserve the right to sue."
`----
http://twitter.com/Scobleizer/statuses/764673949
MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal
,----[ Quote ]
| 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 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.
|
| [...]
|
| The choice has drawn ire from open-source diehards who were displeased with
| Novell’s decision to sign a cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft in the
| first place. A Web site called “Boycott Novell” decried Moonlight as a
| Microsoft “pet project” and criticized the company’s decision not to port
| Silverlight to Linux itself.
`----
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/03/06/mix-novells-de-icaza-criticizes-microsoft-patent-deal
|
|
