On Jun 19, 8:38 pm, Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> 'Moonlight' makes progress on Silverlight for Linux
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | According to Miguel De Icaza, Mono project leader and Novell
> | open-source president, Mono engineers have been working 14-hour
> | days to create an implementation of Silverlight on Linux using
> | Mono, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net software.
> `----
Microsoft has been "playing" Migues De Icaza for almost 8 years now.
I spoke with him about a year after he started the Mono project.
At that time, after a year and a large team, he admitted that
he had less than 25% of .NET implemented.
Microsoft has used Mono to promote C#, but they are not willing to
share the critical desktop components. They provide enough to
implement .NET servers, but even those are limited because the
full protocol isn't fully supported.
Since neither party has published the terms of the agreement,
one can only speculate. It's possible that Microsoft has decided
that Mono is Microsoft's best chance at maintaining the Microsoft
API set and has decided to offer something like Visual Studio for
Linux.
I'm sure that Microsoft won't turn over the best of the family jewels,
but this does provide yet another marketing channel for ISVs.
Microsoft has been competing against multiplatform APIs such as
Java, GNU, Qt, and Cygwin for several years now, and there has
been a noticable decline in the number of new applications being
released in the Microsoft API set. It seems that now that Java is
living up to it's "Write Once Run Anywhere" promise, especially
when development is done on Linux,
> http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9731410-7.html?part=rss&tag=feed&sub...
>
> This is patented technology. Microsoft will be pleased to see that Novell
> supports its Web hijack attempts.
I find it fascinating that what was published as Web 2.0 under OSS
with full
disclosure, has now been patented by Microsoft. Did they even BOTHER
to mention the PRIOR ART?
Seems like Sun and IBM are going to have to generate a few thousand
patent
applications that list everything from the Bubble Sort to the MIT
Cookie as prior
art, just to keep Microsoft from being able to legally say "We didn't
know there
was prior art, we thought we had invented it".
Microsoft would have a much harder time protecting it's patents. For
one thing,
even when filing patent applications, they don't publish the actual
details of the
"device" (code) until the very last possible moment.
Perhaps Congress should pass an alteration to the software patent law
which says
that if you fail to mention prior art that has been published in OSS
archives, you
automatically forfeit the patent.
Keep in mind that in a civil case, the rules of "preponderance of the
evidence"
actually favor OSS rather than Microsoft. If Microsoft were to
actually list all of
the patents it says Linux has violated, there the fact that Microsoft
has disclosed
their technology to only a handful of people, while OSS technology has
been
widely distributed and the contributors have attested to the
originality of the code,
the best Microsoft might be able to do is prove that an individual,
such as a disgruntled
Microsoft Employee, took Microsoft code, contributed it to an OSS
project, and lied
about it's originality. The problem is that in order to make that
case, the individual
would have to openly admit to criminal counts of copyright violation
and patent law
violations, and face the certainty of a 10 year prison sentence.
Even then, if Linux can prove that it had similar instances of similar
prior art,
they could show plausible deniability, as well as prior art, and make
a strong
argument that the could could have been intuitively derived.
Let's assume that each of the 500 patents Microsoft claims to have
were each
100 lines of code, giving us a total of 50,000 lines of code, across
all kernel,
library, utility, administration, and application code. Balance this
against the
3-6 billion lines of code included in the average commercial Linux
distribution.
If Microsoft were to get "fair share", the judge might rule that
Microsoft gets
$1 per million copies of Linux.
> Related:
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | "I have no confidence in Microsoft's Open XML specification to deliver a
> | vibrant, competitive and healthy market of multiple implementations. I don't
> | believe that the specifications are good enough, nor that Microsoft will hold
> | itself to the specification when it does not suit the company to do so,"
> | Shuttleworth said.
> `----
Let's face it. Microsoft can't even honor the existing IETF
specifications. They
have constantly added extensions and mandatory alterations -
supposedly
as "enhancements". In most cases, the result has been very
unpleasant.
Most of these "enhancements" create huge security holes.
Microsoft has openly expressed their sheer contempt for standards
organizations
such as ISO, and only now that ODF has become a widely accepted
standard,
are they turning to ISO - perhaps because they are the standards body
most
willing to accept partial standards, with ondocumented "extensions",
and
black holes of unspecified values, headers, and content.
Back in the 1980s, the ISO attempted to establish the OSI
communication
protocol stack. IT was based on CCITT standards, but was "enhanced"
by
vendors such as IBM, DEC, and Apollo. Before long, the "hodgepodge"
standard had so many subsets, extensions, and alternatives, that it
became
impossible to implement any functional working version of the
standard.
Meanwhile, the IETF said, "As long as you tell us what you are sending
over the wire, you can send it". Keep in mind that in the early days
of the Internet, this was REQUIRED BY LAW. Since ham radio
circuits were being used, it was ILLEGAL to use "Encrypted"
transmissions.
The protocols had to be COMPLETELY documented to assure the FCC
that the Ham Radio station wasn't passing common carrier traffic.
Microsoft completely circumvented the IETF, force-feeding it
Microloft's
proprietary binary formats, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Viseo,
exe, com, VBS, and DLL content across the wire. The lack of published
standards resulted in the proliferation of nearly 1 million flavors of
Malware,
including trojans, viruses, worms, and spyware. All so that Microsoft
can
monitor piracy without anyone knowing about it.
The costs of these viruses has been estimated as high as $30 billion
PER
INFESTATION. Melissa, ILOVEYOU, Jane's Resume, Sky, Bagel, BugBear,
and numerous others have succussfully infested hundreds of millions
of
machines.
> http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Ubuntu-Red-Hat-reject-Micro...
>
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