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.

An article that quotes rather damning material about Mono suddenly vanishes without a trace and Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza still attacks critics of patents around Mono (which he himself implicitly criticised in the now-vanished article)

Over the past week, a couple of events have served to highlight the extent to which Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza is helping Microsoft to implement its strategy of curbing the growth of free and open source software.

Novell's Miguel de Icaza becomes board member in a new Microsoft group

Miguel de Icaza shows excitement over proprietary Silverlight, proceeds to promotion of closed-source software paradigms for developers; Microsoft's strategy with F/OSS is explained

Dear Miguel: During the last couple of weeks there has been a tremendous amount of information pouring about Mono, the free (speechwise) implementation of .NET started by you, Novell's vice-president of Development Platform, and how it should/would be handled by distros. We even had RMS himself come into the fray and tell us his take on it (which he had been mum about till now).

Here's the latest from Roy Schestowitz of BoycottNovell.com:

Novell’s de Icaza: The Man Who Gives GNU/Linux to Microsoft

I've been following this story for a while now. I'm not the first to compare Novell to SCO. It seems fair to compare them without being hyperbolic.

More perspectives arrive in response to a technical/legal analysis of Moonlight and Miguel de Icaza's highly-deserved Microsoft MVP award

Red Hat reveals details about Microsoft's marketing of anti-FOSS patents; other patent news summarised