AboutWelcome to Free Software Daily (FSD). FSD is a hub for news and articles by and for the free and open source community. FSD is a community driven site where members of the community submit and vote for the stories that they think are important and interesting to them. Click the "About" link to read more...
Red Hat's CEO, Matthew Szulik, has confirmed that Red Hat has held negotiations with Microsoft about exclusive patent deals. He refused to say whether they were still negotiating.
This one has been circulating for the past few hours (also sent to Groklaw and added by now). The articles really speak for themselves and they all originate from (or cite) IDG. Although it is not related to Novell, it sure relates to anti-consumer — and probably anti-competitive too — moves from Microsoft.
RDN's Executive Editor, Features Jeffrey Schwartz talked about the Microsoft-Novell deal with Justin Steinman, Novell's director of product marketing for Linux and open platform solutions, at TecháEd. Steinman was involved in negotiating the terms of the deal and offers his insights on Microsoft's actions, the impact of the agreements on Linux development and more.
As some people here probably already know, I am no fan of Mono - not for technical reasons (mostly [3]), but simply for political ones. Specifically, I’m talking about so-called Software Patents, and even more importantly, precisely who owns those patents.
"The European Commission has fined Microsoft 899 million Euro for anti-competitive behaviour by restricting access to interoperability information through unreasonable royalty payments prior to October 2007. This is in addition previous fines of 497 million Euro and 280 million Euro applied in the same investigation, resulting in a total penalty of 1.676 billion Euro.
«Microsoft is the last company that actively promotes the use of software patents to restrict interoperability. This kind of behaviour has no place in an Internet society where all components should connect seamlessly regardless of their origin,» says Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe.