Novell Unhappy with MS Patent Situation
The Vice President of Novell recently and publicly criticized his company's cross-patent licensing agreement with Microsoft.
The reason? Its lack of patent protection.
Under the agreement, a third party can distribute the Moonlight project, which ports Microsoft's Silverlight technology to Linux, Miguel de Icaza said.
Speaking in Las Vegas, Nevada, as part of a panel attending the MIX 08 conference, de Icaza said that Novell had been doing the best it could to balance its open source interests with patent indemnification.
However, when his company entered into a cross patent / licensing deal with Microsoft in November 2006, the executive said Novell made the wrong choice and should've remained strictly open source.
"I'm not happy about the fact that such an agreement was made," de Icaza said, speaking as part of a panel that also included representatives from Microsoft and open-source companies Mozilla and Zend.
De Icaza's comments regarding Novell and open source came as he received questions from an audience member about the Moonlight project.
During the discussion of open source, he explained that while anyone who downloaded Moonlight from Novell was protected by the company's own cross-licensing agreement of Silverlight codecs from Microsoft.
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