News
Novell VP Openly Laments Microsoft Deal
According to
IDG news service, Novell Vice President Miguel de Icaza publicly decried his company's patent licensing deal with Microsoft at Redmond's MIX08 conference last week in Las Vegas.
"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," IDG reported de Icaza as saying at the panel, which also included representatives from Microsoft, Zend and Mozilla.
The statement came as part of a discussion on how the patent licensing agreement will work with Novell's port of Silverlight to Linux, called Moonlight. According to the report, de Icaza said that anyone who downloads Moonlight will be covered, but distributing Moonlight code is another question: "...you have to talk to Microsoft."
At the same panel, however, according to IDG reporter Elizabeth Montalbo, de Icaza jumped to Novell's defense about signing the agreement later in the discussion in response to comments from Mozilla by pointing out that Novell wasn't the only one to sign and that many tech companies have patent licensing agreements with other tech companies, such as IBM.
Novell signed its patent protection deal with Microsoft in November 2006.
Read the full report here.
About the Author
Becky Nagel is vice president of AI for 1105 Media, where she specializes in training internal and external customers on maximizing their business potential via a wide variety of generative AI technologies as well as developing cutting-edge AI content and events. She's the author of "ChatGPT Prompt 101 Guide for Business Uses," regularly leads research studies on generative AI business usage, and serves as the director of AI Boardroom, a new resource for C-level executives looking to excel in the AI era. Prior to her current position she was a technical leader for 1105 Media's Web, advertising and production teams as well as editorial director for a suite of enterprise technology publications, including serving as founding editor of PureAI.com. She has 20 years of enterprise technology journalism experience, and regularly speaks and writes about generative AI, AI, edge computing and other cutting-edge technologies. She can be reached at [email protected].