● 12.29.09

●● DRI CEO: “The Biggest Risk Was That Microsoft Would Come Hell-Bent to Destroy Us… Not Necessarily by Competing”

Posted in Antitrust, Bill Gates, IBM, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Steve Ballmer, Videos at 3:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Testimony with Richard Williams and what Novell could learn from him

ONE of our readers has suggested that we keep record of the following Richard Williams (DRI) testimony, which may come handy in the future. He speaks about Microsoft’s demeaning and disrespectful approach. Later on he worked for Novell, for obvious reasons.

Williams explains that Microsoft tried to buy out the product and make it seem like a licensing deal (i.e. pretending), then implicitly telling DRI to turn to another market. It’s basically the paying for a competitor to leave the market and assessing/accesssing all the source code first (shades of i4i). Williams never had such experiences when he worked for IBM, he argues.

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Unintentionally, he may also include a little piece of advice there for Novell, and particularly the Mono folks. He says: “I wasn’t interested in doing clone. The risk I saw in doing a clone was that all you’ve really done is you reproduced something good or bad… and you take all risks inherent then with reproducing that other people’s product.”

Speaking of Mono, “Justin” from Linux Today argues that Microsoft’s Muglia silences de Icaza:

There was an recent article on Software Development Times (Dec 15, 2009), that reported on the last Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. It says that Ozzie and Muglia “were insistent that Silverlight was part of the open Web. They pointed to Mono Moonlight as an example”.Yup, as Mono oposers have said from day 1, Mono, and now Silverlight, server MS as a way to validate their offerings. They give credence to their claims that they are now being “open” and that their proprietary offerings should be given equal consideration by governments seeking to standardize on open solutions.Interestingly, Miguel de Icaza was there and raised his head to chime in saying that “he wanted Microsoft to go a step further by contributing technology to ECMA International”. Wow, either he is very naive or he really does not get it. Any way, Muglia quickly quieted him down by saying that “Microsoft was trying to balance standards with its ability to rapidly innovate the Silverlight platform”. That was all it took. Go on dreaming Miguel.

Thanks to Novell (especially Moonlight), Microsoft is willing to describe Silver Lie as “open” [1, 2] (and the same with .NET, because of Mono). █

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