[PLUG-Devel] Hi all

[Alan Dayley]

Tim,

I'd like to repeat, with some editing, some of my discussion that I
provided to you privately.

The biggest concern right now is patents.  The patent protections
offered in the Microsoft-Novell agreement are very restrictive on the
developer.  And they don't apply to anyone who is not a paying Novell
customer anyway.

Clouds of doubt:
- Is Mono, the project on which the Moonlight will be built, "tainted"
by MS patents?
- As a developer and distributor of something using Moonlight, how do I
know I am not sitting on a patent time bomb?
- If at some point the relationship between Microsoft and Novell goes
sour, will Mono be left in the cold with patents hanging over it's head?

I find it highly "convenient" that a party outside of Microsoft is
available and tapped to do the non-Microsoft platform implementation.
Following a variation of the well known "embrace, extend and extinguish"
pattern, Microsoft can:
- Help Novell/Mono create Moonlight
- Let web applications based on it become ubiquitous, badly hurting Adobe
- Cut off support to Moonlight
- Extend Silverlight making Moonlight old and irrelevant

More insidious would be to never give Moonlight the full spec to begin
with so that it never rises above an "almost right" implementation that
can't fully catch on or has a reputation for "bugginess"

As a developer, I find the above possibilities difficult to live with.
Based on past behavior of Microsoft (Office for Mac, IE for Mac,
incompatibilities from one version of their own software to the next,
Windows for Pen Computing (remember that one?), etc.), I see the
likelihood of a bad scenario.

Alan


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