Novell Exec Slams Deal With MicrosoftNovell Exec Slams Deal With Microsoft

Novell VP Miguel de Icaza, one of the more public faces of a growing relationship between Microsoft and Novell, Thursday slammed the patent licensing agreement between the two companies during a wide-ranging panel discussion of Microsoft's commitment to openness.

"I'm not happy such an agreement was made," he said during the discussion, held at Microsoft's MIX conference in Las Vegas. "I think we should have stayed in the open source community. It's above my pay grade."

Even so, Icaza, who heads up Moonlight, Novell's open source port of Microsoft's .Net Framework, said he's committed to working within the framework of the licensing agreement. "If I keep complaining that I'm a victim, I'm not going to get anywhere," he said. He also stood up for the deal after Mozilla engineering VP Mike Schroepfer criticized it.

Though Schroepfer criticized Microsoft's patent licensing agreements, he applauded the company's moves to make Internet Explorer 8 a standards-compliant Web browser, calling the browser's default standards mode a "fantastic thing for the Web." Microsoft released a beta of IE8 on Wednesday. Overall, Schroepfer said, Microsoft has made progress in opening up its products.

The co-creator of PHP, Zend's Andi Gutmans, also said that Microsoft is increasingly embracing open standards, the open source community, and PHP. Microsoft's Web server technology, Internet Information Services, can now host PHP apps in Windows Server 2008. "I think Microsoft's made huge progress in the last year or two," Gutmans said. "There's obviously more that we want to see, but it's a huge difference. The direction is very, very positive."

Sam Ramji, Microsoft's director of platform technology and the company's Open Source Software Lab, said that Microsoft's designer tool set, Expression Studio, is looking to support Firefox and PHP development, just as it supports Internet Explorer and .Net. Ramji also said that if Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo goes through, Yahoo's large number of PHP developers could push Microsoft to embrace PHP even more.

Ramji said the fact that Microsoft was even able to bring this panel together was evidence it was trying to reach out to the open source community and embrace a culture of openness.

Microsoft is increasingly hiring people with Web backgrounds and who have experience in open source, and Ramji said that has been gradually changing the internal corporate culture at the company. "There's a generation coming in that's comfortable" with open source, he said.