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Nat Friedman, the one-time CTO for open source at Novell is no longer at Novell. His last day was Friday. Friedman came to Novell by way of the acquisition of Ximian - a GNOME company he co-founded with Miguel De Icaza.
Jeff has written a good blog item to clarify things about Novell and GNOME. We never stated (but only wondered) that there is a tighter-than-necessary connection between GNOME and Novell. NOOOXML wondered the same thing and posed this as a question about the relationship.
OK, so sometimes I'm wrong. Miguel de Icaza called out an error I made in criticizing Novell for its open-source strategy. I admit that I find it hard to see beyond Novell's patent pact with Microsoft but, as Miguel pointed out in a string of emails between us today (which he graciously allowed me to cite), this leaves out a lot that Novell does well.
Does GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza's backflip over the Novell-Microsoft deal a few days ago mean that he has finally been convinced that he is on a one-way path to nowhere?
"The Gnome desktop environment developers have recently taken the decision to reengineer the Gnome desktop around the Mono framework. This decision has mainly been influenced by the main Mono developer Miguel de Icaza, who is a very vocal employee of Novell..."
There is a substantive effort in open source to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property associated with that is available to Novell customers.
