In order to spread the popularity of its single platform proprietary technologies among developers Microsoft has to retain and extend the appeal of technologies such as .NET and the proprietary languages it uses - and this means catching the imagination of developers, and locking them in to Microsoft technologies. This is the attraction of open source to Microsoft.

Mozilla Europe's founder, Tristan Nitot, has no problem with free software. Indeed, his organization has created some of the best of it. But when software technologies like Adobe Systems' Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight are free but proprietary, they can create all sorts of problems. "Free" without "open" can become a one-way ticket to technology prison.

"In this announcement, a sentence has been ruffling a few feathers at Adobe and Microsoft: «Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web.

Mono is an implementation of Microsoft proprietary technologies that were developed to divert attention from Java. Software that can interact with Microsoft's proprietary technologies, read, translate and even create programs in C# is one thing. Entangling this software into Gnome, one of the two key desktop environments for Linux and UNIX, is quite another...

One of the difficulties open source software faces is in implementing support — where it is even possible to do so — for the wide variety of codecs, formats, and other proprietary technologies that users have come to rely on. One such technology is Microsoft's Silverlight framework, which until early this year, was a no-go for Linux users.

For the last decade, I've regularly seen complaints when we harder-core software freedom advocates spend some time criticizing proprietary software in addition to our normal work preserving, protecting and promoting software freedom.

In the last several days Microsoft has shown that despite claims of acquiring a newly found respect for open principles and technology, developers should be cautious in believing promises made by this “new” Microsoft.

Dependence on a desktop hegemony that is beset with interoperability issues looks increasingly dated. The pressure for open standards and a more heterogeneous mix of technologies in the enterprise is coming not only from governments and users, the free software community or the European Commission, but also from the technologies themselves.

"Brazilian minister of culture Gilberto Gil Moreira speaks on the transformative power of digital technologies..."