AP2008 Live Blogging #2 - Microsoft session

In his lecture Amir Shevet (MS representative in AP2008) talked about interoperability (with other OSes) and it's importance to Microsoft.
I asked two questions:
1. If it's so important for them then why don't they actively and officially support Mono.
2. Do they grantee that if I use Mono and .Net implementation for Mono, I won't get sued by MS later.

Some guy from the crowd (probably MS person) shouted at me that Microsoft is very active and working together with Miguel De Icaza very closely on Mono.
The second question remained unanswered. The main message I got from the MS lecture was "Lets see where we can work together and do it".

Later I saw Amir again in the hall and asked him to address the patents issues. He asked me for my business card and said that he'll get back to my after he'll ask the company lawyers. Stay tuned ...

I'll just point to this link regarding Mono, Miguel and SW patents.

In my eyes: Microsoft say they are open and they want to play nice for now (with Open Source community). But they'll probably never promise not to sue and play nice in the future.

To conclude what I learned: Nothing new under the sun.

Other amusing events during the MS lecture:

- Shachar Shemesh said the he read the rulls for participating in OpenUp (MS OSS competition) and that's it's not the right way to do it and pointed directly the problematic rulls. The MS crowd Guy shouted "Why can't you put a good word for a change" repeatedly, and claim that Shachar's is not providing any constructive criticizm although Shachar pointed the probelms specifically.

- Doron started talking about Microsoft conduct (I Think) and refused to be shushed.

- One Error popped during the lecture. Amir said it happed in his Ubuntu at home too and I said "sure it did , PowerPoint is a closed format".

- At some point during the lecture Amir got a package (the mandatory AP package game), and I remarked "be carefull, it's ticking!!". Later on Amir passed that package to me because it instructed him to give the package to the yougest Linux user (see previous post).