Novell Vice-President Miguel de Icaza had a few things to say at the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas about the Novell-Microsoft deal. He publicly admitted to regretting such a deal, which wasn’t his decision in the first place.

“I’m not happy about the fact that such an agreement was made, but [the decision] was above my pay grade; I think we should have stayed with the open-source community," de Icaza said at the conference. This however came one year and a half after the actual between Microsoft and Novell was signed, so it is a bit late to back off.

Despite all the contradictory feelings, de Icaza, who co-founded the GNOME open-source project, is currently supporting the Moonlight project, meant to bring Microsoft’s Silverlight to Linux customers. He remains among Novell’s most respected and best-known figures, as well as one of the open-source supporters.

Icaza, who spoke on a panel that included Microsoft, Mozilla and Zend representatives, said anyone who downloaded Moonlight from Novell was protected through a cross-licensing agreement: “There is a patent covenant for anyone that downloads [Moonlight] from Novell,” de Icaza said.  

Although unsatisfied himself with the Microsoft deal, de Icaza defended it in front of Mozilla’s Schroepfer, who made remarks on intellectual property patent restrictions, saying Microsoft never sued anyone over such a matter.

De Icaza also said about security and open source that the more people take a look at the source code, the better, as this is somehow a way to “bulletproof” the source code. After all, it is all about strategy and “using open source as a tool.”

In 2006, Microsoft and Novell started an unexpected partnership to support Suse Linux and at the same time, develop technologies to help customers run both Suse Linux and Microsoft Windows on their computers.