I am still waiting for refutation rather than mere rebuttal.
(To rebut: to say something is wrong. To refute: to prove something is wrong.)
I want to see the receipts. I want evidence.
I note that executives and project leaders from large companies and organisations subject to legal threats over intellectual property issues are required to deny infringement because to say anything else constitutes evidence: it could be construed as legal confession of the copying or other IP infringement of which they are being accused.
Or, to put it more briefly: MRDA. Mandy Rice-Davies applies.
For anyone to have any reasons to offer up a stronger rebuttal, you'd need to have substantiated your claims with anything other than speculation first.
> I want to see the receipts. I want evidence.
Show us the receipts and evidence for your claims first. You're the one who started this without presenting a shred of evidence.
To then imply the people contradicting you are lying when they present their description of their experience is at best wildly distasteful.
If the people who were involved are directly telling you "no, you're wrong, that's not why I did it" don't constitute evidence you'd accept then what would?
> I note that executives and project leaders from large companies and organisations subject to legal threats over intellectual property issues are required to deny infringement because to say anything else constitutes evidence: it could be construed as legal confession of the copying or other IP infringement of which they are being accused.
But saying "no, patent concerns were not involved in our decision" is not what people changing their product for patent concerns would do because that would be lying, and the lie would almost certainly be caught during discovery. Instead the magic formulation is along the lines of "no comment" or other variety of "shut up." Not to mention that it can be perfectly to make a change for legal concerns while still disagreeing with those legal concerns because litigation is fucking expensive.
In any case, if the developers of GNOME 3 made the changes because they were afraid of patent threats from MS, coming out and saying "no, we didn't do it because of that" would be among the dumbest things they could do.
I don't know about the other guy, but to be quite honest I'm not confident Icaza would be forthright about something that cast Microsoft in such a bad light, even before he started working for them. His admiration for Microsoft always seemed apparent to me since the genesis of Mono. I was not even remotely surprised when he got a job with Microsoft, I think he wanted it for a long time.
