Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 23rd Mar 2006 13:39 UTC, submitted by liquidat
"Remember when I promised you all that I'd tell you all about the Fedora/Mono decision when I could? Well, now I can. It has to do with a little organization called OIN. Allow me to quote from Mark Webbink's article, 'The Open Invention Network', in the April 2006 edition of Linux Magazine: "The OIN commons is created by having all participants in OIN, whether members or licensees, cross-license any owned patents that affect the Linux kernel, key components in any Linux distribution, and certain key Linux-related applications. The commons forms a large, safe area for development free of patent concerns". And where does Mono fit in?"
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Member since:
2005-07-29
There are two significant reasons that people don't like Mono:
(1) .NET was developed by Microsoft, and everything Microsoft touches is 'teh 3vil' (despite their "touching" HTML, CSS, XML, SOAP, C, C++, and numerous other standards).
(2) Patents. Largely because of (1), it was feared that Microsoft would use Patents as a weapon to stop future Mono development. Why use a platform which might not exist in the future?
There isn't much that can be said to alter (1) (but Microsoft is teh 3vil!), but The Open Invention Network serves as a response to (2). Even if there are patents that Mono infringes, OIN provides a way to negotiate with Microsoft, as it's fairly probable that Microsoft infringes on patents held by OIN. This promotes cross-licensing with Microsoft, which could prevent Microsoft from using patents to shut down numerous open-source projects, including Mono.