Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 6th Oct 2008 10:37 UTC, submitted by John Mills
Permalink for comment 332933
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/13 14:44 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 23:22 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 22:04 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 22:01 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 17:52 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/22/13 22:23 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/22/13 13:38 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/22/13 13:30 UTC, submitted by JRepin
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 22:06 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 21:45 UTC
More News »
Sponsored Links



Member since:
2006-02-05
Reverse engineering is a specific exception to this. If it weren't for that, smb and ms office format compatibility would have been illegal until they were opened/licensed, and wine would still be illegal.
It is definitely a sort of grey area though, and one that could go to court. The thing is that the worst thing that could happen to mono is forcing them to stop distributing ASP/ADO/Winforms. That is a pain, but its not something that would in any way effect linux mono apps, since its only the high level stuff that gets questionable.
The low level stuff (CLR/C#) is under an open specification, and the linux mono APIs (like GTK#) are completely patent free.
The mono team understands the issues, and from day one has been real careful to keep the dangerous stuff seperate from the safe stuff. I would agree that nobody should base their business on the mono implementations of the .net stack (just like I would caution anyone to base their business on wine), but mono is a great platform that integrates very well into existing linux APIs.