Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 29th May 2009 22:32 UTC, submitted by lemur2
If there is one technology in the Linux world that ruffles feathers whenever it's mentioned, it's Mono, the open source .Net clone. Since .Net comes out of Microsoft, and has some patents encircling it, it is said to be a legal nightmare. Supposedly, you can obtain a "royalty-free, reasonable and non-discriminatory" license from Microsoft regarding the patents surrounding Mono. iTWire decided to look at just how easy (or hard) it is to get such a license. Turns out it's kind of hard.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Maybe it's my lack of knowledge of the US legal system, but I fail to see how Microsoft could possibly pretend to interested parties that there are no patents and licenses for CLI or C# and still successfully enforce those patents in court, should it come to that.
So either way, we should be safe: either there really are no patents or Microsoft is really never going to enforce them, or there are patents and MS is willing to enforce them in court, but this attempt gets squashed by the court.