Star C#, CLI Under Community Promise, Mono Split in Half
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 7th Jul 2009 08:51 UTC, submitted by PLan
Mono Project We've already seen some heavy discussion on Mono and C# here on OSNews the past few weeks, as it became clear the patent situation regarding the ECMA parts of Mono was anything but faith inspiring. This issue seems to be resolved now: Microsoft has made a legally binding promise not to sue anyone who uses or distributes implementations of said ECMA standards. Following this news, Mono will be split in two; the ECMA standard parts, and the rest.
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Money rules, not Mono
by Dr-ROX on Wed 8th Jul 2009 15:04 UTC
Dr-ROX
Member since:
2006-01-03

Now here's the deal with Mono and patent lawsuits. Yes, mono uses patented Microsoft technologies, but they are somewhat useful to MS.
MS will never sue opensource projects, because they have no money or aren't doing something, that is decreasing MS incomes. But MS will definitely sue companies, that will create software using Mono and that software will somewhat compete with MS products.
Now remember FAT and TomTom. There were some time after MS patented FAT. But Linux or other company, that uses linux wasn't sued. TomTom is the largest player in GPS market. MS also has some GPS market. So MS saw some cash and sued the richest GPS company, that uses Linux with FAT. Now TomTom are going to WindowsCE. Why?
So here comes Mono. If there wil be no good commercial programs, that requires mono, MS will not even bother to start legal actions. But if some big company releases some big product - MS will react. Imagine, what would happen, if Google made it's Google Earth with Mono. They will be sued to death by MS. The same case works for distros. For example if Ubuntu somehow would impact Windows sales, MS definitely would search for some eveidences to throw that competition out of the ring.
So Mono is even good for MS, MS can wait for some big corp to come and use it. MS will then try to sue some money out of it.
My thoughts.

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