"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:2005-11-16
Member since:2006-03-10
This is mentioned a lot, but seems to me to be pure paranoia. Mono is a re-implementation based on a ECMA standard, it is not a hacked .net from MS. MS even released a shared-source implementation of the CLI to assist "People developing their own CLI implementations" (quote from the MS shared source CLI page). I don't see how they can protect the relevant IP in a courtroom when they have so openly given it away with a suggestion for people to make their own versions.
The worst thing I can think of that MS can do is to make changes in the next versions of .net that makes them incompatible with Mono. Which of course doesn't matter at all since Mono stands on it's own and doesn't rely on MS to function. Even if this version of Mono is the last one to be compatible with .net, it is still excellent and can be used to make great appliactions for Linux and other systems.
While some may hesitate, those who don't have given us a surprising amount of very cool software in very short time, I hope that continues.
Member since:
2006-01-03
as it's fairly probable that Microsoft infringes on patents held by OIN
You have no idea if that is true or not. It is precisely because the specter of MS is hanging over Mono that people don't like it. No matter what you say people are always going to say "Mono is cool, but...".