Some interesting bits of his blog entry in which De Icaza replies to emails he has received concerning the Novell-Microsoft deal: "I do not know of any patents which Mono infringes. (...) Although I did not take part of the actual negotiations, and was only told about this deal less than a week before the announcement, I had been calling for a long time for a collaboration between Microsoft and Open Source and Microsoft and Novell. (...) Similar deals have been done in the past, in 1997 Microsoft signed a similar deal with Apple, and Apple used that agreement and the incoming monies to turn the company around. Sun signed a similar agreement with Microsoft in 2004, which at the time I realized enabled Sun to ship Mono on Solaris (which we already supported at that time)."
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Member since:2005-07-07
Well, to be honest, I've fallen for that one too because of lack of carefulness. But, what this really means is that mono is RAND royalty. And by violating it the worst it could happen' to MS, is getting thrown out of ECMA.
Point taken. It's not typical for me to trust Microsoft but I still don't think they are going to do anything harmful to Mono for two reasons. First Microsoft cannot sustain the black eye it would get if it submarined Mono. Second Microsoft hasn't made a peep about Mono yet and it doesn't threaten Microsoft in any way. Even if Mono beomes standard over .NET, people buy applications, they don't buy frameworks, languages, and things of that nature. More likely Microsoft would go after applications. As long as Microsoft doesn't change its present licensing scheme, Mono is ok. Changing the licensing scheme would destroy C# as a language and that doesn't help Microsoft in any way.
Member since:2005-07-07
It's not typical for me to trust Microsoft but I still don't think they are going to do anything harmful to Mono for two reasons.
Nah, I doubt that one too.
I only hate Novell put a sticker "Use with Novell products only". It will mean hell of a lot of otherwise not needed explaining to me. Explaining like "Why I suggested RH, why not Novell since MS prefers it? Will they have to buy Novell licenses? Will they be sued?". You could say the same thing as it was when newspaper published news that SCO is suing IBM because of linux. It will make much harder to sell linux next few weeks. And after few weeks people simply forget.
(:warning, conspiracy theory:) Or was this sticker payment for "RAND"?
Since I'm from Europe, I shouldn't care about it (software patents don't apply here, or at least yet) and personally, I really don't give a f--k if everybody involved in this deal would stick RJ-45 in his butt, start sucking their dicks and pretend they do that in cluster mode.
What bothers me in this story is the clusterf--k of explanations I will have to go trough explaining how this announcement is bogus. Well, if Novell tried to get me nervous they can be happy for their success. At least they could provide some global indemnifications (which is not including a sticker "Use with Novell products only") for OSS tools they provide to win at least some of yesterdays popularity back.
Member since:
2005-07-07
General Declaration:
The General Assembly of Ecma shall not approve recommendations of Standards which are covered by patents when such patents will not be licensed by their owners on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis.
Well, to be honest, I've fallen for that one too because of lack of carefulness. But, what this really means is that mono is RAND royalty. And by violating it the worst it could happen' to MS, is getting thrown out of ECMA.
GIF was a RAND royalty too. And look where it got to. http://xml.coverpages.org/patents.html might be more informative than my comment.