Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 6th Oct 2008 10:37 UTC, submitted by John Mills
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With patents, the fact that mono is not a copyright violation of .NET is not the issue. The issue is that Windows,forms, ADO.NET and ASP.NET, which Mono 2.0 includes, are patent encumbered technologies.
Most distributions do not, by default, install Windows.Forms, ADO.NET, or ASP.NET portions of Mono (nor do they need to).
Mono is perfectly usable without those components unless you are specifically trying to run a Windows.Forms application or an ASP.NET hosted website.
You do not need them to use Banshee, F-Spot, or Tomboy as has already been explained dozens of times in this thread alone.
Yet somehow you keep ignoring that fact.
With patents, the fact that mono is not a copyright violation of .NET is not the issue. The issue is that Windows,forms, ADO.NET and ASP.NET, which Mono 2.0 includes, are patent encumbered technologies.
If you read the very limited documentation on the ECMA web site regarding governance of these issues, you will actually find that it is worse than that. ADO.Net and ASP.Net are merely namespaces no matter what anyone says, and it's not where the meat is. Without the reasonable and non-discriminatory terms that ECMA membership requires you might well require an explicit license from Microsoft to use .Net ECMA standards, and those RAND terms are simply not guaranteed to be in place forever. That's the situation, and it governs .Net technology such as the CLR and Common Language specification.
There was much bluster from Miguel and a few others on a mailing list a while ago that there was a letter from Microsoft and HP guaranteeing RAND terms to be irrevocable. No such letter has ever materialised, and until that happens questions remain.




Member since:
2007-02-17
With patents, the fact that mono is not a copyright violation of .NET is not the issue. The issue is that Windows,forms, ADO.NET and ASP.NET, which Mono 2.0 includes, are patent encumbered technologies.
You can violate a patent even if Mono is not a copy of .NET code.
Hence, you need a license, from Microsoft, to run anything which implements their patented technologies, including Windows.forms, ADO.NET and ASP.NET, even if Microsoft did not write the code.
AFAIK, Microsoft has given out such licenses only to Novell SLED, Xandros and Linspire.
Agreed.
The entire point seems to be that Microsoft wish to continue making patent threat noises against Linux users, without ever actually suing, and trying to get Microsoft dependencies built in to the only distributions which they do not so threaten.