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:2008-12-26
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.
Just see what happened with FAT and TomTom.
It's ok to use Mono, as long as nothing critical (that can't be replaced easily) is based on it. You can't really rely on "probably winning" a lawsuit, the fact is that once you are sued, you are screwed, unless you have very deep pockets. For an open source project with no obvious pocket to foot the bill, it can be the end (this is probably what msft is capitalizing on - all the need to do is spread some fud about "possibly taking legal action", and the future of a whole project is immediately compromised).
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-04-22
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.
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.
They are not pretending there are no patents. There *are* patents. On everything, CLI, C#, Windows.Forms, etc. Some have been submitted for ECMA standardization which means that *IF* they require a license the terms must be RAND. It is at MS's discretion as to whether they actually will require a license and when and any license, free or otherwise (and they could charge and still be RAND) is incompatible with any FOSS project.
In short, no we are not safe either way.
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.