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Mono/Novell has sued linux distributors and has special deals with some of them? Oh .. you must mean Microsoft, the people who don't make Mono. In which case my question still stands. How is Mono different than any other open source product that has a competitor owned and patented by Microsoft?

It's a stretch to call Mono a "competition" for Microsoft product (.Net stack). Mono is actually boosting and entrenching the .Net environment as viable choice for developers (which some people don't like).

Because .Net and the technology and specifications it is built on is actually Microsoft's invention. Software like Wine and Samba might have the same interfaces and be moderately compatible but the implementation is not based on an implementable specification from Microsoft.

The problem as it stands is that there is no clarity in Microsoft's position. We're told by one group of management at Microsoft claiming that the patents are only defensive and that third parties have nothing to worry about. On the other hand we had Steve Ballmer take the stage and literally say that they'll milk the cash out of those whose software violate Microsoft's patents.

The difference is this; in the case of OpenOffice.org, it is but one module that can be easily jettisoned at the first sign of problems, wine is a compatibility layer, not a framework - one has no dependency if one develops for Wine given that all wine is, is a win32 implementation. In the case of SQL as mentioned earlier, if Microsoft does anything stupid it would set off a chain reaction that they wished they never had done. If they sue MYSQL/Postresql, then Oracle, IBM, Sybase and every man and his dog start to get involved.

Mono is GPL2: who creates and develops it is, for all practical intents and purposes, inconsequential. If the fact that they have Novel as a patron, in-and-of-itself deeply disturbs many people, some other entity could fork it and solve the problem trivially.
And, as for, "mono replicates a closed-source product, even duplicating some of their interfaces, and they might sue us"... and? This is specific to Mono how?

If you hate Novel that much, I'm guessing you vigorously campaign against OpenSuse. And if you hate replicating closed or proprietary software and interfaces, I'm guessing you're not using WINE, don't have Flash either, and don't have any proprietary media codecs installed, and have not installed any word-processing applications that could read .doc files. In short, I'm guessing your machine falls well short of any reasonable standard of compatibility and functionality.

-- Oh, wait, when you say, "created by," you meant .net being created by Microsoft, not Novell sponsoring Mono (they do, don't they? I'm not crazy there?). That's... staggering. In what way does it begin to be significant that Microsoft originated .Net? They did not create Mono in any sense, and pose no greater threat to Mono than any of the innumerable other projects that might step on a patent or re-implement a proprietary interface!

Edited 2009-06-16 20:28 UTC

MS hasn't sued any linux distributers...yet. Whether they do so in the future is the question.

semantic, shemantic ... they have sued at least one company that had hardware with linux onboard, specifically their fat-patent.
now, they chose to sue a "small" company, but there is nothing preventing them to sue everybody else. linux can just pull the support, but its much harder for distributors of linux.