On Mon Jul 06 21:04, Peter Dolding wrote: > What is more worrying here is the progressions of license conversions > it slowly looks like its completely converting to MIT so meaning > Novell will not be blocked by shipping if Patent claims come. GPLv3 would be the only thing which provided any such protection, (L)GPLv2 does not. It would also, however, cripple how it could be integrated with other systems which were not under the GPL. > The simple fact is you cannot develop on top of the MIT based .net > class libraries safely because no one is answering what the status is. > > Next is MS and Novell developers have talk about working with each > other. This is even more risky. I have seen nothing that clearly > states that the MIT section of mono does not contain MS source code. > If that is the case it a rock solid patent case waiting to happen. Patents are unrelated to the source of the code. That would be Copyright law and by contributing the code under an MIT licence the authors have relinquished the right to sue anyone for distributing it. Microsoft contributing code could also be seen as giving an implied licence to use such code and might weaken any patent case they had, so I sincerely doubt they would _both_ contribute patent encumbered code and sue people for using it. > Its either get a patent deal from MS or move the risky bits to > non-free until someone can clear up the status with patents on > implementing .net. You can 100 percent bet MS took out every patent > they could. Finding the patents would make matters worse because > then you would be in known breach. If people are going to be sued for using Mono, it being in non-free does not help, we wouldn't be able to distribute it. > Mono is basically shonky. A simple clear and valid statement would > have stopped all this patent worry dead. There is an aweful lot of FUD surrounding Mono, that is clear. Could things have been said which might reduce it? Possibly. Does Mono have more possible-patents covering it than anything else that's been invented in the last 30 years? Most certainly not. Take a leaf out of the kernel folks book. Don't worry about patents until someone actually starts enforcing them (CF fat32) and then reimplement the feature to work around it. Matt -- Matthew Johnson
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