Hi Marvin, I'm not really too knowledgeable on OSS licensing as this is the first open source project I've contributed to, but I dug up some links and would like to address the anti-MS paranoia.
> > There definitely aren't any legal issues regarding the fact that > > there are dependencies on .NET. > > In the larger FOSS community, there is substantial fear about > Microsoft leveraging "submarine patents" within the .NET platform. > While that may be both irrational and irrelevant here, I thought it > wise to discuss licensing compatibility between this project and the > licensing terms of the .NET Framework. I understand a little healthy paranoia towards a commercial entity coming from an open source community, but is there truly a concern that MS will pull a C# or ASP.NET patent card and have a legal basis to kill or take ownership of a project? The source code of the .NET framework isn't released in the traditional OSS download & build sense of the word, but it is available for reference purposes under the Microsoft Reference Source License. The C# language and the CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) are EMCA and ISO standards. MS and partners (Intel, others) agreed that usage of these patents relating to C# and CLI is allowed on a reasonable and non discriminatory (RAND) basis, royalty free. It is my understanding that these patents generally govern alternate implementations of compilers and interpreters for .NET languages and MSIL/bytecode (i.e., Mono), not applications built on top of this stack. While ASP.NET is not part of the ECMA/ISO standard, many of the businesses that have decided to develop ASP.NET applications have bought into ASP.NET, the .NET Framework, IIS, Windows Server, MS SQL Server, and all of the licenses that go along with them. These companies are more likely to choose Exchange Server, SharePoint, etc. (> 0%) than companies who opted for Linux (~0%). Developers who have focused on .NET development have bought into all of those technologies and then some (Windows XP/Vista/7, Visual Studio, Silverlight, Office, Expression, more licenses, etc.). Our instincts for the preservation of our careers makes us evangelists of the entire stack, sold almost exclusively by MS. If MS were to decide to go all-in evil, they would not only threaten the existence of their own developer community, but all of the product sales, license sales, support contracts, and consulting dollars that result from their actions. If Oracle were to pull this card with Java, on the other hand, they would threaten their own business to a far lesser extent--Oracle doesn't sell every variant of every solution on the stack (OS, DB, web server, app engine, IDE, compilers, virtual machine/interpreter, etc., etc.). Plus, there are more alternatives to Oracle's brand of each of these in the wild. I'm not trying to be anti-Oracle/Sun or pro-Microsoft, I'm just saying that there is a much bigger disincentive for MS to be evil than not. .NET has been around since 2001 and MS hasn't made any significant moves to threaten their reputation in this regard that I can think of. They have made several steps in the opposite direction over the years (releasing the source to the .NET framework, CodePlex foundation, partnership with Novell on Mono and Moonlight). > Do you have a good reference for the .NET Framework licensing agreement? > Are there choices of licenses? While I'm fairly certain we have no cause > for concern here, I think careful review and consideration of the > licensing agreement is for everyone's benefit. MS e-mail concerning patent powers around .NET http://web.archive.org/web/20030424174805/http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/ pipermail/dotnet-sscli/msg00218.html Mono project's licensing page http://www.mono-project.com/Licensing MS' Reference Source Code license http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/referencesourcelicense.m spx MS Community Promise http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx MS Open development http://www.microsoft.com/interop/ Codeplex Foundation http://blog.scottbellware.com/2009/09/analysis-codeplex-foundation-terms -of.html -ScottH > > > Regarding the trademarks, I don't think MS has a trademark on .NET, > > specifically, but rather the logo. > > > http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/en/us/IntellectualProperty/Tradema > r > > ks/EN-US.aspx > > Thanks for citing that. > > > Putting .NET or dotnet somewhere in a product name is a pretty common > > practice > > Sure. > > > (ex. Apache's Lucene.NET and log4net, Spring.NET, Oracle's > > ODP.NET, Red Gate's .NET Reflector and .NET Developer Bundle, > Paint.NET, > > DotNetNuke, Dotnet247.com, DotNetKicks.com, DotNetSlackers.com). > > The only non-profit in that list is Apache. It's entirely possible > that the others pay royalties for the use of a trademarked term. > While it's doubtful, it seemed wise to raise the point. > > M > > -- > You are currently subscribed to [email protected] as: > [email protected] > To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see http://www.ja- > sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/cas-dev -- You are currently subscribed to [email protected] as: [email protected] To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/cas-dev
