C# the language, and the core .NET libraries are under a
far-from-ideal "Community Promise" patent license. Sadly, this patent
grant for the ideas embodied in those standards are made available by
Microsoft to full implementations of C# and those core class
libraries. But they are not available to third party languages.
So in fact, the ECMA subset of C# and the ECMA subset of the class
libraries comes with patent protection,
That subset is not enough: programs such as Tomboy depend on the other
libraries which are not in the ECMA subset and not covered. Also,
that community promise, even where it does apply, is not adequate.
See http://www.fsf.org/news/2009-07-mscp-mono for details.
Implementing a free platform for C# is a good thing to do. If you
would like to promote the use of C# itself, how about explaining to
Novell and Microsoft that they need to fully implement said protection
in an ironclad way for all the usual C# libraries.
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