Jonathan, thanks for your constructive post and clearing up the patent issue. In my opinion that shows that the .NET API patent is not a bigger threat than any other patent, which might be an important message especially for companies thinking about to use Mono but are scared by the .NET patent.
As the patent question comes up regularly, it might be a good idea to modify the Licensing FAQ a bit in that direction so that potential users get a clear statement. Especially the circumstance that the .NET patent is defacto a toothless tiger (as many prior art exists in that context) might be an important information. By the way the Licensing FAQ seems no longer to be directly linked from the FAQ page. Is there a special reason for that? Maybe you can shed some light into another issue as well. The Licensing FAQ states: "Basically a grant is given to anyone who want to implement those [ECMA/ISO] components for free and for any purpose. The controversial elements are the ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms subsets. Those are convenient [...] for people who need full compatibility with the Windows platform, but are not required for the open source Mono platform, nor integration with today's Mono's rich support of Linux." Exactly the last two sentences astonish me a bit because the inference from this statement is that the whole Mono API Stack like Gtk# or Mono.Unix will sit directly on top of the CLI API. However that is very hard to believe as I'm sure even Gtk# and Mono.Unix need more functionality that the CLI actually provides. For example the System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal class is not part of the CLI API. The CLI CultureInfo class does not contain any methods or properties (but the strange notice "Reserved for future use. This class is provided in order to implement the abstract methods that require it in the reflection library."). Also other CLI classes like Exception have a reduced set of methods - just look at the XML file that contains the CLI API. Therefore my conclusion is that any serious .NET application or library will (almost) always need more than the CLI API actually provides. However nobody seems to care about that fine detail and believe that when the CLI can be used for free, (at least) the Mono Stack is safe which is (*in my opinion*) not the case. Did I overlook some important information like that *the whole .NET base library* is actually part of CLI (which is not the case AFAIK)? It would be fine if you or someone else could shed some light into that issue. Thanks in advance. Ralf _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [email protected] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
