On Fri, 2006-11-03 at 10:18 +0000, tom potts wrote: > http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20061102175508403 > so hows that work then?
Novell gets to say to its customers that there are no legal issues from Microsoft toward any of its products. Which instantly kills 25% [0] of all patent complaints toward Mono, Samba, Wine, the Linux kernel itself (see articles circa 2003 claiming that the Linux kernel violated ~230 patents held by Microsoft), and just about every other non-trivial piece of software (because software patents are evil). This is good. The bad part is that it seems to apply only toward Novell, which is a GPL violation waiting to happen FOR SOME SOFTWARE. It's not a violation for most of Mono, as Mono's class libraries are MIT/X11 licensed (which doesn't mention software patents, and thus doesn't have any problems with having patents covering the implementation). Mono's runtime (libmono.so) is LGPL, so that could potentially have problems (e.g. if Microsoft had patents on some portions of their GC), along with some of Mono's apps (e.g. if there's a patent that mcs violates, which would be patently absurd -- compilers are decades old -- but this *is* the USPTO we're talking about...). So worst case, Microsoft sues Red Hat, Red Hat sues Novell (for shipping GPL-licensed software which infringes Microsoft's patents), and everyone gets together for a huge cross licensing clusterfuck, allowing all the large companies to continue on their merry way [1], and killing any chance of new small software companies from making it big [2]. So for the immediate future, it brings sanity to some (Novell customers), FUD to others (Fedora Core, Ubuntu, etc. users), and gives Microsoft cash (preventing them from FUDing many parties involved). Business as usual. - Jon [0] number pulled out of my ass. [1] minus large amounts of attorney's fees [2] which is the primary purpose of patents these days, to prevent any new market competitors. _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [email protected] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
