[clug] Mono in Linux

[David Tulloh]

Nathan O'Sullivan wrote:
> As someone who develops web applications in Visual Studio and deploys 
> on Mono, my opinion is probably biased.
>
> That said, the core of most anti-Mono arguments seem to be that (to 
> quote) "Microsoft still holds patents in relation to these standards".
>
> Do they? Which patents? I've never seen any patents specifically 
> named. And how do these patents manage to cover C# but not Java?
>
There's generally an attitude of not wanting to know about the details 
of patents.  The advice I have read from the FOSS lawyers is that you 
shouldn't search for patents or look at the details of patents.  I 
believe this is because you get greater protection by just going ahead 
blindly and maybe infringing inadvertently compared to being aware of 
the patents and not avoiding them properly or missing one in your 
search.  This almost certainly explains why there isn't a wide knowledge 
or specific naming of the patents in question.

That said there is a lot of evidence out there that there are patents on 
the .NET universe.

An email from Jim Miller talks about there being patents on C# and the 
.NET CLI.  Microsoft is required to make these available on reasonable 
and non-discriminatory terms, they have further pledged that this will 
be on a royalty free basis.  I don't understand this as saying they are 
available for free, which is how Mono seems to read it.
http://web.archive.org/web/20030424174805/http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-sscli/msg00218.html

It is important to note however that the above agreement only covers C# 
and the CLI.  It does not cover ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Windows Forms, VB.NET 
or anything else.  A quick search for "asp net patents" on Google turns 
up some sort of HTTP patent which I haven't read, so there seems to be 
patents on these systems as well.

It's likely that the C# patents will overlap with Java, just as the Java 
patents probably overlap with C#.  However I'm sure that Microsoft and 
Sun/Oracle have a lot of patents on each others products and simply 
choose not to exercise them, much like the MAD policy of the cold war.  
However that shouldn't be very reassuring to anyone who doesn't have a 
dozen solid patents to hold over Microsoft's head.


David