[clug] Mono in Linux

Chris Smart mail at christophersmart.com
Tue Jun 2 06:17:39 GMT 2009


2009/6/2 Nathan O'Sullivan <nathan.osullivan at team.mammoth.com.au>:
> We know they dont hold any patents related to Mono. We know that Microsoft
> claim they have patents related to implementation of the ECMA standard and
> the BCL. We dont know if those patents threaten Java, are invalidated by
> prior work, or even what they are.

Whether there are any patents against Java isn't really relevant.

> Novell-Microsoft agreement to my knowledge only covers Novell's customers,
> so that agreement doesnt affect the majority of us anyway.

Exactly. Novell is protected by the Microsoft patents because of their
agreement, but no-one else is. Novell controls Mono. They could have
made it patent free, but they haven't. Mono is patent encumbered. They
want to make money out of if by licensing Mono and then paying
royalties to Microsoft for their bits. Mono is a money making machine
for Novell, why would we want to program free software using such a
platform?

> Which comes back to the "what are these patents" question, doesnt it?

Well Novell knows, presumably, as that's why they setup the agreement
with Microsoft in the first place. But they didn't extend the cover to
everyone, only their paying customers.

> Whether Novell is an "open source company" (or Sun, for that matter) is a
> whole other kettle of fish but if a) Mono was widely used and b) Novell
> tried this, then a fork would spring up. To me this is whats great about the
> GPL, this Novell-Microsoft-Sun etc battle doesn't need to affect the rest of
> us.

Sure, if that happens it may get forked. The new mono project would
then have to remove all the patent issues surrounding the software
which might make it useless - I guess we won't know until we get a
list of the patents.

> In the context of linux and GNOME in particular (which is what we're talking
> about right?) actual compatibility with the Microsoft implementation isnt
> particularly relevant, since the GNOME-Mono stack is GTK# and other
> open-source libraries written in C#

Sure, maybe we don't care about using Windows Forms or whatever, but
we're still programming in a proprietary programming language, that
Microsoft wants (and is) extracting royalties from.

>
> Ultimately the problem I have with the GNOME-Mono bashing is that it its a
> patent-fairy FUD approach to what came from a technical problem: the Java
> GUI story has sucked on linux, and from what I can see isnt really getting
> any better. Some people dont like that, which is fair enough, but there
> still doesnt seem to be a credible alternative for the massive number of
> programmers who are working everyday in statically typed bytecode languages.
>

Whether Java sucks or not and whether it's all come about from a
technical problem or not, is irrelevant. Programming applications in
Mono/.NET is an issue for free software because we know that there are
patents against it and that's dangerous if we become dependent on it.
It's as simple as that.

I just don't understand why free software developers would willingly
put themselves in that position. Free software should be steering
clear of all patent issues that they know about and not willfully
entering into them.

I guess we'll see what happens :-)

-c


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