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Ximian to Change License for Mono

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the winds-of-change dept.

A Commentor writes: "According to news.com Ximian is changing the license to Mono from GPL to a variant of the XFree license. Apparently this is due to a partnership with Intel." Update: 01/28 15:03 GMT by T : There's a story at NewsForge as well, where RMS weighs in firsthand on the license choice.

12 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. Headline misleading? by MisterBlister · · Score: 5, Informative
    From my reading of the article, they changed the license of the classes, not the whole of Mono.


    This makes quite a bit of sense in terms of acceptance as if the root classes of the implementation are GPL that pretty much forces every application built to use Mono to be GPL. You can debate whether the classes would have been better off XFree-ish or LGPL, but they shouldn't be GPL (IMO), just as the gnu libc isn't GPL.

    1. Re:Headline misleading? by Ondo · · Score: 4, Informative

      It wasn't just the headline that was misleading, the article is misleading. It was GPL and LGPL they switched from.

      From Miguel's message to the Mono-announce list:

      In behalf of all the Mono contributors to the project, we are announcing that the license for the Mono class libraries has been changed from the dual mode we had (GPL and LGPL) to the MIT X11 license.

    2. Re:Headline misleading? by J.+Random+Software · · Score: 4, Informative

      "On behalf of all contributors"? Does Mono require copyright assignment of all contributions, or did they actually manage to persuade every contributor to subsidize non-Free Mono implementations? Their FAQ still says they'll generally accept GPL'd contributions (which implies they don't insist on the right to relicense).

  2. License change. by miguel · · Score: 5, Informative
    The license change only applies to the Mono Class Libraries, and the precise license that we are using is the MIT X11 license.

    Miguel.

  3. Miguel is speaking at Columbia U on Wednesday by philgross · · Score: 4, Informative
    ...as a invited speaker by Columbia's student ACM chapter. 209 Havemeyer at 8pm.

    If the slashdot readership has any questions they'd like to ask Miguel de Icaza, we can ask the highly-moderated ones during the Q&A session and report the answers back here.

    Phil Gross, Columbia ACM

  4. Re:The more interesting news in this aritcle... by horster · · Score: 1, Informative

    I don't think you understand - microsoft is probably quite happy about this. it is at the very least validation of their software.

  5. Re: Intel is putting HUGE resources into Linux by Glasswire · · Score: 5, Informative

    -Intel officially supports 2 OSes, Win and Lin.
    -Intel writes the fastest C/C++ and Fortran compilers and parallelization tools for Linux
    -Intel is a founder of the Open Source Development Lab
    -Intel is working on dozens of Linux projects including OSCAR cluster, ethernet, gig E and embedded StrongARM work.
    -Itanium has over 500 applications for 3+ OSes while Hammer doesn't even have a finished OS yet.
    (Just don't tell Microsoft...)

  6. Re:DotGNU Portable.NET by miguel · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Mono runtime is released under the LGPL.
    The compiler is released under the GPL.
    The class libraries are released under the X11 license.

    The X11 license is a free software license (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#X11 License.
    It is also an Open Source license (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.ht ml

    All of it free software.

    If they were not `truly free software' we would have bigger problems (someone would have to start a reimplementation of X11, telnet, Kerberos, Expat, LibXML, Mesa GL, ftp, Tcl/Tk, BIND, DNS, and anything else released under the X11, the Ousterhout or the BSD licenses, because they are in essence the same thing).

    Miguel

  7. Re:A disturbing move. by Nicolas+MONNET · · Score: 3, Informative

    Tux Racer changed from free software to proprietary software.

    Mono changed from free software to free software.

    Your comparison sucks.

  8. This is *only* the class libraries. by Queuetue · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://www.go-mono.com/faq.html#licensing

    The C# Compiler is released under the terms of the GNU GPL. The runtime libraries are under the GNU Library GPL. And the class libraries are released under the terms of the MIT X11 license.

    I don't know how much better that is, but at least it's better then changing the license to all of Mono.

  9. Re:Back up this claim with evidence. by ajs · · Score: 3, Informative

    Anonymous Coward: "Spider is not BSD you flaming idiot."

    From the cited article (the link to which I was responding): "some of Spider's code (possibly all of it) was based on the TCP/IP stack in the BSD flavors of Unix"

    If we're to believe this "Microsoft insider", here, then the conclusion is pretty clear. As usual, MS bought their technology (standard business practice for most large corporations), but they were unhappy with it. They re-wrote much of it, but left the parts that it did not make sense to re-invent. Plus, they largely did not touch the utilities.

    None of this should be suprising, nor is it a bad thing. In fact, herein lies the power of Open Source. It also shows Microsoft's true colors, however. They brought a TCP/IP stack to market much faster than they otherwise would have because of OSS (not to mention their browser, which is based on Mosaic), but now you hear them decrying such software as dangerous and "viral" (yes, they paint the whole OSS industry with the same brush, regardless of license).

    You may find these facts distasteful. I do too. However, that's no reason to complain about my facts without checking your own.

  10. Re: Intel is putting HUGE resources into Linux by jmcneill · · Score: 2, Informative

    NetBSD runs on the Hammer already.

    See the NetBSD/x86_64 port page.