Can Recent MS Patents Affect Mono and DotGNU?

5p1urge asks: "I really love the Mono and DotGNU projects. As someone who's worked in Java for for over 5 years, I welcome C# and it's buddies to the OpenSource world. However, here's question: as far as I can tell, only the C# spec and System.* assemblies were submitted to ECMA and therefore made officially public. What happens when MS decides that, Linux -is- going to steal valuable income-generating business, and therefore it should use it's newly acquired patents to sue? I'd appreciate comments from IT lawyers / solicitors and individuals with experience in this area, as well as from the wider community. I'm asking this question because I want to code in mono / DotGnu but I'm cautious because I wonder if MS can take it away from us?"

Comments

Answer your own question?

[contrasutra]

inux -is- going to steal valuable income-generating business, and therefore it should use it's newly acquired patents to sue? Are they going to use their patents? Yes. Thats why the got them. If they wanted everyone to use .NET, they wouldnt have patented it.

Parrot

[Nucleon500]

Well, I think making open-source implementations of .NET is a good idea, but it's certainly not ideal. As I'm sure the Samba, WINE, and OpenOffice.org developers would agree, maintaining compatibility with a standard controlled by any hostile party, especially Microsoft, is an uphill battle. I don't predict legal battles, as Microsoft hasn't done that yet, but Microsoft will continue to play the upgrade game, changing the standards and generally making things difficult.

I'm waiting for Parrot to mature. It's a register-oriented bytecode interpreter, designed for Perl 6, but with other languages in the wings. When it gets Perl's libraries, Ruby's syntax, real threads, and great speed, I think it will do well.

Re:Nope

[DaHat]

I wish too that software patents would meet their end, however such thinking currently is nothing more then a dream. For software patents to truly be defeated there would need to be serious and repeated challenges to them, and of those challenges thus far none have had enough force to do what we want to see happen. Keep on dreaming for now, because for the time being, software patents are a reality and here to stay for the forcible future, just like the DMCA I'm afraid.

Despite the fact that every word I said above is factual... I know I am going to get flamed for this so... let er rip...

A few thoughts....

[revividus]

Mono seems to me to be a good idea, mostly because it will enable people who have invested a lot of time into learning it to consider switching to developing for Linux without having to learn whole new languages. Will that actually happen? I suppose only time will tell...

Another thought. Suppose they did `take it away'. What good will that do them? How many languages are there which duplicate or mimic large portions of basic C syntax and structures? It seems to me that all the Mono folks would need to do is declare that they were developing a new language using syntax similar to C#.

They could call it `D-flat'. :-)

Re:With Perl and Python being mainstream

[JusTyler]

and more and more sites are turning to Perl

As a Perl-head myself, I wondered where this statement comes from. To me, it seems, a lot of people on smaller projects and at the "lower end" are ditching Perl for PHP. In terms of pure number, I'd imagine PHP is growing a lot more than Perl.

Bass Ackwards

[overshoot]

Thanks, and on the other side of the case, would it matter? As far as I'm aware, the courts have always allowed the copying of functionality/appearance, just not the methods used. Since this is a compatibility issue, I doubt MS would have a case anyways, unless the methods used to be compatible were the same as their patented methods.

No, the courts have become very tolerant of patents with vague claims. A recent (upheld!) example is the patent on a credit-card-sized PDA, which was upheld as applying to a non-credit-card-sized PDA even though the patent didn't even describe how the small size was to be achieved.

Re:Call me stupid

[codepunk]

Ok,

Rich Client native gui, here you have two other cross platform choices..wxwindows and SWT both which offer native, fast gui's.

Microsoft Visual Studio the best? You obviously have never used any tool from Borland which absolutely stomps a mud hole in anything that MS has ever built.

Most commercial clients might run windows but I can tell you for a fact it it does not run on Linux we ain't buying it in our shop(sounds like I just shot your selling point all to hell). If you like java and you like C# and you sell software why on earth would you lock yourself to a platform.

Parrot vs Python

[cpeterso]

Dan, the author of the Parrot VM, has a bet with Pythong's Guido van Rossum. Dan bet Guido that Parrot can execute pure Python bytecode faster than the Python interpreter can. The battle will be decided at OSCON 2004 in Portland, OR. He sounds pretty confident:

"Boys and girls, let's get this straight. I'm only going to say this once. Parrot is an order of magnitude faster than perl 5 doing equivalent things. Without enabling any extraordinary measures. You know how Python's performance rates against Perl 5. Do the math."

Dan's blog entry about the bet: http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/000139.htm l

Re:Could be intaresting....

[HiThere]

Unfortunately, this is a bit less than true. If you aren't a member of their "patent pool", then many companies will sue you in a way that bears little relationship to fairness. (The cost of defending is generally such that such suits never see the courtroom.) Some companies are relatively benign, and IBM is an example of this. But there's nothing inherrent in being a big player that makes you benign toward those who aren't members of your club. That's up to management policy.

Waiting for the Java patent stories

[zjbs14]

Still waiting for the front-page stories about the dozens of patents Sun holds on Java and its related technologies. Especially the one that applies to any three-tier database applications written in Java (5,899,990).

Guess I shouldn't hold my breath.