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Can Recent MS Patents Affect Mono and DotGNU?

Posted by Cliff on from the do-you-trust-Redmond dept.

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?"

4 of 410 comments (clear)

  1. Short Answer by Mansing · · Score: 0, Redundant

    "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?"

    Yes.

  2. Re:Get a Lawyer? by Overly+Critical+Guy · · Score: 0, Redundant

    It's a slow Sunday. There needed to be something involving "patents" or "Microsft," and luckily this had both. I doubt the editor even read the thing all the way through.

    --
    "Sufferin' succotash."
  3. My answer to you:... by pVoid · · Score: 0, Redundant
    IANAL.

    I'm surprised to not see any IANAL posts up till now.

  4. Re:It's simple... by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 0, Redundant
    Because only a subset of .NET is halfopen, a great bit of .NET software won't run on linux anyways, which reduces the weight of one of the arguments for Mono significantly.

    Look at the Wine project. Do you really think the fact that some APIs aren't ISO standards are going to stop people getting compatability? No, me neither.

    Considering that a commercial QT license is not that expensive for businesses developing software compared to the labour cost

    ... sounds like you've been reading KDE News too much. Given a choice of two powerful toolkits, one that is fully supported in a clean, modern language (ie not C++) and is available for free, and the other which is not, there's really little competition. If you think .NET competes with Qt, you clearly have never worked in a language like C# or Java.