Attachmate Fires Mono Developers

darthcamaro writes "Love it or hate it, Novell's open source Mono project has inspired a lot of debate over the last 7 years. Mono brings .NET to Linux, with some interesting patent connections. The project is now at a crossroads, with news today that Attachmate had laid off the US based development team for Mono."

Comments

And nothing of value was lost.

[Alex Belits]

(I will gb2/b/ shortly).

Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use.

The problem is not unique to Mono; any free implementation of C# would raise the same issue. The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents. (See http://swpat.org/ and http://progfree.org./ This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.

This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. Free C# implementations permit users to run their C# programs on free platforms, which is good. (The GNU Project has an implementation of C# also, called Portable.NET.) Ideally we want to provide free implementations for all languages that programmers have used.

The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.

We should systematically arrange to depend on the free C# implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing programs in C#. Therefore, we should not include C# implementations in the default installation of GNU/Linux distributions or in their principal ways of installing GNOME, and we should distribute and recommend non-C# applications rather than comparable C# applications whenever possible.

Re:Good.

[mysidia]

The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents.

No, C# itself is covered by an open standard. Your suggestion of Microsoft Patent Ire is entirely academic, and Microsoft's patents covering Linux kernel technology are much greater concern

And with Java, the danger is not academic. Oracle is actually suing Google over patents for their implementation resembling Java.

Re:Good.

[Microlith]

ECMA standards don't protect you from patent lawsuits. Especially not when the standard is saddled with RAND patents (which virtually guarantee that open source usage is out the window.)

Re:Good.

[rzei]

Last I checked MONO was aiming to deliver .NET to Linux. .NET (platform) patents scare people, not patents regarding the language specification. I guess you can patent anything in USA and sue on ever more in Texas, but I do not think that the language specification contains anything patentable.

Have you read the patent statement? It says:

Microsoft Corporation will grant, [..] licenses on commericially reasonable terms and conditions, for its patent(s), [...] for the implementation of the Ecma Standard.

So, until you have Microsoft releasing GPL (w/ classpath or whatever assemblies you use on .NET exception) or LGPL code that compiles under Linux you really shouldn't be using it.

Re:Good.

[black6host]

I don't care for proprietary programming languages as much as the next guy. Take away the .net part of it, look at the principal architect of the C# language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg/> Sorry, URL formatting has me stumped, I've followed the syntax, but that's not the point of this post. You can find him. He was was heavily involved/ perhaps lead architect (I don't know as of now) of Borland's Delphi. A most wonderful development environment, and the only real competitor to VB at the time. So my suggestion is don't bash C# but rather the encumbrances places upon it, like .NET.

Disclaimer: I still write in Delphi. If I want to update a network of 100 systems I just copy over the .exe. (Still using Delphi 7). No need to roll out updates to every machine. No registry usage. None of the BS that comes with rolling out a .Net application. And my clients find my work very valuable. My impression is that Delphi is much more common in the EU and I don't speak at all to the crap that's happened since then with the selling to this corp or that corp. I only point out that the person developed by C# is a talented individual.

Re:Good.

[Dragonslicer]

Are you sure that you aren't confusing C# with .Net? C# is a programming language that is standardized by ECMA and ISO. .Net is a framework that can be used by several programming languages, including C#. I know that there are issues with many patents that have been granted in the United States, but I would still be surprised if Microsoft has patents on a language specification.

Re:Good.

[Dahamma]

1) Do your research:

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/principles/osspatentpledge.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/en/us/IntellectualProperty/IPLicensing/customercovenant/msnovellcollab/patent_agreement.aspx

2) Stop plagarizing Richard Stallman's quotes without attribution:

http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono

Re:Good.

[Etrigoth]

Erm, Have you actually tried to deploy a .net application recently ?

Other then ensuring that the framework is installed, it is also generally as simple as copying a .exe file.

ClickOnce deployment is vaguely more complicated but its complexities exist to counter security problems. One can hardly blame MS for trying to be a bit more proactive about security either.

The largest (in terms of distribution) .NET program I've ever written had a target audience of roughly 40k computers. Our deployment process ? xcopy or download an MSI file if you weren't on the network.

Re:Good.

[Gadget_Guy]

It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use.

This is the very definition of FUD. You have some assumptions made up of complete guesswork, and from that you try to scare the development community from using this language/platform. You have absolutely no facts to back up your assertions, and yet year after year people keep spreading this FUD and year after year it does not come true.

The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.

So what is the answer? To avoid applications written in C#? If you do that, then you have already lost the applications without any lawsuits being filed. The paranoia wins.

In years to come, when Microsoft moves on to its next programming system that supplants .NET, I am sure you will pat yourself on the back saying how you saved the open source world from an attack that only existed in your imagination. It is like Donald Trump fanning the flames of a nutjob conspiracy, and then claiming a victory because the unlikely accusations proved to be untrue.

Re:Good.

[hduff]

It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use.

The problem is not unique to Mono; any free implementation of C# would raise the same issue. The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents. (See http://swpat.org/ and http://progfree.org./ This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.

Miguel says everything is cool so you are wrong and we have nothing to fear. Ever. EVAR !

Re:Good.

[shutdown -p now]

He is not. C# has versions, and so does .NET. As well, C# has an Ecma standard, and so does .NET (CLI) - they are two separate documents.

He is correct in that the most recent standardized (by Ecma and ISO) versions of both C# and CLI are 2.0.

Re:Good.

[shutdown -p now]

There's no published standard document from Ecma yet.

Re:Good.

[drfreak]

Sorry, I should have included the link. Miguel describes all the features in the most current version of Mono. At a Microsoft Developers Conference. Enuff Said.

Re:Good.

[Daniel Phillips]

In all the MSDN conference media -which I do not define as MSDN proper, but programmer conference media-, Microsoft has not only embraces Mono but showcases it.

Since I know Microsoft well, that is all the reason I need to avoid Mono now and forever.

Did you... not see the recent Microsoft PDC conference video where Miguel De Icaza himself presented on Mono?

I hope you are not under the misapprehension that Miguel de Icaza has a shred of credibility left with anyone, least of all me.

Re:Good.

[mcgrew]

This is the very definition of FUD.

Sometimes fear, uncertainty, and doubt are warranted. IMO any time you're dealing with MS you should be fearful, uncertain, and doubtful. MS does have a history, you know.

The paranoia wins.

You try walking home through the ghetto without being paranoid. I'm not talking about MS here, I'm talking about staggering home from Felbers. Live in my part of town and paranoia is the only thing that will keep you alive. And to tell the truth, I fear MS more than I fear the gangstas. What's that Who song about "a boss with a gun that fires cops"?

t is like Donald Trump fanning the flames of a nutjob conspiracy,

Bullshit, MS's shenanigans are legion and history, unlike Trump's retarded tinfoil hat bullshit.

Re:Good.

[binarylarry]

Java is open source, GPL even, and has a patent covenant from Oracle not to sue for it's use.

How much better could it fit in the GNU ecosystem?

Re:Good.

[aztracker1]

Well, you could read the legally binding community promise... Or the projects MS has released under OSS licences (MVC, DLR, etc). I'm guessing you've stripped out the FAT32 support, and Samba from your linux builds too then?

Re:Good.

[Anthony Mouse]

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/principles/osspatentpledge.mspx [microsoft.com]

That says it only covers patents "that are necessary to implement the Covered Specification." How worthless is that? So if you implement it the same way Microsoft did, or in the most natural and straightforward way, but there was some alternative way of doing it that still meets the spec then you're not covered? As in, even if the only alternative is a crap implementation that will require twice as much memory and 10 times as much CPU?

Obviously they couldn't have created a patent grant that says 'you can use any Microsoft patents that cover the Microsoft implementation in order to create your own' because that wouldn't include the trap for the unwary.

Re:Good.

[Gadget_Guy]

Microsoft has not only embraces Mono but showcases it.

Since I know Microsoft well, that is all the reason I need to avoid Mono now and forever.

So on one hand we have people stating that we should avoid Mono because Microsoft does not like the competition and will eventually crush it with their patents, while on the other hand we should avoid Mono because Microsoft likes it and showcases it as evidence of the .NET CLR cross platform status.

It seems Microsoft can't do anything right!

I hope you are not under the misapprehension that Miguel de Icaza has a shred of credibility left with anyone, least of all me.

It is quite damning of Miguel that he has lost the support of the paranoid set. So what has he actually done? He has created a programming platform that works, has withstood the test of time, and that has not been crushed under the legal might if Microsoft. He proved the naysayers wrong.

Re:Good.

[Gadget_Guy]

regardless of whether its FUD or not, its been going on too long now to put the fire out.

And in the open source world, as soon as something is despised or rejected by the community at large, its days are numbered.

I don't know about that. The Mono Project has had to wear these accusations since it began and yet it still grows better all the time. Just because a few vocal people are against it does not mean that it will go away. I think that their branching out into the mobile phone arena will keep their profile up and ensure the project doesn't die.

Let's face it, Windows is despised in the open source community too and yet there is still quite a lot of support for the operating system in open source software. Sure it will reduce the number of developers using it, but there is still plenty of software being written using Mono - both open and closed source. Now I think about it, it is probably the private companies writing using Mono as familiar way of moving their in-house software to Linux that will ensure the future of the platform - and be a reason that even Microsoft haters should support the programming platform.

Re:Good.

[modmans2ndcoming]

what rinky dink Enterprise IT department do you work in? Users do not deploy programs to their computers. you push them out and they are just available from the end user's perspective.

Re:Good.

[Anthony Mouse]

First, if they had done what I suggested and included a patent grant for all of the patents that the Microsoft implementation uses, it would only have implicated the FAT long filename patent (or any given other patent) if Microsoft's implementation had used it. And if Microsoft did use it for something in their implementation, the idea that a third party implementation that did the same thing wouldn't be covered is the whole thing people are concerned about.

Second, what you are describing is the trade off between false positives and false negatives and what you are saying is that Microsoft chose an alternative that causes edge cases to result in Microsoft being able to use patents against third party implementations despite the pledge. To me that does not seem to be a good strategy to alleviate concerns that Microsoft will use patents against third party implementations despite the pledge.

Re:Good.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

So why doesn't Microsoft sue? Because it would be a public relations nightmare - just as it was for SCO.

Perhaps you aren't aware that MS funded SCO's lawsuit. SCO was just a proxy for MS. Nothing to stop MS from "selling" the patents in question to some patent troll and engaging in another proxy lawsuit.

Re:Good.

[Gadget_Guy]

nope, they're saying that the copyright/patent situation is not clear at all, and that MS pushing c# so hard right now, including via mono, in no way guarantees that they won't have a change of mind 5 months - 6 years from now, and close everything up again.

They could also send out death squads to kill anyone who writes buggy software in C#. Or not.

It is one thing to have doubts about whether Microsoft are lying about making an open standard, but it is another to then take every opportunity to convince the world that they are doing exactly that - even if it is completely contrary to every action that Microsoft has taken since it created .NET.

All you are saying is that you fear that they may eventually turn against the developer community, that you can't be certain what their ultimate goal is, and that you have grave doubts about their motivations.

But that is not facts, just classic FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

Re:Good.

[JerryLindenburg]

This whole Novell thing got me thinking that maybe Microsoft is about to throw the last blow in the platform war, decidedly ending it once and for all. Think about it for a second. Microsoft has never made a dime from anyone using Linux. They never will, either. Unless they grow up a little, and accept that Linux isn't going away anytime soon. They've done everything they possibly could to kill it and failed. If I were an executive at Microsoft (it could happen, and I would accept the job if they offered it), then I would be looking at extending my reach, improving Microsoft's reputation, and putting the past behind me. It only makes sense in that context that I (still as an executive here) would absorb mono, keep it open, and make it official.

Of course, this layoff doesn't bode well for my little conspiracy theory. So there's no telling what Microsoft will actually do.

If I'm wrong, Microsoft is being mismanaged, and they're as dumb as ever.
I'm going to hold off and give them the benefit of the doubt, assume they've matured with age, and hope I'm right.

We'll see.

Re:Good.

[hairyfeet]

If you would have bothered to read your own link you would have found a handy little link where you buy a licensed copy for any OS you care to run it on, how horrible! To think, they actually want to be paid for their R&D instead of giving you the right to have their work "free as in beer".

You know, just because you want everything for free doesn't give you the right to force that upon others anymore than I have the right to take GPL code and lock it behind a paywall. MSFT has given the code for .NET (all except Winforms IIRC which wouldn't bloody work anywhere else anyway) they have given it as an ECMA standard AND given a legally binding community promise that makes it so any attempt to weasel out would get them laughed out of any courtroom anywhere.

So lets be honest here: The ONLY way you would take anything made by MSFT is if it were sold to Google. BTW, they using any GPL V3 in Android? No? Know why? Look up "TiVoization" and see what is gonna happen to the droid. I frankly find it hilarious that everyone in the Linux community is worried about the old dog when the new hungry wolf is about to bite you right in the ass. Think RMS wrote GPL V3 because it was Tuesday? he wrote it because he knows GPL V2 is hopelessly broken and thanks to TiVo every corp on the planet knows that too.

So please, keep believing that .NET is some evil plot that is just taking a long long LONG time to come to fruition. It will make it all the more funny when the handset manufacturers take your Linux toys away thanks to TiVo tricking. After all, what good is the code if the device won't let you run it?

Looks like Attachmate didn't want Linux

[Omnifarious]

Firing the mono developers didn't convince me of this. It's the fact they're basically moving Linux development to all be under a european division and giving them control over all the decisions. It's like they got that odd Linux thing and don't know exactly what to do with it.

I worked at Attachmate for awhile, and this doesn't really surprise me.

Re:Looks like Attachmate didn't want Linux

[bill_mcgonigle]

It's the fact they're basically moving Linux development to all be under a european division and giving them control over all the decisions. It's like they got that odd Linux thing and don't know exactly what to do with it.

Or maybe they realize that the US Patent system hopelessly f'ks things up for Linux development. Or if not hopelessly, at least expensively.

Not many tears

[markdavis]

>"Mono brings .NET to Linux,"

In a way that lags so far behind current versions and with limitations to make it unsuitable for just about anything useful. I am not shedding that many tears. It was a dangerous road to begin with (patents, not completely open, etc), and it is a shame those resources were not directed to something that would have truly benefited Linux and other Open Source platforms.

In any case, I am sure development will continue in some way. But without those resources, it will just continue to slip further and further behind.

Re:Not many tears

[Etrigoth]

Ok, I'm not going to wholesale bite but you really need to bring some Citation to this FUD.

You see, a simple google search results in this: http://mono-project.com/Compatibility

Which show's that as far as base libraries and feature support, Mono is almost all there with full .Net 4.0.

Seeing as that's the latest version of .Net and not even the latest version that a lot of businesses are targeting, would suggest that Mono isn't lagging at all.

Re:Not many tears

[samantha]

Look, without Mono you can't run serveral projects in the cloud without paying Windows stupidity tax. You can run them on anything but windows if mono falls apart. Like it or not C# is at least as good a language as java and arguably better than c++ for many types of projects. We don't want to lose c# from the non-windows open source world.

Re:Not many tears

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone that build's cross platform .NET apps using Mono, you should definitely STFU, and you obviously are talking out your ass. .NET compatibility in mono these days is steller. The only things we really lack are features of Visual Studio, not so much mono itself. MonoDevelop however is pretty dang good. In .NET we've been getting some amazing database ORM's that point & click to build your DAL automatically for you. In mono its a little bit more old-fashioned having to invoke command line for auto-generation. WPF obviously is not available, as to be expected when developing cross platform, so you use GTK. Go back to fox news dude.

Re:Not many tears

[Anonymous Coward]

Professional full-time .Net programmer with extensive mono experience.

Mono's implementation of winforms is shit. But hey, winforms is shit!

Otherwise, I found mono to be entirely as good as MS' CLR, with the caveat that it lags behind by a short period of time. This becomes less and less important, as new language features are less and less important (generics was huge, linq was useful, type variance is nice...). Additionally, unlike winforms, mono's ASP.NET implementation is actually pretty passable.

Re:Not many tears

[shutdown -p now]

I'm not sure what you mean about parallelism being better in C# - can you elaborate?

I suspect he means Parallel LINQ, which is, of course, not a language-specific feature.

there's no equivalent that I'm aware of to something like java.util.concurrent (see previous comment about parallelism)

I'm not saying that it's as rich, but System.Threading.Tasks and System.Collections.Concurrent namespaces provide similar high-level building blocks in .NET 4.

By the way, this is about more than just parallelism - asynchrony is also neatly expressed via tasks/futures, and C# 5 will add some nice syntactic sugar for that.

As a platform though, .NET has a way to go before it's really mature IMHO.

It largely depends on the field of application. You have to remember that .NET was originally marketed primarily for line-of-business desktop and web apps; in that role, you don't need e.g. a fancy collection framework, but solid database access and a fast UI framework is a must - and so those were prioritized. Consequently, there are areas where .NET is relatively underdeveloped compared to Java, and then there are other areas where it's on par or ahead.

structs can burn in hell

Don't diss structs, they're immensely useful for direct, efficient interop with native (read: C/C++) code. With some care, you can even map them to C++ classes, hand-crafting vtables, if your compiler documents their layout.

I do wish we didn't have to use them outside of that area, though. Unfortunately, .NET JIT is not (yet) good enough to do escape analysis and optimize reference type allocations to occur on the stack rather than heap where possible, like HotSpot does.

Re:Not many tears

[radish]

It largely depends on the field of application. You have to remember that .NET was originally marketed primarily for line-of-business desktop and web apps; in that role, you don't need e.g. a fancy collection framework, but solid database access and a fast UI framework is a must - and so those were prioritized. Consequently, there are areas where .NET is relatively underdeveloped compared to Java, and then there are other areas where it's on par or ahead.

100% agreed there. What struck me as interesting (after years of explaining Swing to WinForms devs) is how much WPF reminds me of Swing, mixed with a little HTML and CSS. The DB stuff though is very impressive, the shame is that in my place of work (and, I suspect, many others) it's not really very useful. We don't do 2-tier apps, we don't run SQL Server and we don't run Windows app servers. A lot of it feels like it was created to make the demo look really cool rather than to be actually useful in major development projects - but that could be my bias talking.

Still, as a Java guy who has become responsible for a bunch of .NET stuff, it's a lot less painful now than it would have been a couple of years ago!

Re:Not many tears

[shutdown -p now]

What struck me as interesting (after years of explaining Swing to WinForms devs) is how much WPF reminds me of Swing, mixed with a little HTML and CSS.

Do you mean the layouts and model/view separation?

As far as layouts go, WPF is fairly bland, though I find it easier to reason about what goes where when you write the tree as XML (where it maps one-to-one), as opposed to wiring it all up in code. There are similar third-party solutions for Swing, so far as I know, but I never understood why they didn't do that from the get go - of all the ways XML is misused, UI layout is something that actually is a good application for once.

As for model/view, I dare say that WPF actually takes things much further here... in Swing, the glue between the two is strictly typed through rigidly defined model interfaces, and so you end up coding model wrappers around your business objects. WPF binding expressions are rich enough that you can bind directly to objects and collections, and change notification events that are necessary for this are lifted to the core framework and not tied to the specific technology - hence why you can actually reuse the same models between WinForms and WPF. Then, of course, there's the ability to bind elements to other elements, and triggers - making rich yet purely declarative UI possible with little to no glue for the model layer (especially if you use one of third-party markup extensions for free-form expressions in bindings).

The only framework I'm aware of that can match this flexibility is Qt Quick... it's a damn shame that its future is so uncertain now - we could certainly use more of that kind of clean separation.

GOOD: Just think of energy saved...

[alexmin]

By not loading up multi-megabyte runtime to print "Hello world!"

Impact on popular Linux applications

[greg1104]

Looking through the Mono application screenshots, what I believe are the most popular programs impacted by Mono development slowing are Banshee, F-Spot, and Tomboy. Since this trio is easily replaced by Rhythmbox, gThumb, and Gnote, among other options, good riddance to the lot of them. In addition to the standard Stallman concerns, the high concentration of the development team within Novell was always a problem anyway. There are way too many similar applications within open-source operating systems, so culling out some of the weaker ones--from a development risk standpoint--is a net benefit as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Impact on popular Linux applications

[lennier]

F-Spot... easily replaced by... gThumb

I'm actually enjoying Shotwell. It's also a good advertisement for the Vala language, which seems interesting.

Re:I was considering Monodroid...

[rabtech]

OK so you wish to live without dynamic language support, true generics, query expressions/LINQ, closures, lambda expressions, the new async/await, and a whole host of other features so you can stick with a language that hasn't seen a major new feature in a long time? One that continuously makes the wrong decisions just for backwards compatibility? (type erasure is idiotic, just make people upgrade their JVMs. the "lambda" support coming in 1.7 will suck for the same reason - it isn't true lambda expressions that make functions first-class citizens, its just syntax sugar on an anonymous class so non-final vars don't get hoisted because writing the changed value back to the caller would apparently be too much trouble.)

Basically Java is frozen in stone and will never be updated with anything worthwhile. Apparently anything that requires JVM support is absolutely out of the question. Especially if C# did it. And if by some miracle Java includes something C# did first, it will introduce incompatible syntax just to be a dick. (for/enumeration loops I'm looking at you!)

There is one interesting question... what will Microsoft do now for Silverlight Linux support? Will they drop it or just go ahead and produce an actual .Net runtime for *nix? They already had rotor, which was an independent implementation of the runtime for *BSD. It wouldn't be hard to do and if they did so there would literally be no reason to choose Java as the only thing it has going for it is that it runs on multiple operating systems. This doesn't necessarily involve the GUI framework or other such things... but the core runtime itself is fantastic.

Re:I was considering Monodroid...

[shutdown -p now]

The problem is that Oracle is behind the wheel now, and that just won't happen. As you said, Java is frozen.

This only means that your hypothetical Java 2.0 won't be called Java.

I don't know what it'll be called, but I bet it'll come out of Google.

(and no, Go is not that)

Good start.

[Yaos]

Now just fire the rest of the idiots that came from Novell and start fresh. Every new Novell product has been a complete disaster thrown together by idiot programmers and idiot managers. Every new version of their existing software is worse than the last version. Please Attachmate, just kill Novell already.

Great

[CODiNE]

now hopefully certain distros *cough*ubuntu*cough* will stop requiring mono just so they can put in Tomboy. (Or is it the other way around?)

C# *and* core libraries

[benjymouse]

MS patent grant and covenant covers C# and core libraries. Unlike Java, C# and core libraries is standardized through ECMA and ISO. As part of having a standard accepted by ISO a submitter must grant license for any patent necessary for implementation on a RAND basis. This was not enough for the OS community, so MS issued the "community promise".

And yes, the community is legally binding and is even stronger than a contract as the recipients do not even have to agree to anything.

Enough FUD already

Re:C# *and* core libraries

[Moondevil]

C# is only an ECMA standard up to C# v2, go look it up.

Microsoft stop submitting more recent versions to ECMA.

Re:C# *and* core libraries

[MareLooke]

The FSFs stance, but since the FSF are just anti MS, Stallman following loonies (right?), here's Groklaw's stance. I'm sure you can find more with your friend.

But don't let the facts presented by people who understand the applicable law and the related issues stop your fanboyism.

Re:C# *and* core libraries

[gbjbaanb]

only C# version 2.0 is standardised by ECMA and ISO, so forget using any of those nice new features like LINQ.

Unless you do use those features, accidentally or otherwise, then you're obviously no longer covered.

The comunity promise isn't strong enough for the community, I can believe that given the way patent lawyering has been going recently.

Legally binding promise == estoppel

[benjymouse]

Look it up. Basically if anyone acts in good faith relying on the promise (a promise here being a one-way contract where you do not have to agree to anything), the principle of *estoppel* springs into play. It is even more legally binding than a contract, because MS cannot even terminate it because of anything you may or may not do.