I consider the criticism of DotGNU's homepage to be valid, and I'm working on making it communicate more effectively. I hope to get this done by Oct 1st.
If that were indeed their position, why don't they say clearly in the letter that allowing software patents of any kind if a huge mistake!?
SuSE asks only for a delay of the vote and a revision of the directive to make sure that
No patents can be granted on algorithms, business methods, and computer programs in themselves
Patents cannot be abused to hinder competition, interoperability and open standards
I don't consider this a position against software patents. In fact, they seem to agree with the intentions of those EU politicians who are in favor of the proposed patents directive. They just point out (in a polite manner) that the text of the directive needs to be revised because the politicians who drafted it didn't understand how difficult it is to allow any kind of software patents without severe undesired side effects.
If this is really the position of SuSE then I am shocked.
Could it be that they don't understand that software patents are a very bad thing for Free Software? No. Of course they realize that
patentability of software "inventions" means that Free Software will generally be limited to technologies which are too old to be subject to patents. In economies which allow software patents, it is impossible for the goal of the Free Software movement (to replace all proprietary software with Free Software) to be reached. The restrictions on software patents which they ask for are only good enough to prevent the total destruction of their Linux-based business.
If this was a letter from a proprietary software company, I would have considered it a reasonable argument, and even potentially helpful for the Free Software movement, because it could be used to show that also proprietary software companies are concerned.
However the letter comes from the leading GNU/Linux vendor in Europe.
It sounds like SuSE doesn't really mind software patents, even though what they ask for will mean that in the long run, at least in the EU most application programs for GNU/Linux will have to be proprietary software. Of course, if profits is the only thing they care about, then their attitude makes perfect sense, because they will be able to charge more when selling proprietary application programs then when selling Free ones.
I think we have just witnessed a major GNU/Linux vendor betray the Free Software movement.
I used to be a customer of SuSE. I will not buy from them again.
Java is ok, but I don't like Sun. Given that together with MS they help funding SCO's attacks on GNU/Linux, they're only a little less evil than MS. However, it's good news for GNU/Linux that MS gets serious competition. That makes it harder for them to extract a monopoly rent from the still strong market position, and it makes it much harder for them to shape the future of the IT world according to their desires.
In the past, the standards for the internet were decided through the community-based process of the Internet Engineering Task Force. This process is based on "rough consensus" and there is no way that a few influential companies could pervert this process in order to use it to establish standards that they can afterwards use to effectively kill their competitors.
Standards from Microsoft are dangerous, even when royalty-free licensing is offered so that they can be implemented in Free Software.
Consider for example the ECMA standards 334 and 335
for the core parts of.NET - while Microsoft has promised royalty-free licensing for any and all patents that may be neccessary for implementing that standard, they are at the same time embracing and extending their own standard, and they have filed at least one patent application that seems to be designed to give them a monopoly on their extensions to the standard.
In some situations it may work to simply refuse to go along with the standards attempts from MS. Unfortunately, MS has so much leverage that this won't always work. For example, with.NET just ignoring it IMO won't work, that's why we're working on creating a competing "standard set of libraries" for the stuff which goes beyond the stuff that is safe from patent-based attacks (the safe parts are what is specified in the ECMA specs, for which MS has promised royalty-free licensing, plus everything which is thin wrappers around stuff that is simply too old to be affected by.NET patents, such as for example System.Windows.Forms). The strategy of the DotGNU project is to re-use a good number of existing Free Software libs (written in C) and compile them for.NET - again since those libs are old, they're safe from being affected by any.NET patents.
We have $5.7 billion of cash in the bank. We didn't have that five years ago. We have generated positive cash flow from operations for 35 straight quarters.
Still, I don't see anything inherently evil in Sun's desire to improve on their revenue-generating processes.
In fact, headcount-based pricing may be a viable pricing strategy for Free Software too. There is no reason to condemn it. Providing computer software is inherently a service, hence it makes perfect sense to charge for it in a manner that is appropriate for a service.
Frymaster wrote: "government regulation of economic rights parallels economic growth".
This may be true in many areas, but in the case of software patents the US has definately gone too far. There can be no doubt that every useful technology will get implemented in Free Software sooner or later, and technology that is useful to many people will get implemented sooner.
The US patent system can only restrict what US residents and US based businesses can do. The rest of the world will happily move forward with Free Software. If the US patents system prevents a Free Software.NET competitor in the US, those parts which are not allowed in the US can still be developed and used outside the US.
It is well-known that when a profit-oriented company has a monopoly on anything that is of key importance for the business world, that is good only for that company and its major shareholders, but not for the economy as a whole.
Hence it should be expected that if the US legal system allows this to happen, businesses will migrate to countries where they will not be encumbered by software patents. Whether we like it or not, globalization is a reality.
The "let's be compatible with.NET" part of DotGNU development is based in Australia, well outside the US, and a legal entity has been created there specifically for this purpose.
However we are still concerned about the bugs in the US legal system, because we would like computer users in the US to be able to freely use and redistribute all of DotGNU, and contribute to its development.
LarsWestergren wrote: I have always been a bit worried that you are helping MS to slay Java.
This is a very good point, one that the DotGNU Steering Committee agrees with. We would very much like to equally support C# and Java, and a significant amount of work has been done in this direction. Our compiler suite is not only able to emit bytecode for the Microsoft-designed CLR, but it can also be used to generate bytecode for the JVM. We also have a Java-compiler front-end. Unfortunately, both of these areas of coding work are current dormant for lack of volunteers.
Anonymous Coward wrote: "..you get burnt. Sooner of later M$ are gonna turn up the heat - guaranteed"
I'm expecting this. One of the things I do daily before switching on my monitor is to make sure that I have my asbestos underwear properly in place.:-)
Of course MS will put up a fight as soon as what we're doing becomes a real threat to them. Sometimes my knees get wobbly when I think about this, but then we knew since the beginnings of DotGNU that it's going to take some guts to not only challenge MS but to actually fight it out.
If I fight and I get burned, at least I got burned while fighting for what I believe in.
If I don't fight and MS manages to catch the whole IT world in their.NET, building another effective monopoly (one which is much harder to dislodge than a desktop monopoly can possibly be), I'll always have to have a bad conscience if I haven't fought.
According to the ECMA secretary-general, MS has promised royalty-free licensing for any and all patented technology that is required for implementing those ECMA standards.
Some other parts of.NET are unproblematic also. For example, System.Windows.Forms is such a thin wrapper around *old* APIs that there's absolutely nothing non-obvious there which would be in danger of a patent.
For the rest of.NET, there is a possibility that maybe the full version of DotGNU Portable.NET can be developed and used legally only outside of the US. I will try to avoid a situation where we have to distribute some useful software as "non-US", but depending on how bad the patents issue turns out to be, it could happen that that is a necessity.
However, I'm confident that that is the worst thing that can possibly happen. The core parts of DotGNU will always be free to use and contribute to anywhere in the world, and we will continue building everything that is necessary for full compatibility, and these things will be free to use and contribute to for all individuals and businesses in countries which do not have a broken legal system that makes software ideas patentable.
The question is not about specific legal advice like "how to go about avoiding every risk of personal liability while contributing", the question is whether (in the light of Microsoft's apparant intention to put up a fight around) the chance of success of DotGNU and Mono is big enough so that it makes sense to contribute.
In DotGNU, we have been thinking a lot about this kind of questions since the beginning. Catch me on irc, channel #dotgnu on irc.freenode.net... my nick is: nb.
I don't think that describing your good ideas on a web page is good enough, because with this strategy it might turn out to be difficult to prove that you have published the idea early enough. I think it's much better to post your write-up of the ideas to a mailing list, then many people will get copies and will if necessary be able to act as witnesses concerning this crucial detail.
For anything related to DotGNU or.NET or webservices in general or bytecode systems in general, I invite you to use the DotGNU "visionaries" mailing list for creating a public record that can if neccessary be used later as "prior art" for invalidating patents on essentially the same ideas.
I don't think e-books are going to die. When offered for sale, e-books are great products for small businesses, and when given away gratis they're a great marketing vehicle.
However the business dynamics of e-books are very different from paper-based books. Selling e-nooks does not make much business sense for a company like Barnes and Noble.
Some other company will be kind of e-books.:-)
Greetings,
Norbert.
It makes sense from the MS perspective to compare.NET with Java since the whole point of.NET has been from the beginning to build an improved competitor to Java.
However from our (developer's) perspective, a comparison of only two development environments is of very limited interest. Let's do some serious research into what is truly beneficial to developer productivity, and then build a Free Software IDE which meets these needs.
We have the beginnings of a VB.NET compiler (derived from the C# compiler) in DotGNU, waiting for someone interested in this kind of thing to come on board and champion that subproject. Right now it does "VB.NET syntax with C# semantics", the hard parts of building a compiler are taken care of, finishing it is a matter of plain old programming (lots of it).
If the quote was accurate, the "re-publish this material" permission granted by Bruce wouldn't even be necessary, since quotes as short as that are "fair use".
Does anyone know whether the "fair use" exception in copyright law also applies to misquoting that deliberately misrepresents the author's opinion?
I'm interested in "Best Current Practices" documents that gives advice on how to best preceed in a Free Software project in order to avoid becoming vulnerable to problems with copyright or other legal issues. Of course the GNU project has some pretty good policies, but asking people to so something just because it's a GNU policy will often just make them complain about "GNU fanatics" instead of them taking the matter serious.
Therefore, it would be very helpful to have insights and policy recommendations from other sources as well.
I think robots should be used for indexing because of privacy concerns (I don't think it's good when anyone can check who visits which website when), and robots.txt should definately be honored by a search engine. There are good reasons to include some parts of some websites from the serach engines, and robots.txt is the way to specify that.
I do like the idea of a p2p web indexing and search system, but I think this can be successful only if it's fast. (If it isn't fast too few people will use it, and then it cannot possibly work well.)
I think this calls for serious computer science research into how to make such a system sufficiently fast.
The one thing that MS is really good at is strategic marketing. It is safe to assume that they have thought the matter through.
My conjecture is that they're realising that they cannot win against Free Software unless they manage to create the impression of Free Software such as GNU/Linux being "un-American" and "a threat from Asia against our economy".
Of course they'll consider it an added bonus that maybe they can get US dimplomats involved in putting pressure on foreign governments in areas like
creating DMCA-like laws
making software ideas patentable
preventing government institutions from contributing to Free Software that they'd like to use
The US has a legal system which gives several critical advantages to companies like Microsoft (DMCA, software patents, etc)... it is only fair when other countries say "we don't like that" and choose a system that gives strong advantages to Free Software. Free Software is typically developed by its users and not as a product to be sold; since governments are among the largest software users it is only natural for them to consider making significant contributions to developing the Free Software that they would like to use.
No, you weren't involved in any of the three attempts to establish cooperation with Mono.
The first attempt was made by the DotGNU coreteam and the Free Software Foundation, privately, immediately after the existence of the Mono project had become public knowledge (that was in early July 2001).
You must be referring to the second of these attepts, which was not initiated by the DotGNU project but by a third party (Martin Coxall)... making Mono part of DotGNU was his idea, not ours... both Miguel (the Mono project leader) and I posted in the thread which resulted from this proposal, and I got upset about some of Miguel's comments, but in retrospect I think it's very understandable that the Mono folks were not interested in talking about cooperation in the context of such a proposal.
In April 2002, we made a third attempt to establish cooperation with Mono. This attempt was much more promising than the earlier two, and it has involved offering a sizeable chunk of pnetlib I18N code to Mono under the X11 license, which they have integrated into their class library.
DotGNU is still open to discussing any mutually beneficial ways of cooperation. For example, some parts of the class library could be developed jointly, using a neutral cvs server. We have proposed this to the Mono project multiple times, so far it seems that the Mono folks are not interested in this kind of cooperation. The I18N code which was integrated into the Mono libs forked immediately, so that doesn't count as a mutually beneficial form of cooperation.
Your claim about DotGNU Portable.NET being "at risk of copyright infringement claims" is totally false. Our procedures have been carefully checked and declared ok by a competent lawyer (Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia Law School). I do know however what discussion you probably remember. Here is how it went: I asked whether Mono has proper procedures for reverse engineering (in hindsight I regret having asked this question publicly, I now think it would have been much more appropriate to ask this kind of question privately), and Miguel replied that the Mono project doesn't have the resources for that, and he added a verbal attack against the procedures used by Rhys in the early days of the Portable.NET project. You really shouldn't be concerned about what Miguel wrote about Portable.NET in that message. First of all, reverse engineering for purposes of interoperability is always legal in the country where that work was done. (EULA clauses that forbid it are legally null and void in that country.) Secondly, the early versions of Portable.NET achieved interoperability in a manner that (in the judgement of Eben Moglen) would not have violated the terms of the anti-reverse-engineering clause even if that clause wasn't irrelevant anyway. (We had not informed Miguel about the details. Why should we? He never asked.) Thirdly, the code to which these concerns applied has long since been rewritten for technical reasons anyway.
Nota bene, both projects, Mono and Portable.NET, want to be compatible with much more than just with what is described in the ECMA specs. So there is reason to be careful. I can assure you that I've been working hard behind the scenes of the DotGNU project to make sure that we're as careful as we reasonably can be.
I don't know what you mean with the claim "there used to be a page around on the DotGNU website (not sure if it's still there) badmouthing Mono." I maintain the DotGNU website and I'm sure that we have never had any such page. The DotGNU website moved to the Savannah CVS system on July 10, 2001 and all versions of all website files since then can still be reviewed at http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/projec ts/d otgnu/?cvsroot=www.gnu.org Since that website move was just one day after the initial public announcement of the Mono project, if your claim was true, the evidence should be there. I challenge you to check your claim against the available public record.
Slashdot Mirror
I consider the criticism of DotGNU's homepage to be valid, and I'm working on making it communicate more effectively. I hope to get this done by Oct 1st.
If that were indeed their position, why don't they say clearly in the letter that allowing software patents of any kind if a huge mistake!?
SuSE asks only for a delay of the vote and a revision of the directive to make sure that
I don't consider this a position against software patents. In fact, they seem to agree with the intentions of those EU politicians who are in favor of the proposed patents directive. They just point out (in a polite manner) that the text of the directive needs to be revised because the politicians who drafted it didn't understand how difficult it is to allow any kind of software patents without severe undesired side effects.
If this is really the position of SuSE then I am shocked.
Could it be that they don't understand that software patents are a very bad thing for Free Software? No. Of course they realize that patentability of software "inventions" means that Free Software will generally be limited to technologies which are too old to be subject to patents. In economies which allow software patents, it is impossible for the goal of the Free Software movement (to replace all proprietary software with Free Software) to be reached. The restrictions on software patents which they ask for are only good enough to prevent the total destruction of their Linux-based business.
If this was a letter from a proprietary software company, I would have considered it a reasonable argument, and even potentially helpful for the Free Software movement, because it could be used to show that also proprietary software companies are concerned.
However the letter comes from the leading GNU/Linux vendor in Europe. It sounds like SuSE doesn't really mind software patents, even though what they ask for will mean that in the long run, at least in the EU most application programs for GNU/Linux will have to be proprietary software. Of course, if profits is the only thing they care about, then their attitude makes perfect sense, because they will be able to charge more when selling proprietary application programs then when selling Free ones.
I think we have just witnessed a major GNU/Linux vendor betray the Free Software movement.
I used to be a customer of SuSE. I will not buy from them again.
Greetings,
Norbert.
Java is ok, but I don't like Sun. Given that together with MS they help funding SCO's attacks on GNU/Linux, they're only a little less evil than MS. However, it's good news for GNU/Linux that MS gets serious competition. That makes it harder for them to extract a monopoly rent from the still strong market position, and it makes it much harder for them to shape the future of the IT world according to their desires.
Standards from Microsoft are dangerous, even when royalty-free licensing is offered so that they can be implemented in Free Software.
Consider for example the ECMA standards 334 and 335 for the core parts of .NET - while Microsoft has promised royalty-free licensing for any and all patents that may be neccessary for implementing that standard, they are at the same time embracing and extending their own standard, and they have filed at least one patent application that seems to be designed to give them a monopoly on their extensions to the standard.
In some situations it may work to simply refuse to go along with the standards attempts from MS. Unfortunately, MS has so much leverage that this won't always work. For example, with .NET just ignoring it IMO won't work, that's why we're working on creating a competing "standard set of libraries" for the stuff which goes beyond the stuff that is safe from patent-based attacks (the safe parts are what is specified in the ECMA specs, for which MS has promised royalty-free licensing, plus everything which is thin wrappers around stuff that is simply too old to be affected by .NET patents, such as for example System.Windows.Forms). The strategy of the DotGNU project is to re-use a good number of existing Free Software libs (written in C) and compile them for .NET - again since those libs are old, they're safe from being affected by any .NET patents.
Greetings,
Norbert.
I don't think that is true. From a recent interview with Scott McNealy:
Still, I don't see anything inherently evil in Sun's desire to improve on their revenue-generating processes.In fact, headcount-based pricing may be a viable pricing strategy for Free Software too. There is no reason to condemn it. Providing computer software is inherently a service, hence it makes perfect sense to charge for it in a manner that is appropriate for a service.
Is Canada also a good place for developing and distributing Free Software without any need to worry about US software patents?
Greetings,
Norbert.
Because suing over defamation doesn't allow you to extract enough money from the guilty party when you win.
Otherwise, there'd be plenty of lawyers queued up asking the major kernel hackers for permission to sue SCO on their behalf.
This may be true in many areas, but in the case of software patents the US has definately gone too far. There can be no doubt that every useful technology will get implemented in Free Software sooner or later, and technology that is useful to many people will get implemented sooner.
The US patent system can only restrict what US residents and US based businesses can do. The rest of the world will happily move forward with Free Software. If the US patents system prevents a Free Software .NET competitor in the US, those parts which are not allowed in the US can still be developed and used outside the US.
It is well-known that when a profit-oriented company has a monopoly on anything that is of key importance for the business world, that is good only for that company and its major shareholders, but not for the economy as a whole.
Hence it should be expected that if the US legal system allows this to happen, businesses will migrate to countries where they will not be encumbered by software patents. Whether we like it or not, globalization is a reality.
Greetings,
Norbert.
However we are still concerned about the bugs in the US legal system, because we would like computer users in the US to be able to freely use and redistribute all of DotGNU, and contribute to its development.
Greetings,
Norbert.
This is a very good point, one that the DotGNU Steering Committee agrees with. We would very much like to equally support C# and Java, and a significant amount of work has been done in this direction. Our compiler suite is not only able to emit bytecode for the Microsoft-designed CLR, but it can also be used to generate bytecode for the JVM. We also have a Java-compiler front-end. Unfortunately, both of these areas of coding work are current dormant for lack of volunteers.
Who will volunteer to champion our Java efforts?
Greetings,
Norbert.
I'm expecting this. One of the things I do daily before switching on my monitor is to make sure that I have my asbestos underwear properly in place. :-)
Of course MS will put up a fight as soon as what we're doing becomes a real threat to them. Sometimes my knees get wobbly when I think about this, but then we knew since the beginnings of DotGNU that it's going to take some guts to not only challenge MS but to actually fight it out.
If I fight and I get burned, at least I got burned while fighting for what I believe in.
If I don't fight and MS manages to catch the whole IT world in their .NET, building another effective monopoly (one which is much harder to dislodge than a desktop monopoly can possibly be), I'll always have to have a bad conscience if I haven't fought.
I've made my choice.
What is yours?
Greetings,
Norbert
Some other parts of .NET are unproblematic also. For example, System.Windows.Forms is such a thin wrapper around *old* APIs that there's absolutely nothing non-obvious there which would be in danger of a patent.
For the rest of .NET, there is a possibility that maybe the full version of DotGNU Portable.NET can be developed and used legally only outside of the US. I will try to avoid a situation where we have to distribute some useful software as "non-US", but depending on how bad the patents issue turns out to be, it could happen that that is a necessity.
However, I'm confident that that is the worst thing that can possibly happen. The core parts of DotGNU will always be free to use and contribute to anywhere in the world, and we will continue building everything that is necessary for full compatibility, and these things will be free to use and contribute to for all individuals and businesses in countries which do not have a broken legal system that makes software ideas patentable.
Greetings,
Norbert.
If MS has indeed made any claims of this kind, please give me the exact reference. This could become important.
Greetings,
Norbert,
In DotGNU, we have been thinking a lot about this kind of questions since the beginning. Catch me on irc, channel #dotgnu on irc.freenode.net ... my nick is: nb.
Greetings, Norbert.
For anything related to DotGNU or .NET or webservices in general or bytecode systems in general, I invite you to use the DotGNU "visionaries" mailing list for creating a public record that can if neccessary be used later as "prior art" for invalidating patents on essentially the same ideas.
Greetings, Norbert.
Does anyone know how their drivers for Linux are licensed? Greetings, Norbert.
I don't think e-books are going to die. When offered for sale, e-books are great products for small businesses, and when given away gratis they're a great marketing vehicle. However the business dynamics of e-books are very different from paper-based books. Selling e-nooks does not make much business sense for a company like Barnes and Noble. Some other company will be kind of e-books. :-)
Greetings,
Norbert.
It makes sense from the MS perspective to compare .NET with Java since the whole point of .NET has been from the beginning to build an improved competitor to Java.
However from our (developer's) perspective, a comparison of only two development environments is of very limited interest. Let's do some serious research into what is truly beneficial to developer productivity, and then build a Free Software IDE which meets these needs.
Greetings,
Norbert.
Contact me at: nb at cisto dot com
We have the beginnings of a VB.NET compiler (derived from the C# compiler) in DotGNU, waiting for someone interested in this kind of thing to come on board and champion that subproject. Right now it does "VB.NET syntax with C# semantics", the hard parts of building a compiler are taken care of, finishing it is a matter of plain old programming (lots of it).
Any takers?
Greetings,
Norbert
If the quote was accurate, the "re-publish this material" permission granted by Bruce wouldn't even be necessary, since quotes as short as that are "fair use".
Does anyone know whether the "fair use" exception in copyright law also applies to misquoting that deliberately misrepresents the author's opinion?
Greetings,
Norbert.
I'm interested in "Best Current Practices" documents that gives advice on how to best preceed in a Free Software project in order to avoid becoming vulnerable to problems with copyright or other legal issues. Of course the GNU project has some pretty good policies, but asking people to so something just because it's a GNU policy will often just make them complain about "GNU fanatics" instead of them taking the matter serious.
Therefore, it would be very helpful to have insights and policy recommendations from other sources as well.
Greetings,
Norbert.
I think robots should be used for indexing because of privacy concerns (I don't think it's good when anyone can check who visits which website when), and robots.txt should definately be honored by a search engine. There are good reasons to include some parts of some websites from the serach engines, and robots.txt is the way to specify that.
I do like the idea of a p2p web indexing and search system, but I think this can be successful only if it's fast. (If it isn't fast too few people will use it, and then it cannot possibly work well.)
I think this calls for serious computer science research into how to make such a system sufficiently fast.
My conjecture is that they're realising that they cannot win against Free Software unless they manage to create the impression of Free Software such as GNU/Linux being "un-American" and "a threat from Asia against our economy".
Of course they'll consider it an added bonus that maybe they can get US dimplomats involved in putting pressure on foreign governments in areas like
The US has a legal system which gives several critical advantages to companies like Microsoft (DMCA, software patents, etc)... it is only fair when other countries say "we don't like that" and choose a system that gives strong advantages to Free Software. Free Software is typically developed by its users and not as a product to be sold; since governments are among the largest software users it is only natural for them to consider making significant contributions to developing the Free Software that they would like to use.
No, you weren't involved in any of the three attempts to establish cooperation
c ts/d otgnu/?cvsroot=www.gnu.org
with Mono.
The first attempt was made by the DotGNU coreteam and the
Free Software Foundation, privately, immediately after the existence of the
Mono project had become public knowledge (that was in early July 2001).
You must be referring to the second of these attepts, which was not initiated
by the DotGNU project but by a third party (Martin Coxall)... making Mono part
of DotGNU was his idea, not ours... both Miguel (the Mono project leader) and
I posted in the thread which resulted from this proposal, and I got upset about some
of Miguel's comments, but in retrospect I think it's very understandable that
the Mono folks were not interested in talking about cooperation in the context
of such a proposal.
In April 2002, we made a third attempt to establish cooperation with Mono.
This attempt was much more promising than the earlier two, and it has involved
offering a sizeable chunk of pnetlib I18N code to Mono under the X11 license,
which they have integrated into their class library.
DotGNU is still open to discussing any mutually beneficial ways of cooperation.
For example, some parts of the class library could be developed jointly, using
a neutral cvs server. We have proposed this to the Mono project multiple
times, so far it seems that the Mono folks are not interested in this kind of
cooperation. The I18N code which was integrated into the Mono libs forked
immediately, so that doesn't count as a mutually beneficial form of
cooperation.
Your claim about DotGNU Portable.NET being "at risk of copyright infringement
claims" is totally false. Our procedures have been carefully checked and
declared ok by a competent lawyer (Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal
history at Columbia Law School). I do know however what discussion you
probably remember. Here is how it went: I asked whether Mono has proper
procedures for reverse engineering (in hindsight I regret having asked
this question publicly, I now think it would have been much more appropriate
to ask this kind of question privately), and Miguel replied that the Mono
project doesn't have the resources for that, and he added a verbal attack
against the procedures used by Rhys in the early days of the Portable.NET
project. You really shouldn't be concerned about what Miguel wrote about
Portable.NET in that message. First of all, reverse engineering for purposes
of interoperability is always legal in the country where that work was done.
(EULA clauses that forbid it are legally null and void in that country.)
Secondly, the early versions of Portable.NET achieved interoperability in a
manner that (in the judgement of Eben Moglen) would not have violated the terms
of the anti-reverse-engineering clause even if that clause wasn't irrelevant
anyway. (We had not informed Miguel about the details. Why should we? He
never asked.) Thirdly, the code to which these concerns applied has long since
been rewritten for technical reasons anyway.
Nota bene, both projects, Mono and Portable.NET, want to be compatible with
much more than just with what is described in the ECMA specs. So there is
reason to be careful. I can assure you that I've been working hard behind the
scenes of the DotGNU project to make sure that we're as careful as we
reasonably can be.
I don't know what you mean with the claim "there used to be a page around on
the DotGNU website (not sure if it's still there) badmouthing Mono." I
maintain the DotGNU website and I'm sure that we have never had any such
page. The DotGNU website moved to the Savannah CVS system on July 10, 2001
and all versions of all website files since then can still be reviewed at
http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/proje
Since that website move was just one day after the initial public announcement
of the Mono project, if your claim was true, the evidence should be there. I
challenge you to check your claim against the available public record.
Greetings,
Norbert.