[Mono-devel-list] Contributing to Mono while having knowledge of Rotor SSCLI

Miguel de Icaza miguel at ximian.com
Wed Jul 7 01:13:02 EDT 2004


Hello,

> My impression in this is that due to conflicts between Novell and MSFT on
> non-competition rules violations by latter Free Software 
> development under Novell umbrella may suffer. These kind of restrictions are
> unjustifiable and difficult to undarstand in light of US and
> EU legal systems at least.

Your conspiracy theory is wrong.

That statement on the FAQ has been there since the 9th of July 2001,
which pretty much means, the launch of the project:

1.2          (miguel   04-Jul-01):      If you have looked at Microsoft's implementation of .NET or
1.6          (miguel   09-Jul-01):      their shared source code, you may not be able to contribute
1.6          (miguel   09-Jul-01):      to Mono.  Details will follow when we know more about this.

www.archive.org confirms that:

http://web.archive.org/web/20011020214623/http://go-mono.com/contributing.html

So there is no such `Novell and MSFT non-competition rule violation'.

It is just what I had to do to ensure that people would not even
consider copying code from Microsoft into the Mono code base which
would render the complete effort ilegal.

That being said, today we implement everything that Rotor has, so we
are a lot more flexible about people having looked at Rotor, as it is
unlikely that they will be able to bring anything from there that we do
not have with a different internal model.

So we could probably relax the above, but only on a case-by-case
scenario, and the further away it is from Rotor, the better.

Miguel.



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