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

[Jacek Blaszczynski]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hello!

Thanks for reply. In such case I do withdraw my argument about Novell/MSFT
entirely and apologise for anyone who could feel offended by
that.

I undarstand project founders position on assuring that all effort is not
wasted by any piece of illegal code sneaked into Mono, but I
would like to see more reasonable approach to that based on several grounds:

1. Exact SSCLI Rotor EULA conditions stipulating its free use for
educational purposes.
2. Omnipresence of disassembled .NET code snippets in books dealing with
subject (even those issued by MSPress) - majority of us read them.
3. Inability for many developers willing to contribute to Mono to remain
isolated from .NET - very often using it its their primary job.

Anyway getting legal opinions from Novell or Free Software Foundation
lawyers on that matter would be very helpful.



- -----Original Message-----
From: Miguel de Icaza [mailto:miguel at ximian.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 07, 2004 7:13 AM
To: Jacek Blaszczynski
Cc: mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com
Subject: Re: [Mono-devel-list] Contributing to Mono while having knowledgeof
Rotor SSCLI

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.ht
ml

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.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBQOu4QYeEyL6RuXD8EQKrdgCfXInSeKPE2k87MLG8YOUzSKpVvu8AoIBO
DozD7IuTik8f2kLDbUSPaVwS
=uIjD
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----