[Mono-devel-list] patents

[Dennis Hayes]

This message explains that there is no problem to use MS patents to

implement CLI / C# standards : licence is free for this particular use.

So there is definitively NO MS patents problem with Mono.

Ask them for IBM or Sun patents, especially on Eclipse or Java

technologies, just for fun.

It seems that Red Hat wants to adopt Java and doesn't like Novell

technologies, but i really don't know why :-)

Le vendredi 18 mars 2005 à 17:00 +0000, Paul a écrit :

> Hi,

http://web.archive.org/web/20030609164123/http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-sscli/msg00218.html

> Can anyone shed any further light on this? I'm trying to get mono

> adopted into the official Fedora Extras but because of the above, it

> seems there is a lot of negative against it.

> TTFN

> Paul

 


 

1)      Only Miguel or a Novell official can speak about Mono and patents.

2)      All patents needed to produce a version of ECMA .NET are RAND (Reasonable and non-discriminatory). It seemed at one time Red Hat was concerned about how reasonable the terms might be. I think the agreement with HP combined with the non-discriminatory terms kills this argument.
Therefore I think anyone can duplicate ECMA .NET without patent problems related to .NET

3)      I think patents not related to .NET could still be a problem. For instance my understanding is that MS has some patents related the “SendAPI” where when a file is sent over the network, the network and file system use the same kernel buffer. In the old days, I guess the file was copied to a user buffer first, consuming a lot of time. This is just an example, so it doesn’t matter if I am wrong here. The point is that is MS held such a patent, it would not be required for ECMA .NET, so not covered by the RAND agreement. If Mono used the patented technique it would not be protected by the ECMA agreement.
This is a basic problem with software patents; almost any program beyond “hello world” will violate somebody’s patents. I do not think this level of patents is what bothers Red Hat.

4)      Not all of .NET is part of the ECMA standard. System.Windows.Forms, System.Data, and VB.NET are major pieces not included in the ECMA standard, MS has never given anyone permission to use these patents, but have said they are open to negations.

5)      I far as I know, MS has NO patents on .NET. they applied for a patent that covered the entire namespace two years ago, as far as I know, that patent is still pending. This does not include patents that are not part of .NET, but that coul dbe used to implement .NET (see #3)

6)      See point #1.

 

Dennis

 

		
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