[Mono-devel-list] patents

[Jeffrey Knight]

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

I probably I misinterpreted this: why isn't anyone free to speak about
Mono and patents?
Mono is GPL'd -- why would a "Novell official" be in a better position
than anyone else?

Jeff



On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 21:06:38 -0800 (PST), Dennis Hayes
<denisraytek at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This message explains that there is no problem to use MS patents toimplement
> 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 Javatechnologies, just for fun.It seems
> that Red Hat wants to adopt Java and doesn't like Novelltechnologies, but i
> really don't know why :-)Le vendredi 18 mars 2005 Ã  17:00 +0000, Paul a
> Ã(c)crit :>
> 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 w orld" 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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