[Mono-list] Sleepless at Patentland...

[A Rafael D Teixeira]

This night I couldnīt sleep well, after reading 
http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/stories/linux/0,12249,2801560,00.html
"Hidden Pitfalls in .Net Open Source?" by Charles Babcock.

The problem I see is that we donīt have economic resources to keep searching 
all Microsoft patents, so itīs quite possible to inadvertently implement 
something that MS has patented, and have we trapped.

Personally, I have no money to pay attorneys or royalties, and even as we 
are not guilt of any wrong-doing a judge can order us to indemnify 
Microsoft, because after publishing something as GPL that conflicts with a 
patent, we canīt offer to get it back, ceasing to affect the patentīs owner 
licensing rights.

If Microsoft wants to play fair, it could publish, to everyone to see, a 
list of .NET related patents, so that we can keep ourselves out of trouble 
even if being less-compatible with the CLR/C#.

Rafael Teixeira
Brazilian Developer


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