[Mono-list] Re: Sleepless at Patentland...

[Miguel de Icaza]

> 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.

Software Patents have their share of problems, they must be abolished.

Please read this first:

	http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2001/08/02

Read the section `Microsoft Poisoned Ecosystem'.

After you read that.  And only after you read that, read this:

Free software probably is violating a lot of bogus patents that are
owned by companies like Microsoft.  C# and the CLI are the least of
the problems right now.

At least our policy when implementing something is:

	Look for prior art, use published techniques or well known
	algorithms to work around patents.

Microsoft is also not the worst when it comes to using patents.  So
far they have used patents for defensive purposes, but if that changes
you might as well stop writing any software that is going to compete
with anything they do (games, OS, web services, tools, compilers,
documentation, productivity applications).

Please read


Miguel.