[Mono-list] any comments out there about this article

[Nathan Torkington]

Brian Mastenbrook writes:
> I'm not sure Microsoft would deliberately make specification-related
> "IP" (as they call it) incompatible license-wise with the GNU
> licenses. Remember, Microsoft has three arms: Development, PR, and
> Legal, and them making the .NET ECMA-submitted stuff
> non-GPL-compatible would simply be an unmitigated PR disaster.

I'm not sure they would, either.  But it's a possibility.  And right
now Microsoft is taking the hard line against the GPL and it hasn't
been a public relations disaster, not even a mitigated one :-) I'm
pretty sure they'd spin it as "we can't run the risk of our IP being
contaminated by the GPL, and isn't the shared source license
reasonable enough?"

This is predicated upon their being patents on key mono-related
technologies.  15 minutes in the patent database didn't find me any,
but it may just be because I couldn't think of appropriate keywords to
search for.  I think I remember Dick Hardt, Activestate CEO, saying
that Microsoft does have patents around parts of .NET, but it'd be
nice to have confirmation and to know precisely which patents and
which parts.

Nat