[Mono-list] Mono licence

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> > Look. The argument FC have put up is over the patents MS hold which Mono
> > relies upon. Due to those patents (and again, according to the FC crew),
> > distribution under the GPL is not allowed. I'm not crying wolf at all
> > either.
> 
> Their argument seems to be this: according to GPL section 7, if you know
> your product potentially infringes on someone's patents, you cannot
> distribute the program.*

We should stop quoting the GPL, because its only used for a tiny piece
of code in Mono.  From the 5 million lines of code that Mono contains,
only about 80k lines of Mono are covered under the GPL.

Those are the compilers and a few command line tools.  And I very much
doubt that there is a valid patent of any kind on the C# compiler, if
that is the case, then they might as well stop distributing gcc ;-)

Miguel.