[Mono-list] Web Services and patents

[Pedro Santos Gómez]

Hi all,

We're going to start a project which we want to
develop using Mono. The question is that we are going
to use Web Services. 

Now, I have mainly 3 doubts about Web Services and
patents:

1st) In the same way I understand that Mono implements
Windows Forms just for compatibility with .NET, but
that we can use other gui toolkits (such as GTK# or
wxNET), or implements ADO.NET for compatibility, but
we can use GdaSharp, Is there any alternative to the
.NET stack of Web Services? I mean, an implementation
of a free library of Web Services (SOAP, not xml-rpc)
that could substitute System.Web.Services.

I've read about gnome soup, but in:
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/soup/
I find that las entry is from April 2003, so I'm not
sure about its current state.

2nd) In case there's no mono "alternative", how
dangerous might be using System.Web.Services in long
term? I don't need any compatibility with .NET, I just
want to develop an application which uses Web Services
in Mono. As far as I understand in:
http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing
the Web Services part is not as easy to defend as the
rest of Mono, and it *could* happen to "remove the
pieces of code that were covered by those patents",
keeping Mono as a  great development platform. But how
could I develop WS?

3rd) What would be the worst case in Web Services? All
I read in FAQs and interviews etc. is that the first
thing to do in case of problems with patents is
finding previous art. Being Web Services a standard,
is it easier to find this? Apache Axis could be an
example? Or what would be patented are the namespaces
or something like that?. If this is not possible, I've
read the next step is to try to change the
implementation. What does this exactly mean? Different
API doing the same thing? Or it would be changed just
inside?

thank you so much for reading and of course for
answering, and sorry if my english is not as good as
could 0:-),
Pedro

P.S: I've already read this thread:
http://galactus.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-list/2003-February/012111.html
but I'm not sure I get a clear answer, and at that
time maybe the implementation of web services was not
as complete as now.
P.S.2: I don't pretend to create any kind of flame
with patent issues or something like that, I just
think that *maybe* patent issues might be even
smoother with Web Services and I just would like
anybody to confirm or deny this. Thank you again.


	
	
		
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