[Mono-list] Uncertainty and Doubt about MONO

[Alexandru Nedelcu]

Hi,

I always respected Miguel de Icaza's judgment and he always has a good 
and sane point of view.
I am a little troubled about the recent announcement, about the 
Novell/Microsoft agreement.

Didn't Miguel de Icaza assured us that Mono was safe, that there are no 
known patents that Mono infringes, that .NET is an ECMA
standard, that even if Mono infringes on some patents then the Open 
Inventions Network will protect it ?
Didn't Miguel said that Novell conducted a whole investigation on 
Microsoft owned patents and no infringed patents where found ?

And Novell is the owner of the Unix copyrights (I am no lawyer, so 
please correct me if I am wrong) ... and Novell just
admitted that GNU/Linux has pieces that infringe on Microsoft's 
intellectual property ?

True or not true ... there are many companies that might stand up and 
demand the same royalties that Microsoft is asking.
The solution is to fight  the whole software patents system, not getting 
around it by a minor deal with the devil himself.
What if companies like IBM or Oracle or Apple take a stand and demand 
the same thing ?

Miguel says in his blog something like:

    "So today we have secured a peace of mind for Novell customers that 
might have been worried about possible patent infringements open source 
deployments"

But doesn't anyone at Novell notice that the REST of the open-source 
landscape is now in a greater danger than before ?
Frankly ... nobody gives a shit about Mono as a comercial product, Mono 
is only interesting as an open-source product,
that can be innovated upon by anyone, and that can be freely distributed.

What is happening ?
I already invested in Mono, I also switched to Gnome the whole network 
that I am managing, Gnome which is tainted with
Novell's products.
I am not the only one wondering: 
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20061103073628401

Please Miguel ... give me an explanation on why this move was necessary, 
and also keep in mind that a lot of us value
Free Software, and won't trade it for anything else.