[Mono-list] Licensing

[Chris Howie]

On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 4:43 AM, Mario De Clippeleir <mariodc at sydec.be> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I don't know if this is the right place for my question, but here
> goes...

I am not a lawyer or a Novell representative, but I will offer my
knowledge nonetheless.

> I have a question about the licensing of mono. When writing a commercial
> application to be used on both windows and mac, Mono is being used as a
> tool to make this happen.  It is not possible to give out the source
> code of the application, since it holds confidential information. The
> application does not use Mono for compilation, only for runtime use.

Whether you use the Mono compilers or just the runtime doesn't matter
-- you are free to do both/either without paying any royalties or
changing the license of your software.

> What type of licensing would be needed here ? Also, it is possible (i
> mean legally) to package and distirbute the mono framework into a
> macpackage application, so that the user need not to install the mono
> framework as a seperare item ?

I am not sure, but depending on how you do it this may require you to
switch to GPL or LGPL.  If you offer a download of the Mono runtime
alongside of your install package I don't think there's an issue.  If
you include the install package in your own, unmodified, I don't think
there's an issue either.  If you "absorb" the installer in your own
then the lines are a bit blurry and I don't think I can answer your
question there, but doing so would raise technical issues too.

Personally I think it would make more sense to point people to
installing Mono on their own, which will certainly not require any
licensing maneuvers.

> Do you happen to know if anything changes if i would be to use cocoa# ?

You'd have to look at their license.

-- 
Chris Howie
http://www.chrishowie.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Crazycomputers