Atlantic Works - I.T. & Multimedia wrote: > Mono is available under GPL, so it could be included in FC, right? I understand that Microsoft have taken out patents that appear to cover parts of .NET. The core parts of Mono and .NET have been standardised through ECMA. ECMA requires that any patents needed to implement the standard are licensed under "reasonable and non-discriminatory terms". This, however, is understood to allow requiring a small per-copy license fee, which is clearly incompatible with Free Software. Certain Microsoft personnel have indicated ( http://web.archive.org/web/20030609164123/http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-sscli/msg00218.html ) that Microsoft will not require such license fees. It is unclear that these individuals have authority to make such a statement. Large parts of Mono re-implement parts of .NET that do *not* fall under the ECMA standardisation process. I am unaware of any statement from Microsoft that guarantees they will not seek license fees for those parts of Mono. I believe that Red Hat, who have been very careful about respecting copyrights and patents, remain worried about the possibility of a Microsoft lawsuit crippling the use of Mono once large amounts of open source software for Mono have been written. That is the situation as I understand it: I hope it is a reasonably impartial overview of the situation... James. -- E-mail address: james@ | "[the computer] belonged to our Rabid NT Guy, and we westexe.demon.co.uk | called it Kant partly because we were naming servers | after philosophers and theologians, and partly | because it couldn't. -- Anthony DeBoer
