Stop the insanity and drop Mono now

Stop the insanity and drop Mono now

Posted Oct 21, 2004 23:13 UTC (Thu) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048)
In reply to: Stop the insanity and drop Mono now by LinuxLobbyist
Parent article: A couple of applications from your future desktop

Miguel and the other Mono proponents are completely ignoring history.

No, we're not.

The only weapon Microsoft could have against Mono is software patents.

If you look carefully, those nice applications do not use "the Microsoft stack" of .NET libraries. They are based on the ECMA standards, and on wrappers on the Posix and Gnome libraries. The ECMA standards do not have patent issues from Microsoft, and the other libraries... well, every Gnome application would be using those libraries anyway! Look into that, Mono provides (and uses) wrappers for GTK, Mozilla, Posix... if there were patent issues, they would not be in the wrappers, but in the libraries themselves, so I state it again, every application using them would be at risk. Using Mono makes no difference.

Add to this Novell's patent policy (which is intended to minimize the risk that somebody actually starts a patent war against open source projects, including Mono)...

So no, the issue is not been overlooked. And chances are that any other technology that does similar things would be covered by the same patents, including Java (seen the Kodak disaster?), and why not, the new perl interpreter, parrot. At the very least the Mono core is covered by the ECMA standard!

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