Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Ah, ok... BTW, sorry if I sounded rude.
I did not want to.

To clarify the licensing issue, different parts of Mono are distributed with different licenses, but the intended effect is that everybody can use it freely (and gratis) for any purpose, in "most" situations. To obtain that effect, the licenses are the following:

• The runtime (the VM, JIT and so on) is LGPL. This means that anybody can use it to run any application, and that anybody can also "embed" it into their applications if they obey to the LGPL (otherwise they should ask for a commercial license). This "embedding" of Mono is done by linking the runtime into the application as permitted by the LGPL, and can be useful more or less as it can be useful embedding Python or other runtime frameworks, with the obvious technical differences (JIT compiler, supported languages...).
• The class libraries are generally under the MIT X11 license, so they can be taken and used everywhere with no restrictions. For instance, we know that the Mono XML libraries have been used in commercial applications running on the .NET Compact framework (which lacks good XML support), and we are fine with that.
• Finally most tools are released under the GPL license, but we are in the process of relicensing some of them under the LGPL or MIT X11. As an example, there's the C# compiler: historically it made sense to release it under the GPL (it is a compiler after all!), but now that we see that there's value in embedding the compiler in other places (we are also doing it ourselves), we think a more permissive license is better.

So, the whole story is more complex that saying "Mono uses license X", but the spirit is easy to understand: "protecting" the core with the LGPL, and being extremely permissive with the rest.

Have fun!
Massimiliano