The FSF warns (again) against Mono [LWN.net]

The FSF warns (again) against Mono

Posted Jul 20, 2009 18:19 UTC (Mon) by makomk (guest, #51493)
In reply to: The FSF warns (again) against Mono by speaker2animals
Parent article: The FSF warns (again) against Mono

More importantly, Microsoft probably has patents that cover these. See below.

Yes, but the patents won't be specifically aimed at that software, which gives more wiggle room to get in there with prior art and invalidate them.

Regular expressions, et. al., are not unique to C# and CLI. The C# and CLI specifications of those are the same as they are in most other languages and runtimes commonly used on Linux.

Yes and no. There are certain language-specific design decisions that have to be made when interfacing to regular expressions, XPath etc from a language. The open question is whether Microsoft has patented any aspect of the interface between them and .Net. (I have a feeling such patents wouldn't stand up well in court if it wasn't for the novelty requirement being severely weakened these days.)

they worry Microsoft patents might cover some common way of performing some task, and so Mono could infringe that. Such a patent would cover that in the non-Mono language systems, too.

Of course it could cover non-Mono languages. The concern is that Microsoft might have patented some common way of performing a task specific to implementing C#/.net. By tying it to C#/.net they'd again make it much harder to find good prior art, or even totally impossible.

If Microsoft is going to sue over such a patent, they are far more likely to go after something other than Mono, where they won't run into major estoppel and laches issues.

IANAL, so this is a bit beyond me. I can imagine the courts wouldn't look kindly on such a trick - but this assumes the defence can convince the court that infringing said patent was a likely or inevitable consequence of implementing the ECMA standard, which would be difficult in itself.

Hence, if you were to license your 3-legged chair patent to someone else, you would be foolish to write your license as saying they are allowed to make 3-legged chairs. Your license would only say that you will not use your patent to stop them from making 3-legged chairs.

No, it would say that it gave you a license to practice their patent on 3- legged chairs and would be legally binding on future purchasers of the patent. This is not a patent license, it's a promise not to sue, and as far as I can tell it doesn't bind anyone that Microsoft sells the patents onto.

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