Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" [LWN.net]

Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?"

Posted Feb 8, 2013 16:07 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" by raven667
Parent article: Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?"

Explicit patent grants only cover small piece of C# (basically only the part which were proposed to become an ISO standard). Large parts of contemporary C# are not covered by these grants. This means that either you'll be forced to use obsolete version of C# (which will irritate many users) or you'll need to try to sidestep patents and implement the functionality in non-infringing way (as was done with FAT). Add the fact that this stuff is produced by a company with known history of such bait-and-switch tactic (FAT patents, again) and the only conclusion is: never.

As I've said: C# is nicer language then many other contenders but for legal reason it's non-starter.

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Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?"

Posted Feb 8, 2013 17:26 UTC (Fri) by dashesy (subscriber, #74652) [Link]

All I can say is that is a shame, such a nice language is inflicted with software patent warts, that goes for "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". We are lucky then that Shakespeare's work is not patented, if only some lawyers knew how much money they could make to let people speak.

Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?"

Posted Feb 8, 2013 18:12 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I'm not sure it's more or less patented than any other language, common techniques for language, compiler, JIT, VM and interpreter design are likely to be patented by someone such as MS regardless of which language you are actually using.

I think underlying most of the anti-C# sentiment is a an anti-MS sentiment and is more political than technical or legal. It doesn't matter if code is open sourced or if there are patent grants or whatever, if it has been touched by MS it has software cooties. 8-)

Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?"

Posted Feb 8, 2013 21:56 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I'm not sure it's more or less patented than any other language, common techniques for language, compiler, JIT, VM and interpreter design are likely to be patented by someone such as MS regardless of which language you are actually using.

Anything and everything is covered by patents novadays, but this is somewhat different case.

I think underlying most of the anti-C# sentiment is a an anti-MS sentiment and is more political than technical or legal. It doesn't matter if code is open sourced or if there are patent grants or whatever, if it has been touched by MS it has software cooties. 8-)

Not "cooties". Legal threats. You need huge amount of money and effort to protect themselves from someone who wants to sue you (see Google's Android and Oracle - and Java was covered by a lot of "promises", too) and Microsoft is a company with a known track record of pushing something as a "standard" then suing people over said "standard" later.

P.S. People often use "it's just a business, nothing personal" justification, and this is good justification. Good enough to avoid such "business" as much a possible, that is. Because this means that you can not ever accept anything from such a "business" without lawyers help - and this help is expensive.