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.