Mono Position Statement

[dan]

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 1:35 PM, Scott James Remnant <scott at ubuntu.com>wrote:

> On Wed, 2009-07-01 at 13:13 -0400, Martin Owens wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 2009-07-01 at 17:58 +0100, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> >
> > > I have underlined the key part of your sentence.
> >
> > You don't think Microsoft have anything against us or any reason to
> > consider poking us? Very trusting.
> >
> I think that, without having looked through the USPTO, that if Microsoft
> really wanted to attack Linux I'm sure they have lots of registered
> patents.
>
> That's what you get for a system that allows you to patent things like
> "underlining hyperlinks and displaying them in a blue colour".
>
>
> I think that the co-sponsors and authors of the ECMA C# standards, HP
> and Intel, have no reason to consider action against Linux.
>
>
> I think that Microsoft have far more to gain in promoting C# and the CLR
> as an open, cross-platform standard and would be far more interested in
> seeing Java's demise than Linux.
>
> (And let's not forget, that Sun patented Java up the wahoonie and there
> are countless other patent holders - in this economy, any one of them
> could be asset-stripped by a patent troll - and you're worried about
> C#?)
>
>
> I think that Microsoft would be in some real trouble in various quarters
> (anti-competitive, etc.) if they suddenly starting litigating
> competitors for implementing a standard that Microsoft themselves openly
> published and encouraged implementations for on other platforms.
>
>
> I think that Microsoft are fully aware of Mono (cf. IronPython) and the
> longer they go without litigation, the more likely their practices are
> going to be held as anti-competitive rather than reasonable.
>
> Scott
> --
> Scott James Remnant
> scott at ubuntu.com


Quite frankly, I dont think C# is what scares people.  I'm not saying
they're right, but its the mono libraries that essentially replicate .net
libraries that are not part of the "standard" that are the problem.  Like
winforms, etc.

My answer to the original defection email is that the answer is not to
change your infrastructure, but to make your infrastructure *not* dependent
on mono apps.  This should be quite easy since we're talking about tomboy
and banshee and similar apps, not core requirements.  It would be
significantly easier than migrating from Ubuntu to Fedora.  And as a bonus
you get to keep Ubuntu awesomeness. :)

dan
---
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Open Standards!
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