Patents, GNOME, Mono [Was: Adding Beagle, tomboy and ifolder to Hoary]

[Jeff Waugh]

<quote who="poptones">

> The only "patent" I am aware of that would affect gnome as it sits is the
> taskbar button grouping, which MS filed for (and was awarded) years after
> it first appeared in Be. If you're aware of any others that stand even the
> remotest chance of winning a settlement I'd love to hear about them.

Hundreds if not thousands of patents cover GNOME, not least of all IBM's
"how to draw a thick line on the screen by drawing a box and filling it"
patent. Thus far, GNOME has avoided features that would be targets for
litigious companies (such as spring-loaded folders, care of Apple, etc).

> Mono however is very, very different. This is an entire project based
> directly upon IP "invented" by MS and openly tying itself to .Net at every
> turn.

Mono is not different. Very little in the standardised .NET stack is covered
by Microsoft-owned patents, because very little of it is actually new. Sun
owns (and has licensed from other companies) a huge proportion of relevant
patents for Java. They recently settled and cross-licensed relevant patents
with Kodak. No one has actually come up with a list of patents owned by MS
that cover the standardised parts of the .NET framework (C# and the CLR).

There are two very important things to understand when worrying about Mono,
FOSS in general, and patents:

 * Microsoft doesn't own a majority of patents covering FOSS technology, in
   fact, only very recently have they started *aggressively* cross-licensing
   and filing patent applications

 * There are so many other crucial patents that could cripple Linux, or the
   entire FOSS community - at least we can throw Mono away and start again
   fairly easily at this early stage... And remember that we're *all about*
   Python here in Ubuntu-land, so don't expect our new stuff to be written
   in C# -> there's always IronPython, though!

Let's not let the conspiracy theories get out of hand in this discussion.

Thanks,

- Jeff

-- 
linux.conf.au 2005: Canberra, Australia                http://linux.conf.au/
 
     "Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark
                             Helmet, Spaceballs