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

[Olafur Arason]

I agree that we can throw mono and application that depend upon it if
there is some problems, but I think we should include it for now
because of applications like beagle and tomboy. You could even choose
not to include things needed to compile mono applications.

But I do understand that beagle is a big enough feature that you have
to support it unless you make it optional. And I do understand that
you don't want to tie up your developers with supporting mono and c#.

But I do see mono as a real feature for python because you have
instant scriptability and extendability. Because of IronPython. So you
could even gradully move beagle from c# to python. People that write
python code are going to take advantage of this but the question is
are you.

Olafur Arason

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 11:44:58 +1100, Jeff Waugh <jeff.waugh at canonical.com> wrote:
> <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
> 
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