Miguel De Icaza: Microsoft promises to never sue anyone regarding Mono.

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Jul-06.html

by mdasen • 17 years ago

80 51 17 years ago

tirania.org

dantheman2• 17 years ago

That's excellent news.

bad_user3• 17 years ago

Yes it is :) But unfortunately it won't put a stop to all the flames. Many people just like being anti-something.

kirubakaran• 17 years ago

Many people just like being anti-something.

People weren't anti-Microsoft without reasons.

Zak• 17 years ago

I can think of plenty of reasons to not use C#. I cannot, however think of good reasons not to use or distribute applications written in C# with this promise in place.

rbanffy4• 17 years ago

Like Microsoft being anti-anything-non-Microsoft?

8plot• 17 years ago

This is strange:

"Q: What if I don’t implement the entire specification? Will I still get the protections under the CP? A: The CP applies only if the implementation conforms fully to required portions of the specification. Partial implementations are not covered."

10ren• 17 years ago

Sounds like a way to enforce a standard, for compatibility, so that (eg) a C# program will run on any C# implementation. Java has similar with its runtime redistribution policy, and licensees.

smakz• 17 years ago

Which Microsoft famously tried to circumvent with J++.

prodigal_erik• 17 years ago

Otherwise you could build an app with a feature that infringes a single patent of theirs, and claim your app is protected because it is an implementation of a tiny one-feature subset of CLI.

ragnemalm• 17 years ago

The CP is then more or less useless for free and open source software---the freedom to modify and redistribute the software is worthless if any feature you choose to add, remove or modify makes you fair game for a patent lawsuit. The users have no real control over this sort of software, because they can't legally distribute modifications which violate the letter of the specifications.

It sounds like C# and the CLI is still best avoided for open source software.

yread• 17 years ago

It is not just a specification, it is a standard. Why would you even want to implement something violating the standard?

>It sounds like C# and the CLI is still best avoided for open source software.

Why? How does the language or compiler matter for writing open source or not? I think the sentence should read:

It sounds like Mono is still best avoided if you are paranoid

And moreover this news is about microsoft promising not to sue mono. It has nothing to do with microsoft suing or not suing you for writing code.

icefox• 17 years ago

note this isn't for everything, but only some parts.

spitfire2• 17 years ago

Bwhahahahahaha.

You want to trust Microsoft to keep their words? Really? When has that ever happened in the past, ever.

You can trust them to do everything in their power to screw you over and nothing short.

This isn't a fanboy hate post either. From a purely business perspective aligning with Microsoft is toxic.

bad_user3• 17 years ago

You don't have to trust Microsoft. If trust was required for collaboration, contracts would've been useless.

You can trust the legal system though ... what you're looking for it's called "estoppel": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel

spitfire2• 17 years ago

You sir, have balls of brass.

I am not a risk taker and will follow after you succeed.

gtufano• 17 years ago

Interesting, but I don't think that this concept applies to the "civil law" countries.

azharcs• 17 years ago

I really wonder if this is anything other than a fanboy hate post. I am not going to dissect your comment and explain it why it is a fanboy post, you can do it when you are free.

I know its fashionable to hate Microsoft, but sometimes it creates a narrow-mindedness which results in, we Entrepreneurs or Hackers to miss out on good opportunities if we are going to be this religious.

This isn't a fanboy hate post either. From a purely business perspective aligning with Microsoft is toxic.

I don't know what you mean by toxic, there are 1000's of companies like Adobe, Autodesk, id Softwares, EA etc which went on to make Millions and Billions of Dollars because they aligned with Microsoft and built over their platform. If maybe John Carmack was religious enough to hate Microsoft or not build over their platform, he wouldn't have created one of the best game developing company. Maybe he would have spent his time discussing what color the next version of Macbook would be, on discussions.apple.com.

ZeroGravitas2• 17 years ago

Doesn't your last line completely undermine your argument and your moral authority to comment on fanboys?

beefman• 17 years ago

No company in the world has a technology comparable to .net/WPF on any platform, let alone all major platforms. Microsoft is giving it away. Show me the evil.

Google et al are taking your data and I defy you to reach a human being on the phone or by e-mail. It's already plain this approach will prevail, at the expense of the entirety of human discourse being 20% paid-for. This is really nothing against Google but it is a far more serious phenomenon than anything of the Microsoft/Stallman era in terms of individual liberty, and of reality not sucking.

Herring2• 17 years ago

Miguel posted about this on proggit. Read the fine print. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8yrtt/miguel_de...

"The title of this submission is incorrect.

Microsoft promised not to [sue] over the ECMA parts of Mono. They made no declaration about ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms or other "up the stack" APIs.

That is why my blog post talks about splitting Mono's source code in two, the ECMA core and the rest.

I believe that both Debian and Ubuntu do fine-grained packaging and might already have this, but the source split will make it simpler for others."

Herring2• 17 years ago

And (imo) there's no telling which way a judge might rule. Eg see the email exchange betwen rms & Bruno Haible on why CLISP is under gpl: http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/clisp/clisp/doc/...

"I say this based on discussions I had with our lawyer long ago. The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them. Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me at the time that it was, following reasoning like what you are using; but since the result was very undesirable for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer.

What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them. He said a judge would ask whether it is "really" one program, rather than how it is labeled."

crux_• 17 years ago

I think the point here is to protect end developers: if you want to be safe from future patent issues, they are making it easier to opt out of even installing any of .NET besides the ECMA core on your development systems, thus providing a decent guarantee that even if the rug gets pulled out from under Windows.Forms or ADO.NET, your app won't be impacted.

mishmash• 17 years ago

Seems like this is a pretty critical thing to do.

extension• 17 years ago

This is a very important point. The obvious strategy for Microsoft is to open up enough of the platform to allow it to proliferate, but keep enough of it closed to give their implementation the edge. If you were hesitant to invest efforts in the .NET platform before this announcement, and you depend on the high level APIs, you might have more reason to worry now.

rbanffy4• 17 years ago

... because you know C# and the CLI are soooo useful without "ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others"...

Well... At least those apps that don't touch the poisonous parts are safe. Until Microsoft changes its mind and breaks a promise.

jules• 17 years ago

Does that include LINQ?

JulianMorrison• 17 years ago

I don't really see Microsoft as the enemy anymore, but playing in their back yard is still really, really foolish.

It's not like there's a shortage of cross-platform languages or good JIT VMs.

pawan• 17 years ago

thats a good news.

jasonkester• 17 years ago

It's amazing how much paranoia and hate gets dumped on the Mono team around this issue. It must be seriously disheartening.

They just can't win. They need to spend so much of their time proving to everybody how open source they are, and how they hate Microsoft like everybody else (honest!), that they end up with pragmatist clowns like me griping at them for dragging their feet. And still there is this vocal part of the open source movement that will always hate them with a passion no matter what they do, because they dare to trust an evil corporation that eats babies and whatever else Microsoft is supposed to be up to these days.

This whole license things seems like such a non-issue to an outsider. It's just readily apparent that it's not in Microsoft's best interest to squash a project like Mono. Here they are saying it again, in the form of a legal contract, and STILL the die hards don't believe them.

Amazing.

wheels• 17 years ago

Remember, the leader of the pack on this issue is RMS. He's not looking for a world of coexistence with Microsoft -- he wants them to go away and not come back. If you try to get inside of how he'd be approaching this issue you get to, "What about when Microsoft is on the way down? Will they fire back with these things?"

However, RMS is also pretty true to his stated purposes there; he'll welcome things back to the fold when situations change (e.g. the Qt / KDE schism over Qt's licensing), but he's not one to look at things from a good faith perspective when there's no guarantee of followthrough.

Agathos• 17 years ago

If we didn't have this promise until yesterday, does that mean the haters were right all along until yesterday?

oomkiller• 17 years ago

Does anyone else think that trusting Microsoft (or any other corporation/business for that matter) with a PROMISE is a bad idea?

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

Maybe... Are these sort of "promises" legally binding?

berntb4• 17 years ago

Remember when Microsoft promised an open document standard for the next Office -- and it was many thousands of pages that was less than trivial to implement?

(Without looking, I assume that to add maiming to injury, the standard allowed variations, so non-Microsoft documents could be made incompatible between versions of Office?)

I haven't played the game, but the idiom these days seems to be "the cake is a lie".

rbanffy4• 17 years ago

I hate do do it (no, not really), but I told you so. :-)

Mono _is_ a patent minefield and trusting Microsoft not to sue based on a promise of good behaviour is ludicrously optimistic, at best.

rbanffy4• 17 years ago

Does anyone here know if their promise will cover future versions? Or if they can sue an implementation of an older version of ECMA 334 and 335 if they chose to extend it?

And how much ECMA standards are worth if Microsoft decides to extend them in their implementations? It seems to me whatever comes with the latest Visual Studio is the de-facto standard, not whatever ECMA publishes.

larrywright• 17 years ago

I'm not quite sure why Mono is so important. Technically, it's an interesting accomplishment to be sure, but I don't see that it gives you anything you can't get elsewhere. Particularly on the web front, MS is certainly not leading edge anymore.

On the desktop application front, this is certainly better than coding GTK apps in C, but other alternatives to that already existed (namely the Ruby and Python bindings for GTK).

The bottom line is that while C# and the .NET framework are certainly better than MS's previous development offerings, it still offers very little of interest in my opinion. Ruby, Scala, Clojure, and Python have much more compelling features for most problems.

youngian2• 17 years ago

Yes. Anyone care to give a short explanation of what exactly is so promising about Mono that it's worth all the worrying? Whether or not these fears pan out to anything, they're substantial enough that there should be a pretty good motivation for not just switching to another development platform.

inklesspen• 17 years ago

The only thing I've ever heard is that some people _like_ programming in C# and refuse to learn other languages.

makecheck• 17 years ago

If a "promise" holds any weight in court, why do contracts ever have to be written and signed?

MaysonL• 17 years ago

Because they're much easier to pin down and enforce than spoken promises: or even publicly published ones. Note that they often have clauses indicating that they supersede any prior agreements [read - the salesman's "promise" isn't enforceable].

Miguel De Icaza: Microsoft promises to never sue anyone regarding Mono.

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