After reading up a bit on what happened with Mono while I was out sick, I came across another excellent post by Glyn Moody.
As he correctly points out, lawyers from the SFLC have been over this Open Promise that Microsoft is using and concluded it was incompatible with GPL software:
"SFLC published the paper in response to questions from its clients and the community about the OSP and its compatibility with the GNU General Public License (GPL). The paper says that the promise should not be relied upon because of Microsoft's ability to revoke the promise for future versions of specifications, the promise's limited scope, and its incompatibility with free software licenses, including the GPL."
Secondly, why are people like de Icaza and Jo Shields celebrating this move that they claim removes a patent claim from Mono for which their earlier statements denied the existance?
Why are they ignoring this earlier study by the SFLC that debunked the Open Promise as being GPL compatible? (this is not a claim against Mono specifically).
If MS wanted to clear up the air between them and the cancer they have been fighting for so many years, why not adopt a strategy that is comprehensive and legally not dubious?
Again, all this does not make me feel better about Mono at all, which is a shame because I would rather focus on which application is better feature-wise (and some like f-spot are good) than worry about a patent trap in my favorite OS.
Comments
28 comments postedNo one in their right mind would believe anything Mr. Gates and his empire "promises".
Get real
Mono is owned by Novell. Novell is essentially owned by MS. MS owns the rights to the ECMA specs. MS also basically owns ECMA (See. OOXML).
They have one intention: Extend, Embrace, Extinguish.
Also, see how they are patenting other ideas to save the planet: http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/07/this-could-save-many-lives-lets-patent.html.
the folks who just don't like mono for whatever reason won't stop yelling just because of this step from MS. However the ones that sit in the companies, making the architecture decicions, driving things further, those have understand the news as it should be.
I can't see how the open promise would be GPL incompatible. The Open Promise only shields against patent attacks by Microsoft, it does not affect any licensing. Maybe GPLv3 that has a parent clause in it as far as I remember, but that's irrelevant because nothing in Mono is GPLv3.
"Secondly, why are people like de Icaza and Jo Shields celebrating this move that they claim removes a patent claim from Mono for which their earlier statements denied the existance?" When did Icaza say that there are no patents on Mono? I can only remember him (and many others) say that it's an EMCA specification, that Microsoft won't be suing because of the fear that other companies (probably including Novell) will fight back with their own patents. You can watch old youtube talks by him and will find exactly the same arguments he brings now, three years ago.
I think you're only interpreting stuff into it. The situation for mono developers has not really changed. The chances to get sued where incredible low before and will continue to be. There are patents on every technology we're using. Say Microsoft has parent on parts of the .NET technology and really likes to sue, they will find tons of other Open Source projects infringing those. Just think about other virtual machines like every dynamic language has. Say the Interop-Services are patented? You can find those in Python as well...
So please stop spreading FUD. And RMS is no help there either because apparently he stopped being sane a while ago...
Regards,
Armin
Actually the 'there are no patents on mono' was a rethoric by Jo Shields.
Secondly, RMS seems to have things pretty much together as far as I can tell, yet people that want to weaken Software Freedom (the Open Source camp) actually reiterate that argument because he doesn't take their viewpoint and neither do I.
Again, I never said what you claim I did - I claimed that there were no documented patents (which was and still is true), and that if you were really concerned, you could ask for a blanket coverage for potential infringements in the core technologies (which was and still is true).
Are you capable of responding to external stimuli?
Do you need the aproval of thf FSF when you need to go to the bathroom?
Do you always trust convicted criminals (MS) over organizations an people that devoted their existance to protecting something?
Here's some news for you: They're not celebrating because it frees Mono from patents. They're celebrating because this should finally put an end to the endless moaning and bitching of guys like you. They're celebrating because they can return to doing useful stuff, like making software. And ignore the minority that still continues the few that keep on bitch. Because you know: trolls never die...
Yeah, we're trolls. Me, Sam Varghese, the FSF with RMS and the SFLC. Typical trolls, much unlike MS who set a record of a trustworthy partner for Free Software projects.
Yeah because both Sam Varghese and RMS seem like very trustworthy, respectable and sane people.
How does the OSP come into play here? Isn't that related to implementing OOXML (aka unrelated to mono)?
OSP: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx
CP: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx
MS _has_ cleared up the patent questions around mono. You can use the C# implementation in mono and you will not be sued.
What they have not said is that you can use the parts of mono that re-implement Microsoft's frameworks (gdi, winforms, asp.net, etc). From a Linux perspective though, that does not matter. People are concerned about using f-spot and tomboy, not concerned about running Windows applications.
Complaining about no explicit support for future versions and no guarantee for partial implementations are both red herrings because mono is already complete and doesn't need to implement future versions to be an excellent platform for Linux development.
The issue with partial implementations is two-fold:
1. It could "lock out" competing implementations, so only Novell/Microsoft can play in this space.
2. Sub-sets of or customizations to languages/frameworks are common practices.
Whether you think these are concern enough to get up in arms about it one thing, but it's a bit dismissive to call them "red herrings".
Doesn't Tomboy use the System.Data namespace? If so, then the protection that MS granted doesn't apply to Tomboy since System.Data is outside of ECMA 334 and 335.
I think the only non-full DB alternative to System.Data is SQLite. So it may be the case that Tomboy uses SQLite but I don't think it does so. At any rate, if Tomboy does use SQLite then it's suffering from an incredible disadvantage of not being able to stay within the same context in the runtime while accessing the backing store. Which I'm sure that MS would point out as a reason to not use Mono and switch to the "real" thing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the context switch is fast, but it uses unsafe code (any SQLite bug would affect Tomboy) and still has a back and forth feel, especially converting XML to SQLite.
Again, I'm not really sure if Tomboy uses SQLite or not. If it doesn't then it's not protected, if it does then that's fine it's just inferior to MS products that can use faster/safer System.Data.
Don't tell this to the mono guys, they'll eat you alive ;-)
You are confusing two different things. Microsoft Open Specification Promise and Microsoft Community Promise are two different things and if you cared/checked/weren't a troll you would see that they stated that the Community promise they gave was irrevocable. But then again it's so much easier to troll around spreading FUD.
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx
If I am confusing these two, then my mistake is shared by RMS and Glyn Moody and their information is wrong. Which I higly doubt.
Please read their comments first before commenting.
Glyn's post says "I have memories of X" where X is the concerns the SFLC had over the OSP, which applied to implementors of OOXML.
Glyn is referencing a paper published about the OSP (applying to OOXML), which is not the same thing as the CP (applying to mono).
I haven't read any of RMS's opinions on the matter so I can't comment on anything he may have written.
I'm not declaring all this a fraud. But I need verification by a trusted party before I will trust this, so far each of these parties are voicing concerns.
I also remember the mono camp firmly claiming there were no patents on an 'open' ECMA standard, yet this move clearly shows the opposite.
As far as I remember, the mono camp never denied the existence of patents regarding the ECMA standard. They just said that the license for the patents were granted by Microsoft under "royalty-free, reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms as a requisite for the ECMA standadisation. The problem was it was not clear how to get hold of such a license until now, as described in this (http://www.itwire.com/content/view/25215/1090/1/0/) quite interesting article.
This problem should be pretty much solved now by the community promise.
The communtiy promise is one of the documents that is being critizized by the FSF...
It's apparent that you are intellectually extremely lazy. Or have severe dyslexia.
Or did you morph OS to C in your trolling little mind?
"I also remember the mono camp firmly claiming there were no patents on an 'open' ECMA standard, yet this move clearly shows the opposite."
CP doesn't show opposite. It simply destroys all those if's and maybe's anti-mono people have. It destroys FUD.
Mono is now more secure to use then many other parts of the FOSS ecosystem.
So, RMS and the FSF and SFLC don't understand this stuff, that is your assertion?
Instead, we should put our faith in Microsoft and Novell?
Secondly, the MS promise covers two ECMA standard, which firmly debunks the myth that ECMA standards are free from patents.
The FSF and RMS are not saints, just as MS is no saint. All parties to this debate are fundamentally human. Thus all are equaly falible. Why do you presume some can be infalible as you seem to with the likes of RMS/FSF?
Gnote and KeepNote are better than Tomboy and phraymd and niepce (still under heavy development) may become better than F-Spot that i don't really like
Microsoft is becoming more open to free software. They are pushing more of it every day, check out "Codeplex". These kind of stuff is bottom up stuff, people in Microsoft are being influenced! It's really not a Trojan horse or trick. Microsoft is seriously getting influenced.
We need to stop looking at Microsoft as pure evil. There is A LOT of people, the line level people who work for Microsoft, who JUST LIKE WRITING SOFTWARE. They aren't as loyal to the "Microsoft way" as people seem to think! They just want to improve technology.
Not everything out of Microsoft is crap. In fact they really hit a home run with their development framework, it's really good stuff that makes writing software easier. We got Microsoft saying, here, USE IT, we won't sue you.
I can't find how this is a bad thing.
Gnote Is not better than Tomboy, and will never be able to keep up.
BTW, Akismet works great and is much less of a hassle than captcha.
You can not assert that Gnote's inability to "keep up" with Tomboy is a failing unless you also acknowledge that mono will never be able to keep up with .NET.
Maybe so, but that sidesteps the patent debate completely. I would like to use just the best app for any task and that could include mono apps if it wasn't for this problem.
I acknowledge that it's the patent system that is at fault, but as recent history has shown, it can and will be used to attack Linux so we would do very well to shrink our attack surface.