Mono seeks to open up .Net
Published: 16 Jul 2004 14:25 BST
Are people in the open-source community ticked off at you for having done something with Microsoft's C#?
Well, there are many positions of course on these situations, and I wouldn't say it is the open-source position versus the rest of the world.
What about patents? Is there a danger that Microsoft may at some point demand that you license portions of .Net?
Well, at this point, we don't know of any patent infringement that Mono has [committed].
Have you looked into it specifically?
We have looked at some of it, and we haven't found any infringement. But in general, the problem is that Microsoft at least has 30,000 patents. I don't know if you have ever seen a patent or how it works, but they basically have these law claims where they say this is the invention, and the claims are relatively hard to read.
So it's not possible to enforce?
It has to be brought up to your attention. That's the problem in general with patents. Even if you try to do a patent review, which we looked at some, the scope wasn't really anything that we infringed on.
Then there is prior art. The question is have these been done before? For example, in this particular case, you have a multi-language VM (virtual machine). It turns out that it's a very old concept and it's actually being used in production. The OSF (open software foundation) commissioned a development that did exactly that. It never made it to market. Well, it made it to market -- it just was a complete failure.
So what is your policy then?
The moment we are made aware of an infringement on a valid patent that cannot be worked around and there is no prior art, we will remove the code. So that has been our policy. We will remove any infringing code and as a user of Mono, you will have to work around the removal of the code. So today we don't have that because we are not aware of any infringements, but that's the situation.
Has Novell thought about legal indemnification like you did with Linux?
No. The legal indemnification for Linux is different, though, because there is a claim that property was stolen.
Previous
Did you find this article useful?
156 out of 306 people found this useful
- Share this article:
