I am not sure why there would be any court action. I am also not sure Xamarin is starting completely from scratch. It would be interesting to know. I know the MonoTouch stuff a bit better so I will use that as examples.
First, Attachmate is the one that terminated their employment (without cause). They have a very weakened position in that event in terms of what means the ex-Novell team chooses to pursue for their income. The team is allowed to use their knowledge and skills as long as they do not use proprietary code. I am sure that part of what makes Xamarin possible is that pretty much all their employees are probably on severance pay from Novell. I would not be surprised if many of them are still getting Novell paychecks when .NET for iOS is released. Second, a fair bit of what Xamarin needs to create .NET for iOS may have been released by Novell under MIT/X11 licenses. This code can be used by anyone to create commercial products without fear of lawsuits. Not only was a lot of the core Mono functionality (full AOT compilation for example) driven by the needs of MonoTouch but some of the code is common between MonoMac and MonoTouch. I see no reason why the MacCore stuff on GitHub could not be used in Xamarin product for example. Third, Xamarin can use the MonoTouch API wholesale. There is a tonne of legal precedent around this. Fourth, it seems unlikely that Attachmate owns any patents that we need to worry about. The Microsoft patents are as before (and largely covered off by the Microsoft Community Promise). Most of the previous Novell patents have been sold and will now find themselves under the Open Invention Network. Fifth, I read recently (and Miguel confirmed via Twitter) that Android 3.1 is actually shipping out-of-the-box with the Mono runtime. I am not sure if that will/can continue now but, if so, that could really give the Xamarin team a leg up on Android. If you look at the commits in the public GItHub Mono repository you will see that many of the check-ins relate to MonoDroid (Mono for Android) and MonoTouch. My read is the team invested a lot work while at Novell that is now available to them via GitHub and that will speed up their efforts. After all, Miguel is suggesting 3-4 months before we see a preview of the Xamarin products. That is a pretty aggressive timeline. I suspect that the reason these timelines may be realistic is precisely because they are not starting from scratch. Other companies that rely on Mono for their own mobile solutions (Unity?) will probably help with the effort. A lot of the testing, polishing, and bug fixing may be contributed by non-Xamarin partners once preview code starts to show-up. This does not really address the "from scratch" question I realize. Attachmate has sent a pretty clear signal that they just do not care about Mono. This is not surprising for a company that appears to make it's money by miking mature technologies. SUSE is already a stretch for them. The kind of business that Mono represents is just off their radar. It is also possible that they wanted to send a clear signal that SUSE is now pure Linux and not a Microsoft lackey like some in the Linux world have tried to portray Novell. How much money should Attachmate rationally spend going after a Mono start-up? I think they are looking to minimize costs. Legal fights do not really do that. It is interesting though that Attachmate is still selling the Mono products and that it has said that the Mono business is now in the hands of the SUSE management. Time will tell what their plans are there. I am not so naive that I think legal action is impossible. It just looks so ill advised that I have trouble understanding what kind of management would attempt it. Then again, we have seem stupid stuff before. On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 7:18 PM, Jason Awbrey <ja...@awbrey.net> wrote: > if Attachmate abandons their product (and it's revenue potential) and > refuses to support customers who have legitimate, paid licenses for the > product, why would they waste money chasing Miguel's team in court? > > the fact that Miguel expects to spend 3 months getting to an initial > release seems like a pretty good indication that he is seriously starting > from scratch, not using any of the existing MT IP > > granted, Attachmate's behavior so far doesn't seem entirely rational, and > many companies seem more than happy to waste money on legal actions that do > nothing but generate bad press for them > > >> I am also really concerned about the legal ramifications of this. I just >> don't see how Miguel and company don't get tied up in the courts on this >> one. >> >> > _______________________________________________ > Monodroid mailing list > Monodroid@lists.ximian.com > > UNSUBSCRIBE INFORMATION: > http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/monodroid > > -- Justin Malcolm Business Development Manager Analytic Design Group analyticdesigngroup.com <http://www.analyticdesigngroup.com/> p 604.669.7655 m 778.385.5477
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