On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 3:36 PM, Vincent Povirk <madewokh...@gmail.com> wrote: >> It is not so much the technical details that are the problem. >> >> It is the LEGAL problems and potential legal problems that are at the root >> of my complaint. >> >> Telling me that I have the technical details wrong does not help. I have >> very carefully tried to move the discussion away from secondary technical >> points and onto the strategic issues that are not being addressed. > > Well, it didn't seem like you were interested in diving into > specifics. I don't know the details of Microsoft's patents relating to > .NET or any promises they've made regarding those patents. Even if I > did, I'm probably not qualified to evaluate them. I simply assumed > that because so many mainstream distros and open source projects > seemed to think that use of Mono didn't pose a significant legal risk, > it wasn't a problem to include it in Wine. > > If there's some specific action we could take to reduce our legal risk > without impairing Wine's compatibility with Windows, we should > probably do that and/or ask Mono to do it. However, it seems unlikely > to me that there is something Wine could do in this area that Mono > cannot, and I am not in a position to go looking for patents that > might be relevant to our use case. > > This may be naive, but it seems obvious to me that the technical > details are what ultimately determine the legal situation, and > appearances have a much smaller effect. You also have to understand > that this is a development mailing list, and it's full of programmers, > not lawyers. So there's far more knowledge here of technical details > (personally, I consider those details my responsibility) than legal > strategy. > >
The core of mono is safe. It is covered under ECMA-334 (C# language) and ECMA-335 (CLIR vm). The mono MS Compatibility Stack, which includes: - XML - ASP.NET - Windows.Forms - ADO.NET - Core cryptography - Transactions is a grey area now since the project is not part of Novell anymore. Novell and Microsoft had joint patent agreement, so there were no problems. So the question is, does wine-mono include the compatibility stack? - Matijn
