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Comment by Niten | Hacker News Reader

> Please don't give me the stuff about MS promises against suing, it's totally unrealistic.

You're wrong. It would be pretty much impossible for Microsoft to sue over Mono at this point, even if they wanted to. You gloss over the fact that Microsoft has issued a thorough, unrevokable, legally binding Community Promise to not assert patent claims over .NET implementations:

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx

The purpose and implications of the Community Promise are clear. Microsoft has sanctioned Mono, and no court in the world would let them take the CP back and say "nah, we were just kidding."

> What I am peddling here is FUD, but it's warranted FUD, there are too many unknowns for what amounts to a buggy C#.

Oh please. Ignoring the fact that you appear to be confusing C# and the CLR here, do you actually have any concrete complaints about mcs, or is this just more unwarranted FUD?

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>"do you actually have any concrete complaints"

Yes, the central point of my comment that you didn't address.[1] That is, Novell looks like it's going to be acquired and there seems to be no reason for the purchaser to continue with Mono. It's a totally uncertain future for Mono. As I said elsewhere I am not slandering Mono, I wish it were otherwise but, given that there are just so many other cool technologies out there, what's the compelling case to bet your business on it with such a rain cloud over it? So it's not about using it for some little side project, its about founding your startup idea with Mono at the core of the technology stack, are you going to take the risk? Would you, personally, use it over the other options for your business when it doesn't have an independent community, only a soon-to-be-acquired Novell?

Listen to the squawking and preening going on in this blog to display value to Oracle. http://www.novell.com/prblogs/?p=3070

Do you trust Oracle with your business future, given the multiple fiascos that have come out of the SUN takeover?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

> That is, Novell looks like it's going to be acquired and there seems to be no reason for the purchaser to continue with Mono

Contrary to other "open-source" projects, Mono has a very active (albeit small) community behind it. Right now there are very active contributors that aren't working for Novell.

Also, making a parallel with another active project, JRuby, its leader quit Sun/Oracle but it is still working on JRuby ... and I've been watching Miguel's commitment and enthusiasm about Mono ever since the start, and it has only grown since then.

     It's a totally uncertain future for Mono.

Yeah, because whatever platform you're using is so much safer.

The patents grant by Microsoft also includes supersets (contrary to Java SE implementations), and the ECMA standard you have to implement is rather small, also making it suitable for mobile phones (MonoTouch falls under that community promise, even though it ships with a fraction of what is known as .NET)

It's also an open-source project that doesn't fall under the GPL trap ... yeah, I said it. The class libraries are MIT X11, the runtime is LGPL, it is appropriate for embedding in commercial deployments right now.

If commercial support is dropped, it can live on.

Get over it!

>Microsoft has sanctioned Mono, and no court in the world would let them take the CP back and say "nah, we were just kidding."

Microsoft is an entity independent of the people who currently work there. It's not about MS going to court and saying "We had our fingers crossed", it's about new management coming in and claiming previous management did something crazy. Do this promise protect against that?

It's legally binding, so yes (so far as the letter of the promise goes).

>>Microsoft has issued a thorough, unrevokable, legally binding Community Promise to not assert patent claims over .NET implementations

I remember when Microsoft claimed to open their Office document formats. I argued then that I didn't know how (legal loophole, impossible to implement, etc) -- but there was a catch. A monopoly company don't want to do that -- "follow the money".

Later, it was found out that the specification was thousands of pages long, etc.

Are there e.g. any creative loopholes in that agreement? How do you know? Has that Promise been analyzed by a good team of lawyers?

Has Mono been checked for other patent troubles? E.g. doesn't Microsoft itself pay licenses to Oracle, because .NET is too similar to the Java environment?

Edit: I do hope I'm wrong, of course. (Fixed a bit of grammar.)

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