The GNOME Journal, September Edition

1. It is not illegal to use mono or to develop mono.
2. C#/.net libraries are ECMA standards

People who say otherwise are full of crap or just lying. However,

1. Microsoft has the right to charge a RAND (reasonable and non-descriminatory) fee at any time for the use of these standards.
2. They have never, ever, stated in any binding way that they would not do so in the future.
3. *any* fee, even minimal would result in the instant death of any OSS project dependent on those standards.
4. RAND can (and frequently does in the proprietary software world) mean several dollars per download! Or requiring build licenses for all developers producing binaries (every end user of gentoo for example!) that are in the hundreds of $ range. These are all reasonable and non-descriminatory in that context!

Miguel De Icasa and Ximian/Mono people *know* this full well but don't want to admit how dangerous mono adoption is for the gnome community. They cite a BS casual mailing list post from the head engineer of .net as their claim that MS will never sue.

See how much crap this is for yourself (from official Mono faq):

http://web.archive.org/web/20030609164123/http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/... [archive.org].....
http://www.go-mono.com/faq.html#patents [go-mono.com]

Jim Miller's off hand email is the *only* assurance anyone has ever received that MS would never charge a RAND fee! If this were truly MS's commitment then they could release a statement or legally commit themselves to that! This email is not not not legally binding people! Until MS makes a legally binding agreement to never charge for use of these standards, it is not ok to use mono!

See also Seth Nickels' blog on this subject "Why Mono is currently an unnacceptable risk":

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/2004/May [gnome.org]

The two main arguments against what I'm saying are really crap also:

1. Java is also proprietary:

Yes but Sun has licensed Java in such a way that they are legally prohibited from charging *any* royalties at all for existing releases of Java. We know with 100% certainty that Sun will never try and collect any RAND fee. Ever. The situation with Java is totally different for this reason. Even if Sun changed its mind or was purchased by a less generous company (like MS for example), existing releases of Java and alternative implementations based on existing released specs would always remain free as in beer. The no version of the .net ecma standards ever has been comparably free.

2. You are always infringing somewhere, worrying about this is wasting your time:

True, there is always a danger of unknowingly infringing. However, in this case mono is knowingly using patented software. If MS decided to collect or sue, mono and gnome would have absolutely zero defense! Furthermore, MS is well known for destroying threatening companies when it suits them to do so! They have done this many times in the past. Remeber how they *lost* an anti-trust lawsuit? It is because they are agressive, unscrupulous and incredibly rich and illegal monopoly that used its power to destroy competition. They can and will crush gnome if gnome threatens MS! Mono is the ultimate submarine. We build it, integrate it so gnome can't live without it, then they kill gnome by charging for builds. Bam. Gnome is dead on that day.

Take Away: Mono is cool but way too dangerous. Smart people and companies are staying away from it (which turns out to be *most* companies by the way. That is why Redhat and others are pushing Java as an alternative). People who back mono either have motive (ximian), are misinformed (most of the people on this forum), or just dumb (people who are really drooling over the potential of mono so they are ignoring the risk, probably ximian and some gnome developers again)

Microsoft's recent actions in locking out Mono at their conference just proves how friendly MS feels toward mono. They want mono to gain mind share and acceptance in the gnome community (that is why they are so silent about its use) but they don't want it to get too much mindshare outside of that or else it will be difficult for them to pull the plug on mono and gnome in the future.