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Fedora and Mono and OIN

Submitted by stro on Thu, 2006-03-23 14:37. Mono
Mono

Worried about Mono and patents? Heard of the OIN?

OIN is the Open Invention Network. Prominent members include Red Hat, Sony, Novell, IBM, and Philips, etc. The idea behind OIN: throw a bunch of patents in a pool. Make those patents available to open source developers, and to companies who support open source developers.

More importantly: pool those patents to counterattack companies who might accuse us of infringing *their* patents.

Read the rest.

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Hello ye easily fooled knaves

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sat, 2006-03-25 13:35.

Novell never has and *still has not* offered any patent protection for mono.

This recent news changes *nothing* and does not remove very valid fears people have always had regarding mono.

MS has never, ever, said that they would not sue or charge a license fee for the use of .net technologies.

The argument presented in this article is simply that OIN has some unrelated patents that they believe the entire industry is infringing on so if anyone messes with them they will sue.

They have nothing, zero, nada, on .net or protecting mono. They want to have a nuclear arms race with patents against, yes this is amazingly stupid, Microsoft.

A war of money with Microsoft.
A war of lawyers with Microsoft.
A war of attrition with Microsoft.

That is just stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

I thought, well when redhat starts using mono, that must be the time when it is ok, and I'll start using mono. But they messed up. Their reasoning is bad and in the end Redhat, Novell and gnome with it, will get slapped down hard if they ever threaten MS.

Idiots.

Don't believe me? Well read the article. Even Redhat admits that they only felt ok shipping mono when they had a good counter threat to MS. What? No actual permission? No actual license? Why not just start including mp3 or any other proprietary, patent encumbered technology that sounds cool using the same logic and weapon? What a pile of crap.

The real danger has been explained to all the idiots in denial many times. MS has never ever ever agreed to no charce a license. They can legally charge a "RAND" fee which may mean as much as hundreds of dollars per "developer" (which may just mean anyone trying to compile) because "reasonable" in this context is in the proprietary world where a $200 developer license is very reasonable. A $200/developer fee would mean the instant death of everything mono. If mono is integrated deeply into gnome, *which it now is*, a $200/developer fee or even 1 cent per developer or download would mean the instant death of gnome.

Good idea. Idiots, idiots, idiots.

Stupidity and Hypocrisy

Submitted by roland on Tue, 2006-03-28 09:51.

If mono is integrated deeply into gnome, *which it now is*, a $200/developer fee or even 1 cent per developer or download would mean the instant death of gnome.
At least as of the state of Fedora Core 5, I don't think that's true. Excluding a handful of Mono apps from the install was sufficient to cause nothing Mono related to load (at least not that I was able to locate). If it ever becomes more complicated than that I'll either launch a site dedicated to helping people strip Mono and all Microsoft IP encumbered products out of Fedora, or I'll just drop it in favor of something else.

That's fine for me personally, but what if RedHat follows this same tact with future releases of RHEL? I can't justify to my employer the idea of risking a large portion of our infrastructure based on some idiotic patent version of "Mutual Assured Destruction". I can't stand in front of my CIO and justify the notion that what was once a patent risk is no longer a risk because someone promises to sue them back.

Aside from the legal aspect, there is the simple fact that it is stupid for free software advocates to support IP encumbered software or APIs. The whole excuse of "Linux needs this and Java isn't any better" is hogwash. Linux doesn't need Mono. For all the effort that has been put into Mono, something completely unencumbered could have been created.

Moreover, it's completely hypocritical for the GNOME community -- a project that was launched largely on the premise that Linux had to have a desktop that was unencumbered by non-free licensing and technology (i.e. QT) -- to turn around and lead GNOME down this path just because it suits the whims of one of it's leaders.

Werd by Anonymous George
Bad design.... by Anonymous George

Re: Bad design

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sat, 2006-03-25 05:13.

Dear anonymous, you seem to not know a whole lot about what you're talking about. GCC is a very good compiler, but it doesn't have a JIT and it won't have an efficient JIT any time soon. How do you plan to build an efficient VM with JIT compilation on a compiler without JIT support? I guess that is good design for you. And no, doing without a JIT is not possible, since mono needs to support runtime code generation. Using an interpreter would be terribly slow. Using precompilation has benefits and mono implements that, but doing it the way GCJ works has several drawbacks (like the ABI issues they have now and in the future as the VM implementation changes).

lupus

Who's uninformed? by Anonymous George

Re: Who's uninformed?

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sun, 2006-03-26 03:09.

Dear anonymous troll, you asked the question in the subject and immediately answered yourself. You don't know the difference between an interpreter and a JIT and come here lecturing about good VM design?
Good thing you posted anonymously, I guess, you're too embarassed by yourself.

lupus

Re: Bad design...

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sat, 2006-03-25 00:02.

I see you're anonymous now.

I don't get it...

Submitted by hauberg on Thu, 2006-03-23 17:19.

From the link:
> Turned out that the buyer was Novell. And they turned around
> and contributed them to the OIN pool. Well-deserved kudos to Novell.
Yes, kudos to Novell!
But what I don't get is that Novell (at least the Ximian part) has been trying to push Mono for quite a while. So why haven't they (Novell) told us about this a long time ago. Why do Redhat need to tell us that a Novell sponsored technology is "patent-safe" (whatever that means).

Miguel has been saying that

Submitted by Anonymous George on Fri, 2006-03-24 06:50.

Miguel has been saying that for quite some time now, it's just a lot of people didn't (want to) listen. He has not been talking about the Open Invention Network obviously - as this is a quite a new thing, but about the fact, that nobody will be able to sue Mono, cause of the patents Novell owns. The sad thing is, the patent system is so wrong, that in fact it is not possible to write a single piece of software (unless it is VERY trivial) without infringing someones copyright, so the claims against Mono never had a lot going for them.

yeah, but...

Submitted by Anonymous George on Fri, 2006-03-24 12:56.

Vague "its ok, trust me" statements from Miguel are a lot different than knowing the details of how Mono will be protected from patent lawsuits. I haven't heard of Novell offering any official patent protection on Mono up until this point (statements from a developer don't count), so I can't fault RedHat for taking a cautious approach to Mono use. Given the sad state of patents in the US, a major US company that is not paranoid about patents will quickly find itself going bankrupt in court.

Hi, yeah this is exactly

Submitted by Anonymous George on Thu, 2006-03-23 17:45.

Hi,

yeah this is exactly what I don't get. There have been so many discussions about the patent issues. Why hadn't Novell mentioned this?

Or maybe this was a way to promote Mono? The patent issues were a reason why so many developers spoke about it. And now they say, that everyone can use it without patent issues.

Well.. for me I already have decided: I simply use it :) Instead of talking about we could spend the time more effective if we simply use it and wait what the future will bring. Microsoft already had the chance to fight against free software with patents, because every desktop app uses patented technology.

Greetings

Mike

But don't accept them!

Submitted by lobais on Thu, 2006-03-23 15:55.

But at the same time, we should NEVER come to accept software patents!
:S

The problem with that is,

Submitted by bradlis7 on Sat, 2006-03-25 21:12.

The problem with that is, they won't care in court whether you believe in the patent or not. If it's the law, then it's the law. Maybe certain countries don't have this law, but the USA and others all have laws against this.

But on the other hand, in the USA, the best way to get a law changed is to get a lawsuit and go to the supreme court (as far as I know).