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Will Mono benefit from Microsoft's C# patent promise?

By Sean Michael Kerner on July 7, 2009 10:09 AM

From the 'I'm not a lawyer and I don't pretend to be one either' files:

Microsoft is adjusting its licensing for two key standards that are critical to .NET and Novell's Linux implementation of .NET, Mono.

ECMA 334 which is a standard for C# and ECMA 335 which is a standard for .NET's CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) are now part of Microsoft's Community Promise.

Basically what that means is that anyone can now use those two standards without licensing them from Microsoft.

"Under the Community Promise, Microsoft provides assurance that it will not assert its Necessary Claims against anyone who makes, uses, sells, offers for sale, imports, or distributes any Covered Implementation under any type of development or distribution model, including open-source licensing models such as the LGPL or GPL," Microsoft blogger Peter Gali wrote on Microsoft's Port 25 open source blog.

This is a potentially a big deal in that it open up Mono (or at least parts of it) in a way that might be enough to satisfy patent concerns that many have. Mono is part of Microsoft's interoperability agreement with Novell and was originally part of the working patent covenant established between the two vendors.

The way I understand the covenant, is that it protects Novell users (SUSE and OpenSUSE) as well as community Linux distributions. There have been concerns in the community about redistribution of Mono, while still not putting users at risk of violating any patent or intellectual property held by Microsoft.

With the Community Promise, C# and CLI should no longer be an issue, though Mono is more than just those two items. It's an area that Mono project leader Miguel de Icaza is aware off.

"Astute readers will point out that Mono contains much more than the ECMA standards, and they will be correct," De Icaza blogged. "In the next few months we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions. One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others."

Overall though, De Icaza noted that he was ,"..overflowing with joy." In general I agree with De Icaza that this move by Microsoft is a good thing. It clears up some critical usage issues that have been hanging around for years. There are still some major trust hurdles for Mono to clear with many in the Linux community who have issues with Microsoft and their patents, but this is clearly a step in the right direction.

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