On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 3:36 PM, Vincent Povirk madewokherd@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