Jesse Keating wrote:
I'm also personally concerned about the dangers of tainting. If MSFT folks
are contributing to the Mono code that Novell uses, they have no worry
because Novell and Microsoft have a pact. However if say a Red Hat employee
looks at the source code, does that employee then become tainted by the
Microsoft code? Is not anything that employee does that is related come
under danger of Microsoft litigation? It is something I would like to avoid
all together.
If we could get upstream gnome to boot mono to the curb, I would follow suite
with Fedora, sending a clear message that we have NO INTEREST in
Novell+Microsoft tainted products. Sure, immediately we lose things like
beagle, f-spot, and tomboy, surely replacements can be written in non BOO
SCARY code... We could send the message that says "we don't care about
protection from Microsoft for this software, because we don't care about that
software, see we're using something better, safer, cheaper, and the community
is with us."
Unfortunately, the potential issues with exclusionary patent agreements
and any possible solutions probably cannot be limited to Mono though it
is probably the most significant project since the current move sets
political if not legal precedent for patent claims in the future against
other distributions except Novell and even Novell if the agreement isnt
renewed after 5 years.
Novell is working with Microsoft on virtualisation and openxml format
support which probably results in code to xen and openoffice.org both of
which has significant Novell developers working on them. If these
contributions are under GPL and LGPL respectively then the patent clause
in GPL automatically grants everyone else the necessary rights or would
prevent Novell from distributing the code to anyone. So we are probably
safe with that. Things for Legal to carefully look at.
Rahul
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