Verily I say unto thee, that Rahul Sundaram spake thusly: > You seem to misunderstand how OIN works. OIN doesn't need any patents > related to Mono. > > http://gregdek.livejournal.com/4008.html Ah, I get it now - "If you attack us, our OIN soldiers will attack you." That works if your resources can outlast your enemy's, or if your enemy is bluffing. Still, this seems like an odd basis upon which to make the deliberate and voluntary decision to wheel the enemy's Trojan Horse through the gates of the city. BTW, I've fully reviewed the archive now, and this is pretty much all the information I could find: 1. The decision to allow Mono to enter the tree seems to have been made arbitrarily by Red Hat, with no community consultation, and in spite of protests (including some by high profile Red Hat personnel - mostly expressed as a rejection of Mono before the announcement). 2. There has only ever been one public announcement on the subject, and that was made (with some dismay, it seems) by Tom Callaway: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-extras-list/2006-January/msg00588.html 3. There has only ever been one, extremely reserved, explanation given for this decision, in a blog post by Greg DeKoenigsberg: "Business considerations that prevented certain Mono components from being included in Fedora previously have now been resolved." http://gregdek.livejournal.com/3597.html The specific nature of this resolution is not given. 4. There is precious little concrete information about precisely who made these arbitrary decisions that also affected the Fedora community distro, but as best as I can deduce, the key players seem to be Greg DeKoenigsberg (as above) and Christopher Blizzard, although it may be that these were simply the only people discussing it publicly: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=188 5. The nearest thing to an actual justification for this acceptance of Mono, is that the OIN offers a kind of Mexican Stand-Off protection to those who implement it: http://gregdek.livejournal.com/4008.html My final conclusion is that Fedora includes encumbered, non-Free software, that is covered by patents owned by Microsoft, and assured by a patent covenant that is not worth the (metaphorical) paper it's written on, since Moonlight, which is also covered by this same type of covenant by the same company, has recently been exposed by Groklaw as undistributable (I'm advised that PJ is currently investigating Mono as well). The announcement and justification for this inclusion is extremely sparse, and there has been almost no community consultation on the subject, either before or after the fact. I hope I don't seem judgmental, I'm just trying to establish the facts. OK, this really is my final post on the subject, and I apologise for being off-topic. If anyone still wishes to continue this off-topic conversation with me, please feel free to Email me at fedora[at]slated.org. Thanks. -- Regards, Keith G. Robertson-Turner -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
