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VIRTUALISATION Ubuntu tech board plays down Mono IP concerns
VIRTUALISATION Ubuntu tech board plays down Mono IP concerns | Ubuntu tech board plays down Mono IP concerns |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Saturday, 27 June 2009 | |
  
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Summarising the views of a board meeting held in March, the Ubuntu Foundation's technical lead Colin Watson wrote on June 16: "In short, at the moment, Mono is very well-maintained in Ubuntu and there appears to be no significant cause for concern over its IP situation. We will attempt to clarify in suitable places what developers and/or rights holders should do in the event that they have evidence of a problem." Others present at this meeting were Matt Zimmerman, the CTO of Canonical, Scott James Remnant, senior software engineer at Canonical, and Emmet Hikory, Ubuntu MOTU council member and Java packager. (Canonical defines MOTU as Masters of the Universe, "the brave souls who keep the Universe and Multiverse components of Ubuntu in shape. They are community members who spend their time adding, maintaining, and supporting as much as possible the software found in Universe.") Watson's words appeared to contradict a statement advanced by Gerry Carr, a spokesman for Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, a couple of days back. When asked about Canonical's policy on Mono, Carr told iTWire on June 25: "That's an interesting question. Really, it is Ubuntu's board of governance, not Canonical whose policy you want as they decide what goes in the distro. The board have been asked the same thing recently and are considering it but I do not have a timeline for a decision but I will track and push as far as I can." Asked about the apparent contradiction, Carr replied: "This is not a position - it is a summary of a discussion. I spoke to Matt (Zimmerman) before I replied to you who told me (and I you) that they were working on an official position. I will send it to you when I have it, like I said." He went on: "... you have made an error in your assumption. The above is not a position. I will send you a position when I have it. I am repeating this as I want to make it as clear as possible. Again, a discussion is not a position." In the June 16 post , Watson wrote: "Mono has been the subject of various heated discussions recently. While there is no urgent question to resolve, it seems appropriate for the TB (technical board) to give it some consideration. "We recently considered the topic of alleged patent violations in some detail. Although the TB meeting in question does not appear to have been written up, logs are available here. To summarise briefly, we will of course engage with patent holders who contact us with a claim of a patent violation in Ubuntu; the technical board is the correct point of contact for this. Although others are welcome to inform the technical board of allegations of which they have become aware, and any developer with a question or concern about a particular patent should contact the TB who will advise if they are aware of an issue, we will not in general act solely on third-party allegations or rumours. In the case of Mono, Canonical (who would bear most of the liability for any violation) does not currently believe this to be a major risk, as should be evident from the fact that it has been shipped in Ubuntu main since 5.10 and in the default desktop since 6.10. "In general, we will ship the best available free software applications, in the judgement of the relevant development team; the desktop team has responsibility for desktop application selection, as is natural. In a small number of cases, Mono applications have been selected there on their merits. At present, were there to be an issue, Mono would be easy to extricate. Making it more of a core requirement is likely to encounter some performance concerns at present anyway, since the budget for desktop startup is increasingly tight as we work on boot performance." Red Hat's community Linux distribution, Fedora, recently decided to jettison Mono altogether from its default install, and replace the Mono-dependent note-taking application Tomboy with Gnote , a recently-created port of Tomboy. There are fears in many sections of the FOSS community that Mono may prove to be a patent trap down the line as .NET is totally Microsoft technology. While some claim that it is possible to obtain a royalty-free, reasonable and non-discriminatory licence for the use of Microsoft patents which may be part of Mono, in reality, it seems to be well-nigh impossible to even find out how one can do so. |
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