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VIRTUALISATION FSF says Microsoft Mono move full of loopholes
VIRTUALISATION FSF says Microsoft Mono move full of loopholes | FSF says Microsoft Mono move full of loopholes |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Saturday, 18 July 2009 | |
  
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In a detailed statement, the FSF said that though all patents were a threat to developers, those that belonged to Microsoft were especially dangerous as it was the only major software firm that had positioned itself as the enemy of GNU/Linux. It said that Microsoft had been clear about its intentions right from 2006 when chief executive Steve Ballmer had said, in response to a question about the company's patent deal with Novell, "the fact that (GNU/Linux) uses our patented intellectual property [sic] is a problem for our shareholders. We spend $7 billion a year on R&D, our shareholders expect us to protect or license or get economic benefit from our patented innovations. So how do we somehow get the appropriate economic return for our patented innovation...?" The FSF also quoted from an interview given to eWeek by Microsoft's Bob Muglia in which he said: "There is a substantive effort in open source [sic] to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property [sic] associated with that is available to Novell customers." It pointed to the fact that in 2007 Microsoft had claimed that GNU/Linux infringed 235 patents and followed this up by suing GPS maker TomTom in 2009 over the VFAT filesystem implementation in the Linux kernel. The statement said that since C# was developed inside Microsoft, there was every likelihood that "they have many patents to cover different aspects of its implementation. That would make free software implementations of C#, like Mono, an easy target for attack." "The ECMA 334 and 335 specifications describe the core C# language, including information about standard libraries that must be available in any compliant implementation," the FSF statement said. "However, there are several libraries that are included with Mono, and commonly used by applications like Tomboy, that are not required by the standard. And just to be clear, we're not talking about Windows-specific libraries like ASP.NET and Windows Forms. Instead, we're talking about libraries under the System namespace that provide common functionality programmers expect in modern programming languages: binary object serialization, regular expressions, XPath and XSLT, and more. "Because these libraries are not defined in the ECMA specifications, they are not protected in any way by Microsoft's Community Promise. If this were the only problem with the promise, it might be safe to use applications that avoid these libraries, and stick to what's in the standard. But even the code that's covered by the promise isn't completely safe." The statement conclude by saying that if Microsoft wanted to genuinely reassure free software users that it had no intention of suing them for using Mono, "it should grant the public an irrevocable patent license for all of its patents that Mono actually exercises." |
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