The elusive, royalty-free patent licence for Mono

By Sam Varghese
Monday, 25 May 2009 05:45

Opinion and Analysis

How difficult or easy is it to obtain one of the much-touted "royalty-free, reasonable and non-discriminatory" licences for Microsoft patents that are part of a technology like Mono?
Judging by the frequency with which references are made to such licences by those who back Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza's bid to create an open source clone of Microsoft's .NET development environment, it's surprising that no-one has ever ventured to test this claim.

The idea of trying to find out what was involved arose after reading a nearly nine-month old, well-written post defending the use of Mono and mocking its detractors. The author, Jo Shields, works for Oxford University.

As Shields made mention of this kind of licence in his post - to quote: "Related parties have pointed out with relative frequency that those licenses are available under a 'royalty free, reasonable & non discriminatory' license (sic), but free patent protection isn’t remotely good enough, is it?" - the very first question asked by a reader in the forums provided was how one could obtain such a licence for Mono.

Shields appears to have asked de Icaza about this on an IRC channel and posted the great man's responses which were as given below:

[miguel_] Direct, anyone can request it from ECMA
[miguel_] Well, you can request the docs from ECMA
[miguel_] The Gnome Foundation is a member, and whoever is the member can request the docs
[miguel_] It might be possible also for the public to get them but I dont know what you have to do

And Shields added: "I asked, that was the answer. Make of it what you will."

It looks like the man who created Mono himself is not sure how one obtains this "royalty-free, reasonable and non-discriminatory" licence" to avoid violating Microsoft patents in the .NET specification. Strange, one doesn't hear this point being highlighted too often.

That, however, doesn't stop de Icaza from pushing Mono as the next best thing after sliced bread. Or maybe tortillas.

Everyone, but everyone, who defends Mono, claims that since the .NET standards have been submitted to ECMA, an industry association, it means that it's fine to go ahead and use Mono - aren't we all abiding by a published standard when we do?

But when you ask ECMA, they tell you a different story.

CONTINUED