Optus has moved to play down the implications of the copyright ruling on its 'TV Now' service for lucrative deals covering exclusive rights to deliver popular free-to-air content to mobile devices
Microsoft has decided to allow developers to use C# and the common language infrastructure, both of which are part of its .NET development environment, under the terms of its community promise, according to a statement from Peter Galli of Microsoft.
The promise extends to two sets of specifications submitted to ECMA, 334 and 335, and appears to clear the way for the use of Mono in the development of free and open source software.
But given that Microsoft often gives with one hand and then takes much more with the other, legal opinion is needed before a definite pronouncement is made.
"ECMA 334 specifies the form and establishes the interpretation of programs written in the C# programming language, while the ECMA 335 standard defines the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in which applications written in multiple high-level languages can be executed in different system environments without the need to rewrite those applications to take into consideration the unique characteristics of those environments," Galli said in the statement.
"It is important to note that, under the Community Promise, anyone can freely implement these specifications with their technology, code, and solutions. You do not need to sign a license agreement, or otherwise communicate to Microsoft how you will implement the specifications."
The Community Promise does not provide any kind of assurance that any implementation covered by it would not infringe patents or other intellectual property rights of any third party.\
Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza, who has led the development of Mono, an open source clone of some part of the .NET development environment, said in a post on his blog: "A few months ago we approached Bob Muglia and Brian Goldfarb at Microsoft with a request to clarify the licensing situation for the ECMA standards covering C# and the CLI (also ISO standards, for the ISO loving among you).
"Previously Microsoft had detailed the patent license plans and today they have delivered on those plans. Astute readers will point out that Mono contains much more than the ECMA standards, and they will be correct.
"In the next few months we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions. One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others."
"Depending on how you get Mono today, you might already have the this split in house or not."
Dieneke Koster
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