Mono and Samba: smell the difference, says Allison

Sam Varghese
Friday, 16 October 2009 07:23

Opinion and Analysis

However, he said, his basic issue with the Community Promise was that though De Icaza had touted it as the panacea to end all fears about Mono, De Icaza himself did not have to depend on the same promise. (emphasis mine)

"Miguel's employer, Novell, has a patent agreement with Microsoft that exempts Mono users from Microsoft patent aggression, so long as you get Mono from Novell. Miguel takes pains to point this out," Allison wrote.

As far as Mono goes, De Icaza has implemented parts of it which are not covered by the specifications submitted to the standards body ECMA by Microsoft; the parts submitted are said to be available on royalty-free terms and without fear of patent violations.

De Icaza admitted on July 6 that he had implemented much more than the ECMA-covered parts, writing: "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."

As is well known, in December 2007, Samba developers Allison, Tridgell, and Volker Lendecke, aided in no small way by kernel guru Alan Cox, the FSF's Carlo Piana and Eben Moglen, won a famous victory by wresting an agreement from Microsoft which provided everyone with a level playing field as far as Samba use went.

The agreement called for the provision of protocol documentation to a foundation, the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation, which would provide implementors with a limited number of Microsoft patents that may be asserted, and clear and timely warning if new patents were added by Microsoft.

Writes Allison: "If Miguel and the Mono folks had been so careful when negotiating with Microsoft, and just a little less excited about the cool new technology, then I think they'd have done their users a better service."

He argues that including Mono as a default part of a GNU/Linux distribution is an unnecessary risk to users and using it should be left up to users - much in the same way that users are free to install players to run patented MP3 files.

"Most distributions have a way to manage patent risk, by separating out the Free Software that may have patent problems into separate downloadable repositories that are not enabled by default," Allison writes.

"I think it is time for the Mono implementation and applications that use it to be moved into the 'risky' category, until the patent situation around it is deemed to be truly safe to use by default in Free Software."