Firefox and Moonlight (Mono) "Free Software" Status?
Keith G. Robertson-Turner
fedora at slated.org
Mon Jun 2 22:48:00 UTC 2008
Verily I say unto thee, that Naheem Zaffar spake thusly:
>> It's hard to convict a criminal who has not yet committed the crime
>>
> totally off-topic, but if no crime has been committed, the person is
> not a criminal.
To elucidate my analogy:
This particular criminal has "form", they've already been convicted, at
least twice, on two continents. Any FBI profiler would describe this as
a high risk scenario, providing sufficient due cause to take steps that
would usually be a violation of that individual's civil rights, by e.g.
invoking the Patriot Act.
But stepping back from the analogy, I don't literally mean "conviction"
in this case ... I mean taking measures to protect others. Protect /us/
from a known bad element who clearly has unambiguously bad intentions.
> Slightly on topic (only because I feel there should be something on
> topic in this post), yes some people are uncomfortable with Mono (I
> myself uninstall it as my first task after installing Fedora), but
> there are some checks and balances - there is the ECMA standards
> certification and more importantly there is (or was - no idea where
> it is after the Novell deal.) "protection" on this item from the OIN
> - something which preceded mono's inclusion into Fedora.
AFAIK the OIN do not own all the patents in mono-core. It's Microsoft's
"Intellectual Property", provided under ECMA's supposedly "RAND" patent
terms. If this isn't the case, I'd be most relieved to be proved wrong.
--
Regards,
Keith G. Robertson-Turner
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