Mono Platform

[Tom 'spot' Callaway]

On Sun, 2005-03-13 at 17:42 -0500, Eric Warnke wrote:
>I don't want to draw this out more than it needs to be ( and I can find
>no "legal" list or email anywhere on the sites ).  I'm just confused
>with the scope and leadership here. 

Java issues aside (we should have legal look them over), its faulty
logic to say "if foo is legally questionable and we include it, why not
bar?". If anything, we encourage people who have legal concerns about
Fedora packages to raise them to us.

Mono is legally questionable. We're not including it until the legal
issues are clarified by the patent holder. If and when that happens,
we'll revisit the topic. Right now, there is no patent grant in writing
for any of the patented technology upon which Mono is built on. This is
a clear-cut violation of the GPL. The vague post which is often referred
to as a "patent grant" is very very far from that. I'm not even a
lawyer, and I know that much.

It has nothing to do with playing favorites, and everything to do with
covering our ass.

If you care about getting Mono (or any other patent encumbered software)
included in Fedora, get an unrestricted patent grant from the patent
holder in writing which explicitly permits unlimited redistribution and
use.

Yes, this sucks. Software patents suck. And yet, its the world in which
we live. :/

~spot
---
Tom "spot" Callaway: Red Hat Sales Engineer || GPG Fingerprint: 93054260
Fedora Extras Steering Committee Member (RPM Standards and Practices)
Aurora Linux Project Leader: http://auroralinux.org
Lemurs, llamas, and sparcs, oh my!