Mono Platform

[Antonio Zugaldia]

Hi everybody,

On Sun, 13 Mar 2005 17:30:30 -0600, Tom 'spot' Callaway
<tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> 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. :/

Thank you very much for your answers. Just two more questions:

(1) Why don't we have a "nonfree" extras repository? Then we can have
packages not only for Mono, but for MP3 support, Acrobat, ...

(2) I uderstand Red Hat's position, but why _Debian_, SuSE or Ubuntu
don't have that concerns? What's the difference?

Best regards,

A.

-- 
Antonio Zugaldia <antonio at zugaldia.net>