[fab] Fwd: Mono and FC

[Rahul Sundaram]

Jesse Keating wrote:

> 
> I'm also personally concerned about the dangers of tainting.  If MSFT folks 
> are contributing to the Mono code that Novell uses, they have no worry 
> because Novell and Microsoft have a pact.  However if say a Red Hat employee 
> looks at the source code, does that employee then become tainted by the 
> Microsoft code?  Is not anything that employee does that is related come 
> under danger of Microsoft litigation?  It is something I would like to avoid 
> all together.
> 
> If we could get upstream gnome to boot mono to the curb, I would follow suite 
> with Fedora, sending a clear message that we have NO INTEREST in 
> Novell+Microsoft tainted products.  Sure, immediately we lose things like 
> beagle, f-spot, and tomboy, surely replacements can be written in non BOO 
> SCARY code...  We could send the message that says "we don't care about 
> protection from Microsoft for this software, because we don't care about that 
> software, see we're using something better, safer, cheaper, and the community 
> is with us."

Unfortunately, the potential issues with exclusionary patent agreements 
and any possible solutions probably cannot be limited to Mono though it 
is probably the most significant project since the current move sets 
political if not legal precedent for patent claims in the future against 
other distributions except Novell and even Novell if the agreement isnt 
renewed after 5 years.

Novell is working with Microsoft on virtualisation and openxml format 
support which probably results in code to xen and openoffice.org both of 
which has significant Novell developers working on them. If these 
contributions are under GPL and LGPL respectively then the patent clause 
in GPL automatically grants everyone else the necessary rights or would 
prevent Novell from distributing the code to anyone. So we are probably 
safe with that. Things for Legal to carefully look at.

Rahul