Firefox and Moonlight (Mono) "Free Software" Status?

[Keith G. Robertson-Turner]

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