Tonnerre Lombard

FFII’s coordinator for Switzerland

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Gnome goes Mono and jumps into the Patent Trap

A couple of years back, the Gnome desktop environment developers have taken the decision to reengineer the Gnome desktop around the Mono framework. This decision has mainly been influenced by the main Mono developer Miguel de Icaza, who is a very vocal employee of Novell. Recent developments thus request us to recall the pieces of the puzzle in order to understand what might really be going on.

Reasonable doubt has been rased to whether or not Mono can actually be deployed freely. Mono itself is basically a free and halfway portable implementation of the .NET framework developed by Microsoft. However, the .NET framework itself is subject to a large amount of software patents, which cover the concepts used within the .NET framework. Since these are concepts and not individual implementations (which are covered by Copyright, which is certainly untouched by a reimplementation), they most likely also apply to the Mono framework.

To Novell itself, Icazas employer, this is not a significant problem, since Novell has closed a patent deal with Microsoft not so long ago which undoubtedly also covers the .NET patents. However, all conventional Linux and Open Source vendors would not be able to distribute Gnome as it would be covered by the .NET patents Microsoft owns.

This amounts to an easy way for Novell to effectively lock in Gnome users to their own products. Gnome would no longer be a real Free Software project, even though the code remains freely available. It is expected that this type of patent issues will be raised many times, causing severe damage to the economy with the time. The only way of mitigation will be a transatlantic patent agreement which clarifies Art. 52 EPC: Software is not patentable.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 12:34 am and is filed under Intellectual Profitability, Open Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Gnome goes Mono and jumps into the Patent Trap”

  1. ciaran Says:
    November 23rd, 2007 at 8:42 am

    The patent pledge

    De Icaza’s replied by saying they will only use the parts of Mono that are described in the ECMA standard and which are thereby covered by a patent pledge from Microsoft.

    http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=5746&offset=75&rows=90#190589

    From working on the OOXML issue, I know that Microsoft’s patent pledges are usually uninspiring. Do you know of a critique I could link to about problems with their patent pledge for ECMA/Mono?

    (BTW, good blog entry, and the life=infringement one too.)

  2. ciaran Says:
    November 23rd, 2007 at 11:05 am

    Oops. 2004 story

    That news article is from January 2004, so I guess there hasn’t actually been any recent decision?

  3. tonnerre Says:
    November 28th, 2007 at 9:09 pm

    Re: Oops. 2004 story

    Well, the recentness of the basic decision is greatly exaggerated, I guess I should reformulate that paragraph. Recent events have pointed out why and where things are going in that respect.
    Due to these events I wanted to re-attract attention to that part of the issue.

  4. Mono - Discussion With a Developer | Ubuntu Linux Help Says:
    June 17th, 2009 at 1:50 pm

    [...] Ubuntu Linux users. This concern was raised by a post I saw at the Free Software Foundation site: Gnome goes Mono and jumps into the Patent Trap, where it [...]

  5. Gnome did not go Mono « Tonnerre Lombard Says:
    June 18th, 2009 at 9:50 pm

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