Microsoft and Mono Now Playing Nicely

Not that there's ever been acrimony but Mono of course is from the other side of the tracks and there's always been an assumed threat hanging over its head that it'll get run out of town if it gets too big for its boots. Given Microsoft's past with regard to open source that's understandable. Richard M Stallman said that much last week. But that was old Microsoft which didn't like Linux. Things have changed and this announcement shows they mean it.

It shows it in that the open source community at Microsoft have their own blog. In an entry posted yesterday, it was announced by the Microsoft community manager Peter Galli that Microsoft will be applying the Community Promise to the ECMA 334 (C#) and ECMA 335 (Common Language Infrastructure) specs.

What this means is that Microsoft will not sue you or your customers if you implement C# or the CLI or use Mono. The Community Promise legally binds Microsoft not to assert its patents against people who implement certain Microsoft standards and technologies. Though you should pay attention to the word certain. It doesn't cover certain proprietary Microsoft technologies such as Winforms, ADO.NET and ASP.NET. The founder of Mono, Miguel de Icaza said that Mono will be splitting into two source code downloads. ECMA stuff (C#, CLI) and the rest in the not too distant future.

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