The elusive, royalty-free patent licence for Mono

[ Thanks to Sam Varghese for this link. ]

"Judging by the frequency with which references are made to such licences by those who back Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza's bid to create an open source clone of Microsoft's .NET development environment, it's surprising that no-one has ever ventured to test this claim.

"The idea of trying to find out what was involved arose after reading a nearly nine-month old, well-written post defending the use of Mono and mocking its detractors. The author, Jo Shields, works for Oxford University.

"As Shields made mention of this kind of licence in his post - to quote: "Related parties have pointed out with relative frequency that those licenses are available under a 'royalty free, reasonable & non discriminatory' license (sic), but free patent protection isn't remotely good enough, is it?" - the very first question asked by a reader in the forums provided was how one could obtain such a licence for Mono."

Complete Story

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