Microsoft’s Empty Promise

“Why Worry About C#?
Since we published Richard’s article about Mono last week, some
people have been asking us why we’re expressing special concern
about free software developers relying on C# and Mono, instead of
other languages. Sun probably has patents that cover Java. Maybe
IBM has patents that cover C compilers. “Shouldn’t we discourage
the use of these too?” they ask.

“It’s true that all software patents are a threat to
developers—but that doesn’t mean that all software patents
are equally threatening. Different companies might have patents
that could be used to attack other languages, but if we worried
about every patent that could be used against us, we wouldn’t get
anything done. Microsoft’s patents are much more dangerous: it’s
the only major software company that has declared itself the enemy
of GNU/Linux and stated its intention to attack our community with
patents. If Microsoft designed a patent trap into C#, that is no
more than what it said it would do.”

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