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