FSF: FOSS developers “still should not write software that depends on Mono”

“A few days later, an interview with Microsoft President Bob
Muglia was published, and he made it clear that they considered C#
one of these so-called “patented innovations:”

“There is a substantive effort in open source [sic] to bring
such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being
driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we
made with Novell is that the intellectual property [sic] associated
with that is available to Novell customers.

“(eWeek.com, “Microsofts Muglia Talks Longhorn, Novell and
Java”, November 17, 2006.)

“They’ve been turning up the heat ever since. In May 2007,
Microsoft followed all this up by announcing in a Fortune magazine
interview that they believed GNU/Linux infringed 235 Microsoft
patents. And recently they made it very clear that these were not
idle threats: the company sued TomTom for using the VFAT filesystem
implementation in the kernel Linux without buying a license from
it.

“All of this can’t simply be brushed aside. These are statements
and actions made at the highest executive levels of the company.
Using patents to divide and conquer the free software community is
a fundamental part of their corporate strategy. Because of that, C#
represents a unique threat to us. The language was developed inside
Microsoft, so it’s likely they have many patents to cover different
aspects of its implementation. That would make free software
implementations of C#, like Mono, an easy target for attack.”

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