10.18.08
Microsoft Does Not Reply to Request for Mono Patent Protection
As we promised to do, we have have just resent our request to Microsoft Licensing. They have not replied for over a week.
From: Roy Schestowitz
To: iplg at microsoft.com
Date: Sat, Oct 18, 2008
Subject: Request for a written license for ECMA 376 implementationDear Microsoft Licensing,
I would be interested to receive a licence for commercial distribution
of Mono, in accordance with your terms presented by Bob Muglia:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2060750,00.asp“There is a substantive effort in open source 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 associated with that is available to
Novell customers.”According to several legal analyses, Mono is not safe for those who are
not Novell customers to use. I would therefore like to purchase a licence.Best regards,
Roy Schestowitz
Meanwhile we have identified possible patent violations in Mono, which may collide with existing Microsoft patents (not even submarine patents). █
xISO_ZWT said,
October 18, 2008 at 1:32 pm
First they’ll ignore you…
Needs Sunlight said,
October 19, 2008 at 7:36 am
Keep coming back at them each week about this.
For our amusement, could you use the same title (or part of the same title) along with a week number?
Roy Schestowitz said,
October 19, 2008 at 7:40 am
We’re weeks away from contacting individuals at Microsoft (a source gave us their details), then filing formal complaints.
Needs Sunlight said,
October 22, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Be sure to document this thoroughly enough to also be able to take it to the Better Business Bureau in the US, and the equivalents elsewhere. The company’s a fraud as far as technology goes. The next step is to go after the middle managers who knowingly deploy MS.