Removal from Main is another matter.

Mono doesn’t. Mono has a solid paper trail of payments for royalties going from Novel to Microsoft for years. Any distro allowing packages with dependencies on Mono, Moonlight or any other MS technology is really going out of their way to cause trouble for the distro’s users.

A half measure is to not have mono in the default:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/110/

However, that is only a half-measure. Removal from the repositories is necessary.

Both have private firms for harvesting patents. IV has already proceeded to “racketeering” phase.

Was that your point? That if you deal with Microsoft, they won’t sue you? Is that the message you wanted to bring?

I disagree with you here. Mono and Moonlight aren’t “just like FAT”. Microsoft’s legal case against Mono and Moonlight will be a far stronger case than what Microsoft can argue about FAT.

I think you mean far weaker, since Microsoft is helping Novell develop them. It’ll be kinda hard for Microsoft to claim damages (which they have to do) if they were involved in producing it.

They’ll get laughed out of court.

Microsoft and Novell did not violate the GPLv2 by agreeing to a “covenant not to sue customers” rather than a direct patent license as literally forbidden by the GPLv2. The GPLv3 blocks against this new agreement type but isn’t an obstacle either to this initial deal because the GPLv3 set an effective cut-off date that was after the Novell-MS deal (that deal purposely got grandfathered in — in particular, Novell let the FSF gain extra access to details of the deal, perhaps in exchange for an exception for that deal).

>> [Microsoft’s] Zink added that the covenants, which also extend to those companies such as Novell which agree to cross-license, “give understanding and certainty to people”.

Ah, but we know Microsoft is not a trustworthy business partner. What protection are they offering against others that might have patents on that technology, patents possibly sold by Microsoft or allowed by Microsoft to be developed by the proxies?

Microsoft has close relationship with various patent troll companies.

One can only hope.

I disagree with you here. Mono and Moonlight aren’t “just like FAT”. Microsoft’s legal case against Mono and Moonlight will be a far stronger case than what Microsoft can argue about FAT. I would like to suggest a reason why Microsoft is pursuing the Tom Tom case. Microsoft, of course, would like to win the TomTom case, but Microsoft figures it might as well start out with the weaker cases. Microsoft figures it can turn defeats on the weaker cases into a long run victory, by lulling the Linux community into complacency and then attack Mono in a couple of years.

Novell employees are involved in this too.

BTW, it looks like it’d go in Universe (community-supported packages, not endorsed by Canonical) along with Moonlight. It’s not hard to get a package into Universe.