Mono and FAT

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The thing with Mono is that you know for sure that Microsoft is getting patents on C#, there’s no reason to believe these wouldn’t apply to mono. Secondly, Microsoft has a bad reputation for patent extortion, as the recent case against TomTom has shown. If Microsoft can successfully blackmail someone over something like long-filename support on FAT, why wouldn’t they do the same for an entire framework they designed?

The immediate danger here is not the existence of Mono or some specific Mono apps, but the possibility of an increasing number of Gnome components depending on Mono and what this would mean for the Linux desktop when Microsoft finally decides to sue some non-SuSE distribution or even a project or a user for the use of their intellecutal property? People implemented FAT for years without any problems until TomTom got bitten, FAT with long filenames was also a safe Microsoft-technology to use…

For the record, let me say that this application was designed with dotnet in mind. Any fairly straightforward translation into something else still means this would likely be “dirtier” wrt dotnet patent traps (true especially for the earlier versions of this app) than would likely be an application that was designed without dotnet influence.

Having said that, I think as many people as possible should write to their reps in government about how pathetic software patents are. There are many patents out there that can trip people, up and those owning patents are always a threat to try and work their patented ideas (through proxies) into FOSS.