Summary: Novell trademarks, copyrights, patents, and C# bindings in KDE's Phonon

THE OpenSUSE project mended its distribution's EULA a few months ago in order for it to be seen as more liberal. The project's news section is now discussing the use of Novell's own trademark which is "OpenSUSE". It states that:

If you want to use the official openSUSE marks, but fall outside the permitted uses it is still possible to get permission. If you’d like to seek special permisison, send an email to permission@novell.com with your contact information and an explanation of the situation.

Trademarks aside (they do serve their purpose), there's a bit of a troublesome aspect in SUSE, which seeds a lot of Mono. The copyrights assignment in Mono elevates Novell, but perhaps more importantly, there is a patent baggage in Mono and Novell customers receive special treatment. In many ways, Novell, which is an ally of Microsoft, still controls the direction of Mono and its increased focus on .NET imitation leaves room for concern [1, 2].

It is with that knowledge that we regret to see C# inching closer to KDE, based on the latest development digest. Bindings are being put in place by Arno Rehn, who committed related changes before.

Add Phonon C# bindings.

This is part of an ongoing -- albeit very gradual -- trend [1, 2, 3, 4]. ⬆

"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."

--Bob Muglia, Microsoft President