http://winetricks.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/install-gecko.sh also installs mono

[Vincent Povirk]

> It is not so much the technical details that are the problem.
>
> It is the LEGAL problems and potential legal problems that are at the root
> of my complaint.
>
> Telling me that I have the technical details wrong does not help.  I have
> very carefully tried to move the discussion away from secondary technical
> points and onto the strategic issues that are not being addressed.

Well, it didn't seem like you were interested in diving into
specifics. I don't know the details of Microsoft's patents relating to
.NET or any promises they've made regarding those patents. Even if I
did, I'm probably not qualified to evaluate them. I simply assumed
that because so many mainstream distros and open source projects
seemed to think that use of Mono didn't pose a significant legal risk,
it wasn't a problem to include it in Wine.

If there's some specific action we could take to reduce our legal risk
without impairing Wine's compatibility with Windows, we should
probably do that and/or ask Mono to do it. However, it seems unlikely
to me that there is something Wine could do in this area that Mono
cannot, and I am not in a position to go looking for patents that
might be relevant to our use case.

This may be naive, but it seems obvious to me that the technical
details are what ultimately determine the legal situation, and
appearances have a much smaller effect. You also have to understand
that this is a development mailing list, and it's full of programmers,
not lawyers. So there's far more knowledge here of technical details
(personally, I consider those details my responsibility) than legal
strategy.