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

Matijn Woudt tijnema at gmail.com
Wed Jun 6 09:37:20 CDT 2012


On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 3:36 PM, Vincent Povirk <madewokherd at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
>

The core of mono is safe. It is covered under ECMA-334 (C# language)
and ECMA-335 (CLIR vm).
The mono MS Compatibility Stack, which includes:
- XML
- ASP.NET
- Windows.Forms
- ADO.NET
- Core cryptography
- Transactions

is a grey area now since the project is not part of Novell anymore.
Novell and Microsoft had joint patent agreement, so there were no
problems. So the question is, does wine-mono include the compatibility
stack?

- Matijn



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