The FOSS community has been concerned about the difficulties, pros and cons of including Mono-built applications as a part of standard Linux builds. Both Pro and Con.
Most recently, the Ubuntu Technical Board posted to their Ubuntu Developer Announce mailing list their extermely pragmatic position on Mono applications.
Today Microsoft extended the Community Promise to the two underlying ECMA (and subsequent ISO) standards that cover the CLI and C#. These promises had already covered other EMCA standards such as OpenXML, so it was quite logical that the CLI and C# would follow. Well, in a sane universe anyway.
As the Mono project (and Moonlight) are based on these standards, the Community Promise would logically extend to these environments.
Hopefully now we can all just build cool software, not argue about licenses, patents and other distractions. Now let’s fix Outlook’s HTML rendering!. 🙂
(Thanks to John BouAntoun for the original link, Peter Galli for the original blog post, and Microsoft for doing the right thing.)
Well said Nick! As it turns out, Henny Penny is wrong. The sky isn’t going to fall in.
Well …. ooxml is not something i would be proud of (re ISO standards approval process ).
However, the foss community will only believe microsoft when it as a ‘whole’ (not just parts) send the same message.
While you blog about this Microsoft *still* is going after companies for violating patents which *still* have not been stated on the public record, violated by linux etc. . Fix the Entire approach before you can “sanity prevails”. Microsoft is rather ‘split’ at the present.
OOXML… not the first time a commercial organisation has created and promoted standards; and the world is better for the file formats to be opened up and standardarised.
I am starting to doubt that the FOSS community, especially the “F” part of FOSS, will ever trust or believe Microsoft.
Microsoft is a big organisation; with parts pursuing software licensing sales with closed sourced licenses. This is orthogonal to FOSS. That’s the core business of Microsoft. The reality is that interoperability is a customer request. So Microsoft has to listen and respond.
Patents are also a part of this eco system; and a fundamental part of intellectual property and law. Unsurprisingly, its the large organisations with money that are the target of patent trolls; and all organisations fear submarine patents.
*In my opinion* the Patent system needs reforming, worldwide to a form of consistency.
Watch what code gets shipped: not the rhetoric.
I meant before you can *say*(correction) “sanity prevails”.
perhaps the customers who demand interoperability will demand microsoft stop chasing the false gods of ‘linux’ who they get their software from.