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Sanity Prevails

By Nick Hodge | July 7, 2009

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.)

Topics: microsoft, opensource | 5 Comments »

5 Responses to “Sanity Prevails”

  1. Angus Says:
    July 8th, 2009 at 6:14 am

    Well said Nick! As it turns out, Henny Penny is wrong. The sky isn’t going to fall in.

  2. dave Says:
    July 21st, 2009 at 1:09 pm

    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.

  3. dave Says:
    July 21st, 2009 at 1:10 pm

    I meant before you can *say*(correction) “san­ity prevails”.

  4. Nick Hodge Says:
    July 21st, 2009 at 2:14 pm

    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.

  5. dave Says:
    July 22nd, 2009 at 12:25 am

    per­haps the cus­tom­ers who demand inter­op­er­ab­il­ity will demand microsoft stop chas­ing the false gods of ‘linux’ who they get their soft­ware from.

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