24 May
2005
24 May
'05
8:52 a.m.
*snip*
Missing a minor detail.M$ has patents on large portions of the .Net architecture. They have granted a royalty free in perpetuity licence to the C# and CLI portion of the technology only. Other portions are licenced on different RAND terms. In short pay for commercial use. You are courting disaster, particularly with a Company as horrendous as M$.
AFAIK the CLI is the specification submitted to ECMA. http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-334.htm The CLR (similar to Java VM) is the implementation of CLI, which is owned by Microsoft. So (a big hypothesis coming up) if I wanted to write a new implementation of the CLI, would I be required to pay anything to MS ? Not clear on this.
Thanks, Gishu