On Tuesday 24 May 2005 14:22, Pillai, Gishu R (GE Energy) wrote:

*snip*

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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.h tm 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.

No. Mono is one such FLOSS project trying to implement the dotnet framework. But even they are cluless about any M$ patents that they might be violating. The general feeling is that Miguel & co. are more likely than not to be in violation. The problem is that reading the patents automatically taints you, thus preventing you from doing anything useful.

rgds jtd