Microsoft's Open-Source Trap for Mono

He's right on this one. Under the license that MS is going to do this with, it isnt opening up anything. More like hiding a brick under a hat on the side walk and waiting for someone to kick it. There isn't a doubt in my mind that this falls into the MS dirty trick category.

Now this is the real Microsoft trap. It will also keep Mono under a cloud, even if Mono never has any code that could conceivably be copied from the .NET code base. Much more effectively slowing the uptake of Mono than the current methods they have been using.

The same is true for pretty much any non-free source code anywhere. If you ever signed an NDA with some company in order to look/work on their source, you had better be extra careful about working on a similar technology in the open source field. Same goes for leaked code. There were ample warnings around back when the Win2K source leaked, that anyone even remotely interested in ever contributing to Linux should stay far away from it.

That said, this has written "bad intent" written all over it. I mean, who are the people interested in looking at .Net's innards? People working on competing implementations of .Net. People working on top of .Net only need the specifications/documentation. They'd only ever touch .Net's innards if they find a bug in .Net and are determined to find the root cause.

It'll be interesting to see what step Microsoft will take against Wine and CrossOver. It has them targeted in the contracts as well.

>It has them targeted in the contracts as well.

I don't understand what you mean by that. Has Microsoft entered into contracts to go after Wine and CrossOver? With whom? What do the contracts call for these people to do?

Ofcourse you do Dino. You know very well that Mono, Wine, Crossover, OOo and a few other bits and pieces were explicitly excluded from the so-called "safety" of the MS-Novell deal.

That basically means that, if someone from Novell looks at the .Net reference implementation and creates something that works similar in Mono, that MS can still sue Novell for it and try to obliterate Mono in the process.

[sarcasm] Wait, wasn't there some Miguel Somethin-de-something guy working at Novell doing Mono stuff? [/sarcasm]

>You know very well that Mono, Wine, Crossover, OOo and a few other bits and pieces were explicitly excluded from the so-called "safety" of the MS-Novell deal.

Come on Sander, you're not that stupid. The original statement was that Wine and CrossOver were targetted in contracts. You are referring to contracts from which they were excluded.

Hello!!! Logic, people!!!

Explicit exclusion is also targetted.

>Explicit exclusion is also targetted.

Hmmm. Targeted for what?

Sorry Dino. I don't feel like playing your flame-n-game tonight :-)

Sorry Sander, no flame involved.

When people say or write something, it should mean something and not just because you want to be paranoid.