Re: "Why Mono is Currently An Unacceptable Risk"

[Richard Corfield]

On 2004-05-23, Rolf Tollerud <rolftollerud@msn.com> wrote:
>
> How is it going with your home-grown Avalon/XAML? 
>

XUL is currently fully functional thank you very much. XAML is still
vapourware as far as I can see. Presumably it is being touted so much
at the moment to take attention away from XUL - for fear of XUL gaining
developer mindshare. XUL/XAML are both very good ideas. As is normal,
Microsoft isn't the first to innovate here, though at least there is
prior art to go around.

Patents, copyrights and trademarks?

 Not sure if any such patents work over here. We don't have software
 patents as yet, and hopefuly never will. This is the biggest problem
 though, and not just C#. Patents exist in the USA for pretty well
 everything. I'd not be surprised if Hello World infringed at least one.

 Copyright protects the embodyment of the work. As long as Mono is a
 clean room implementation, it doesn't infringe the copyright. Too many
 people seem to be trying to make copyright give them more rights than
 it ever has. This applies to movies/music/the web as well. Surely I'm
 just as right to use adblock on a web site as I am legally entitled to
 tear a page out of a book for example, but I digress.

 Trademark is the use of a name. I don't believe Mono can ever be confused
 with .Net. They don't even sound the same or look the same.

I think the early 2000s must be the half-decade of "Intellectual
Property". Its a relatively new term, and a relatively new focus in the
industry, and it basicly seems to mean "Whats ours is ours, and whats
yours is ours too". So called Intellectual Property is expanding, at
least in the public perception, at an alarming rate. Now, apparently,
copyright gives rights owners the ability to control how their work
is viewed (quote from the MPAA), yet it never used to. SCO claim that
copyrights are like patents, and cover the basic ideas - no evidence of
this in the past. Fair use is forgotten. This must be the decade of one
of the biggest attempted land grabs going.

It would be interesting to compare the information revolution with the
industrial revolution. I remember from way back in school learning about
conceptually similar struggles back then, with the corporates of the time
trying to take far too much, and eventually not getting it. I wonder if
there was as much cluelessness about industry on the part of the general
public as there is about computing and ``IP'' now.

I hope that history repeats itself and corporate power is
weakened. Industry seems to have bigger lawyers and more ability to
spread its message through the media than before, though I wasn't around
at the time so can't really comment. Unfortunately, like the near slave
workers of the early industrial revolution, we get to live through the
turmoil first.

 - Richard

(Standard disclaimer, I'm not a layer)

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