Novell's development of Mono steps outside the sandbox defined by Microsoft's Community Promise

Last week, Microsoft extended the terms of their Community Promise to implementations of the ECMA 334 and 335 standards. You might think this means it's safe to write your software in C#. However, this promise is full of loopholes, and it's nowhere near enough to make C# safe.

FSF: Last week, Microsoft extended the terms of their Community Promise to implementations of the ECMA 334 and 335 standards. You might think this means it's safe to write your software in C#. However, this promise is full of loopholes, and it's nowhere near enough to make C# safe.

The Free Software Foundation has issued another statement on Mono, C# after the recent Microsoft extension of the terms of their Community Promise to implementations of ECMA 334 and 335. Is is safe to go back in the water now, as so many have been saying? FSF says no, that the "promise is full of loopholes, and it's nowhere near enough to make C# safe."

There has been much discussion in the free software community and in the press about the inadequacy of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) as a standard, including good analysis of some of the shortcomings of Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP), a promise that is supposed to protect projects from patent risk.

First the big news: Microsoft will be applying the Community Promise patent licensing to both C# and the CLI.

Microsoft's bid to dispel the patent fears surrounding the open source .NET clone, Mono, has met with little enthusiasm from free software advocates.

We've all heard the rants: Mono has patents, Microsoft releases community promise, community ignores, flamewars continue. Enough to make any developer want to stop programming out of sheer annoyance. Mono is an excellent language and platform; there's nothing anybody can do to change that. People will continue to develop C# apps, and those that continue to hate Mono will continue to complain.

...or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Look at the Wookie. Misdirection is a curious thing, and in the hands of Microsoft "evangelists" (such as Miguel de Icaza), it's positively dangerous.