Re:Mono's Making Money
by JonoW on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @09:52AM
(#3347624)
How is that different from any other OSS project? If MS wants, they could look at a projects source code and decide that they've violated a patent and sue them. To my knowledge they're yet to do this.
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The difference is that Microsoft created .Net and the patents covering it together, so they're fairly narrow patents and it'd be a hell of a lot harder to find relevant prior art to use against them. (The same's true of OOXML, incidentally; Microsoft even tried to get a patent covering both it and ODF but the examiner narrowed it to just OOXML based on a huge amount of prior art dating back to SGML in the 80s.)