Summary: Moonlight “promise” full of legal holes and Novell’s Visual Studio surrogate removes GPL code

YESTERDAY we showed that Microsoft's “promise” to Moonlight has at least 10 holes in it and an ongoing discussion at LWN finds even more holes which are inferred from the original text of the “promise” (the FSF found the Mono “promise” to be unacceptable).

For the curious, Microsoft has posted the new “covenant not to sue” covering Moonlight 3 and 4. It is still quite narrow. “Microsoft, on behalf of itself and its Subsidiaries, hereby covenants not to sue End Users for infringement under Necessary Claims of Microsoft and its Subsidiaries on account of such End Users’ use of Moonlight Implementations to the extent originally provided by Novell during the Term and, if applicable, the Extension or Post-Extension Period, but only to the extent such Moonlight Implementations are used as Conforming Runtimes.” Microsoft can also discontinue it at any time.

They actually issued a press release just to promote this “promise”. It is apparently more important to Novell than promoting actual products, but then again, the news also had something to do with version 2 coming out [1, 2, 3].

One person has pointed out that Novell is in the process of removing GPL code as though it is not acceptable. From Miguel de Icaza’s blog:

* MonoDevelop code is now LGPLv2 and MIT X11 licensed. We have removed all of the GPL code, allowing addins to use Apache, MS-PL code as well as allowing proprietary add-ins to be used with MonoDevelop (like RemObject’s Oxygene).

So Novell has removed what Steve Ballmer called “cancer”, which is the same licence that Novell and Microsoft conspired to hack. Novell’s Banshee too is licensed under the MIT X11 (not just the Windows booster known as MonoDevelop). Is Novell still allergic to the GPL? █

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