FAQ: Licensing

Licensing

Can I write commercial or proprietary applications that run with Mono?

Yes. The licensing scheme is planned to allow proprietary developers to write applications with Mono.

What license or licenses are you using for the Mono Project?

The Mono runtime, compilers and tools and most of the class libraries are licensed under the MIT license.

The Mono runtime include some bits of code licensed under the BSD license and some class libraries are under the Apache 2 license. The exact list is available here

Note that as of March 31st, 2016 the Mono runtime and tools have been relicensed to the MIT license.

I would like to contribute code to Mono under a particular license. What licenses will you accept?

Contributions are now taken under the .NET Foundation CLA.

Patents

What kind of patent coverage exists for Mono?

Microsoft has issued a patent promise for Mono, as follows: