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It's MIT licensed. If they do then it can be forked and community maintained. It could be similar to the mass forking of projects when Oracle acquired Sun. .
by stusmall 4y ago
It's MIT licensed. If they do then it can be forked and community maintained. It could be similar to the mass forking of projects when Oracle acquired Sun. .NET now has a way bigger community than a lot of those projects did and they thrived.
- cardanome 4y agoMIT does not have a patent-grant clause though. There is a good reason projects like the Rust Language are dual-licensed under MIT AND Apache2 because only the later protects you from software patent claims. So I wouldn't be so sure about MS not having any legal means to shut down forks. Even if they might not win in court, as long as they can make up something up, they still have enough legal war money to effectively shut down any unwanted fork just by threatening legal action.
- omajid 4y agoMicrosoft publishes a patent promise here, though: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/PATENTS.TXT https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/PATENTS.TXT
- cardanome 4y ago"We promise not to sue you" is much weaker than a proper patent-grant. That promise seems only to apply if you use the .NET runtime. If you used a forked project, it might not apply. See also: https://endsoftwarepatents.org/2014/11/ms-net/ https://endsoftwarepatents.org/2014/11/ms-net/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]