I can't seem to find any basis for this other than "entity x recently learned from anonymous entity Y that Microsoft might do something bad" That said, the poi

I can't seem to find any basis for this other than "entity x recently learned from anonymous entity Y that Microsoft might do something bad" That said, the point here is that the patents in question in regards to Mono are the cornerstones of Microsoft's own development efforts. So they aren't going to sell off their ADO.NET related patents because it's the core of data access in their entire development environment. For the scenario in which a patent affecting Mono was sold to happen Microsoft would have to auction off pieces of the .NET Framework itself and that's just not going to happen.