[Opensim-users] Microsoft issues patent promise, dispels Mono legal concerns

[Kyle Hamilton]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 11:44 AM, Ethan Grammatikidis<eekee57 at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> On Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:00:20 +0000
> Opensource Obscure <open at autistici.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> At a first glance this is good news for Opensim users and
>> developers that use Linux. I'd like to hear comments,
>> especially from free-software advocates.
>>
>> Microsoft issues patent promise, dispels Mono legal concerns
>> from Ars Technica - http://bit.ly/BasCG or
>> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/07/microsoft-issues-patent-promise-dispels-mono-concerns.ars
>
> Just wondering how binding this promise is. I guess MS couldn't break it without getting themselves bad press, but there's always a possibility of a company finding itself in a tight corner & thinking maybe it's worth breaking this. I find myself wondering if some, perhaps many big businesses are designed to run as if they're in a tight corner all the time.


I'm not a lawyer, but I've learned a lot from Groklaw. This is not
legal advice, simply my interpretation of what I've read :):

The legal principle involved is called "estoppel" -- if you make a
promise not to sue someone for doing B, and then they in good faith
rely on that promise and do B, you can't go back on your word and sue
them for it anyway.  If the promise was made by the rightsholder (and
the fact that they issued it as a press release in written form), if
they try, they will have the court rule against them.  It's been this
way since before we had a legal system in the US, and imported
England's.

(Technically, this is the same thing that a license is: you receive a
promise from the person who grants the license that they will not sue
you.  It doesn't matter if you pay for it or not.)

This "promise" can be looked at as a "license" as far as CLR runtimes
go: if someone tries to create a functional CLR implementation, they
have a license to any necessary patent claims that Microsoft holds
that must be infringed in order to adhere to the standard.  This
license does not extend to non-CLR technologies, though.

Again, IANAL.  Check with an IP lawyer if you want to.

 -Kyle H