[PLUG] MONO curiousity...

Ian Burrell ianburrell at gmail.com
Thu Apr 5 17:50:40 UTC 2007


On 4/5/07, plug_0 at robinson-west.com <plug_0 at robinson-west.com> wrote:
>
> This mono project sounds interesting, except for the closed libraries part.
>

The Mono class libraries are licensed under the MIT X11 license.  That
is open source. The compiler is GPL.  The runtime libraries are LGPL.
The class libraries used to be LGPL before they were relicensed.  The
reasoning what that there is some question how "derived works" is
defined for object-oriented dynamic languages.  They want to allow
people to write closed-source applications in Mono which link
dynamically with the class libraries.

The MIT X11 license does allow people to not release their
modifications but that doesn't seem to be a major danger with a
project where the rest of the code is under the GPL or LGPL.  And
where there is a strong open developer community which will keep the
open-source version moving faster than any proprietary fork.  Other
BSD licensed projects, like BSD, PostgreSQL, or X11 have had
proprietary forks which have been outdone by the open-source version.

 - Ian



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