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A sliver of light

de Icaza is aware of the problems created by the 'IP' restrictions surrounding his projects, and has expended some effort in trying to forge agreements with Microsoft which allow the re-use of Microsoft codecs and methodologies.

Most recently, Microsoft has issued an updated Covenant to End Users of Moonlight which claims to cast at least a sliver of light on the problem. For most users, however, the language of this covenant appears ambivalent and open to re-interpretation. As Tom 'spot' Callaway , Fedora's engineering manager notes:

"The new 'covenant' is specifically worded to apply only to end-users, and makes the following noteworthy distinction: 'an entity or individual cannot qualify both as an End User and a Distributor for use of the same copy of a Moonlight Implementation.' It grants no patent rights to Distributors, aside from those already granted to Novell in the previous covenant. What it practically means is that once you distribute, you stop being considered an 'End User' by Microsoft, and are no longer protected by this 'covenant' (unless you're Novell or Microsoft)."

The covenant also reserves the right for Microsoft to discontinue the agreement at any time, and forbids use of "GPLv3 or a similar license". For this reason some leading distributors, including Fedora, still see Moonlight as a potential hostage to fortune, and exclude the software from their distributions. This does not apply to Debian and Ubuntu which use a different rationale.

Callaway gives a clear enunciation of the problem. "If Microsoft was serious about encouraging adoption of the Silverlight/Moonlight technology in FOSS," he wrote, "they would do so with an unrestricted patent grant for all end-users and distributors for code under any FOSS license."

Legally, this leaves Moonlight in similar murky waters to Mono. Moonlight can be used, at least in the short term, if you have obtained your software through Novell. Otherwise, you are cast adrift in a no man's land where it is not always apparent what is permissible and what is not. (In Mono, some elements are covered by ECMA, some are not).

Next: Behind the web

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