I bet Roy is kicking himself for taking a break when he did! That being said it gave him plenty of time to come back after a lot of the intial confusion has been hashed out.

The first post,  Microsoft Confirms Mono is Not Safe, Stallman Agrees, outlines 4 points of concern:

1. Mono — like .NET — does not correspond to an ECMA standard because it brings with it more than just the core. It puts Microsoft in better charge of developers (as in “developers developers developers developers”). Patents were never the sole issue when it comes to Mono.
2. Deviation from the ECMAs is not allowed. This is a concern we highlighted too. This ensures that Microsoft stays in control (no independence, which it may describe as “fragmentation” just to justify this policy).
3. Additional parts of Mono will ultimately be used. Projects like Banshee are sponsored by Novell and Novell only has acquired protection with a patent deal (and that too will have expired for SLE* users by January 2012). Some projects already grab portions of the ‘restricted’ parts. We gave examples before.
4. FAT had Microsoft make similar promises that Microsoft did not keep or obey when it sued TomTom. FAT needed to spread first. It is simply called “patent ambush”.

If I had to list my concerns around the Promise I would come up with a slightly different list:

  1. Standard bits alone are not enough to deliver killer apps. We have several Microsoft emails about limiting the usefulness of what was standardized, so we know they at least discussed this internally.
  2. The Community Promise has that restriction that the Open Specification Promise does not. By not extending the Promise to partial implementations, it could “lock out” alternative implementations of the standard. Limited sub-sets of languages are a common practice in the industry for specialized purposes.
  3. The Community Promise will constantly be misrepresented as covering the whole of mono – giving a false veneer of security over the non-covered bits (which end up to be the “juicy parts”)
  4. The Community Promise only applies to the current version. This could be used by Microsoft to “freeze out” competing implementations. Just update the standard, but not the promise.

Keep in mind that I have already said I will give the benefit of the doubt on this move. I don’t think the Community Promise is a trap, so much as it is a move designed to free things up some, but not enough so that Microsoft doesn’t have a killswitch or two in case things get out of hand. In that sense it is not an immediate trap, but more of a “lull them into a sense of security” trap.

Microsoft doesn’t need to do anything drastic now – that’s why you can ignore people that say “Well, Microsoft would have sued by now if they wanted to” – no they wouldn’t. Not even Ballmer hopped up on developer sweat and chair aroma is that crazy. There’s no analysis right now that makes it worth Microsoft shutting down mono at this point in time. Quite the contrary, Microsoft has got to be absolutely delighted over the mono project.

Now, if 10 years down the road, Linux share of the home desktop is 20% and rising, and Windows is 80% and falling, we might just see something then. I’m looking to see what sort of attacks Microsoft brings out against Firefox in the next few months, considering by some measures IE is approaching 50% market share. Take whatever nastiness you see there from Microsoft and multiply it by a googol if Windows ever finds itself in similar straits.

Finally, here’s the best point to remember: GNU/Linux got to where it is today despite Microsoft’s best efforts. We do not need them. I can not understand why after years of Free and Open Source fighting off and growing without Microsoft, then when Microsoft decides they need us, we act like Microsoft is the one doing us the favor!

Anyway, pulling up a chair and popcorn to watch the flames over at BN!