There has been a new development in the subject I raised a day ago. It seems that there has been some effort on Microsoft’s side to clarify the legal issue with the Mono Project. According to this article in iTWire, Microsoft will extend its Community Promise to the C# and CLI standards.

Community Promise is a document that basically states that Microsoft won’t make any trouble to anyone who will try to create new implementations of covered standards. At the moment, it covers XPS and VBA languages. And now it will cover C# and CLI as well.

There are several reservations though.

First of all I couldn’t find anything on the legal status of the Community Promise document. It seems that nobody can tell for sure how binding this document is. Mono proponents will obviously tell that this is the next thing after ten commandments. Mono opponents, on the other hand, will undoubtedly say that this document has no meaning and Microsoft can violate it any moment.

In my opinion the later seems to be true, unfortunately. Microsoft can violate this document. Knowing a bit about history of Microsoft, I doubt there’s any document that Microsoft cannot violate. Yet it seems to me that Microsoft has been trying to say aloud that they will not go after those using or developing Mono. Otherwise, the entire Community Promise and ECMA standardization seems to be useless.

Another issue is that Mono project contains many different components. This obviously includes the CLI and C#, but there are others. Yet according to this, Mono community already started taking care of this, by splitting Mono into several parts, some covered by Community Promise and others that are not covered.

In any case, this seems to be great news for the Mono project.