Today, I was looking for a program to get the source code and licenses of all the dependencies of an npm project, and I found a tool called OSSGadget [6] by Microsoft, that seems like it could be very useful for what I was trying to do, but it requires .NET. I revisited the End Software Patents wiki page and followed a chain of links to "Microsoft's Empty Promise" [7], which explains that the reason to worry about Microsoft's patents more than other patents is because Microsoft "declared itself the enemy of GNU/Linux and stated its intention to attack our community with patents". Since 2009, have things changed? Microsoft does not claim to be an enemy anymore. Additionally, "Why free software shouldn't depend on Mono or C#" [8] makes it clear that the patent threat in this case does not make the software nonfree. We also found .NET in Parabola [9], further confirming this.
So, I was originally going to ask if .NET should be added to the List of software that does not respect the FSDG. It seems now that .NET does respect the FSDG. But, the follow-up question to that is: Is using OSSGadget (based on .NET) to help the Free Software Directory a good idea? Regardless of the FSDG, should using C# implementations still be discouraged?
[1] https://github.com/ppy/osu [2] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime [3] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/PATENTS.TXT [4] https://wiki.endsoftwarepatents.org/wiki/.NET,_C-sharp,_and_Mono[5] https://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines
[6] https://github.com/Microsoft/OSSGadget [7] https://www.fsf.org/news/2009-07-mscp-mono [8] https://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono [9] https://www.parabola.nu/packages/community/x86_64/dotnet-sdk/
OpenPGP_0x8EF548378E806320.asc
Description: OpenPGP public key
OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature