here come the marketroids: MSFT Gives Open Source A Hug

[alexanderhenry at cox.net]

[quote]
Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols. These developers will be able to use the documentation for free to develop products. Companies that engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, as will enterprises that obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent license.
[/quote]

That's some pretty strong language.  So we develop Mono per M$'s API docs, and even if the docs are labeled "patented" as long as Mono remains free (beer) no one gets sued?