Are all future versions of C# covered by the Microsoft Community Promise?

Question

I was wondering if open-source implementations, such as Mono, are theoretically going to become legally forced into only implementing old versions of C# which the community promise covers.

Thanks,

Mack

Answer 1

The only thing that is covered by the Community Promise is the ECMA specification. This mainly includes: a subset of C# 2.0 and a subset of CLI 2.0. That's it.

AFAIK, the ECMA has changed their IP Licensing requirements, so that all future standards must be covered by royalty-free patent licenses, but I'm not sure about that.

Beyond that, your guess is as good as anybody else's.