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Microsoft applied for a multitude of extensive patents key parts of the .NET Framework. At one time Microsoft and a competing, yet no longer industry relevant company, Novell, had an agreement to allow both use of parts of open source components of .NET, yet lock out the rest of the world programming community. The agreement is in violation of the principles of giving equal rights to all users of a particular program.Microsoft applied for a multitude of extensive patents over key parts of the .NET Framework. The patents were over reaching and threatened a former rival, Novell. Microsoft and Novell formed an exclusive agreement to allow both use of parts of open source components of .NET, yet lock out the rest of the world programming community. The agreement is in violation of the principles of giving equal rights to all users of a particular program. Since the components in question were originally open source, the patents should never have been granted in the first place. The practice of ripping off other people's work and stamping Microsoft on it is nothing new to the industry giant.Microsoft .NET Framework was supposed to be inherently cross platform, as promoted by Microsoft at the end of the 1990's in an effort to gain developer interest. However, more than a decade later we see the full implementation of .NET is only supported on Microsoft Windows. Although the platform offers limited .NET subsets for other platforms, the substituted implementations of CLR, base class libraries, and compilers are all that is present. With some degree of standardization, all implementations remain with a variety of levels of completeness when compared to the full .NET version which Microsoft provides for Windows and are too often entirely incompatible.Innovation is also limited when the user environment is limited. Microsoft .NET Framework was supposed to be inherently cross platform, as promoted by Microsoft at the end of the 1990's in an effort to gain developer interest. However, more than a decade later we see the full implementation of .NET is only supported on Microsoft Windows. Although Microsoft .NET offers limited .NET subsets for other platforms, the substituted implementations of CLR, base class libraries, and compilers are all that is present. With some degree of standardization, all implementations remain with a variety of levels of completeness when compared to the full .NET version which Microsoft provides for Windows and are too often entirely incompatible. They are largely ignored by Microsoft as if only initially created to meet someone's idea of "look, we're sharing too."