Not surprisingly, Microsoft has filed for a number of patents regarding their .NET initiative.

An article on CNet is reporting that at least one of these patents is very broad and may well make the entire API to Microsoft's .NET platform a patented product and therefore stymie the efforts of the Open Source community to create compatible execution environments on non-Microsoft platforms.

It remains to be seen how this interacts with/interferes with the move to standardization. One possibility is that Microsoft will choose to use the patents in order to control the APIs development, but not implementation. The fear, however, is that they will use it to constrain the ability to build .NET compatible products for non-Microsoft systems.