Slashdot Mirror
Could Mono Kill Gnome?
Jrbl writes "NewsForge is running This editorial by Tina Gasperson about the possible implications for GNOME if it gets Mono (which allows patented components.) There's also a reference to this article at The Register in which Miguel de Icaza raves about Microsoft."
some forty jokes about mononucleosis and how it will just make you sick, probably not kill you. Yada, yada, yada.
/me thinks we've spent too much effort arguing about this.
.NET/Mono", "Linux desktop struggles" and "GNOME in Trouble" sensationalism for ZDNet headlines, and that's not going to help our cause one bit.
Ximian is going to develop Mono - that much is clear. It doesn't matter what anyone says, they're going to use it.
Wether 'official' Gnome uses it or not doesn't matter. Enough people hate the idea that that probably won't happen. And if it does happen, they'll either be a fork, or massive exodus away from Gnome.
Let Ximian do what they want to do. Gnome is GPL - what's everyone so scared about? We've got bigger fish to fry.
All this does is provide - "Linux Community divided over
I'm getting pretty tired of the trend of Slashdot to post stories that are not only based on very shaky and highly-speculative evidence, but are backed-up by old articles that have since been refuted/proven dead-wrong.
It's one thing to accuse Microsoft of FUD, it's another to do their job for them by fragmenting the open-source/FSF/Linux community by posting this type of crap.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
The article is very hard to read, as it seems to confuse patents and copyright in ways that are imiscable. I will try to lay out the timeline that I think she's assuming when she says "Intel, having gleefully taken advantage of the MIT licensing on Mono's class libraries, enforces its patents against every entity making use of its modifications, including the Gnome project, effectively shutting it down."
1 Mono exists
2 Gnome adopts Mono (a reach, but ok)
3 Intel writes proprietary (non-MIT-licensed) components for Mono
4 Intel enforces patentson those components and shuts down Gnome!
Ok... so we come to the obvious solution. Assuming that #2 happens (no pun intended), #4 can only happen if #3 is followed by:
3.4 Gnome adopts Intel proprietary components via Mono
Um... *WHY*?!
Of course, if Gnome implements these features using Bonobo and Orbit guess what Intel can do? That's right... enforce their patents!
This is, AFAIKT, junk reporting. If I'm wrong, please show me specifically what timeline you see occuring.
Personally, I'd say this is a pretty paranoid article. Sure, M$ must have some sway with Intel, but Intel has been pretty active in the open source world themselves, going so far as to invest in RedHat and VA even. Linux on the server is big, and so is the money. Nothing Microsoft could do to Intel (rather then OEMs who license their software) could cause them to kill GNOME.
.net. It's just not going to happen.
Also, sun is never going to develop software that requres
Other then that, what exactly about the MIT license makes it more prone to patent problems? Is it that MIT'd code can be patented or what? How is it that an official GNU project (as GNOME is) not use the GPL or LGPL?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Haven't we already seen enough on this drama by now? I mean, sometimes it's like a damn soap opera around here with the "he said/she said".. Let's see, Miguel makes some statements about the idea of .Net and Mono, RMS is taken out of context and made to look confrontational (OK! *More* confrontational) about it. Both of them bend over backwards to explain themselves and repair the appearance of any breach, Miguel comes back with a *very* lengthy explanation about what he meant and what 'The Register' had taken out of context for whatever reason, and yet we find ourselves looking at the same tired issues, yet again..
Hrmmm.. I wonder what's on Jerry Springer...
My co-worker once told me, that OS/2 died because its windows emulation was too good.
I think something like this might happen to every Linux Software. Therefore it is unwise to support closed standarts.
OK, my turn to play pundit. (-;
.Net seems dangerous for GNOME. Imagine that Microsoft really does let other people play in the .Net game. Consider the ramifications to the Open Source movement if proprietary software like MS Office or Photoshop could be used more-or-less 'natively' in Linux using the .Net API provided by Mono. Would laziness set in, slowing projects like OpenOffice and Gimp? Would people still use the free software or would they just give in and use what is more familiar? Without .Net support, people will continue to be forced to use Free Software in many areas, thereby causing them to learn new tools and break ties with proprietary ones.
.NET is supporting the future of proprietary software simply by enabling it. Another sign of this would be GNOME/Mono moving away from GPL to a "less defensive" license. Microsoft knows that Windows could be doomed in the near future. They also know the power of the Open Source movement and that it has the power to obsolete their entire proprietary business model. IMO, they're using .NET to try to hook people into hybrid free/non-free software so that they'll still have a strong foothold no matter where the market evolves. And if the patent issues get ugly, we could end up paying Microsoft for software that *we* wrote. Sure, GNOME itself could still be free, but if half the Open Source software for it requires .NET modules from Microsoft, licensed at a cost, we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot. A similar analogy would be the DVD crypto mess. You can buy the media, you can write the free software to play it, but you can't legally use them together in the US.
It's one thing to support what could eventually be a necessary "embrace and extend" standard, but to focus everything on
So it seems to me that supporting
Let me re-emphasize: We do NOT need ANY proprietary software. We do NOT need Microsoft or ANY of their products. All we need is a stable user-developer community. In a word: consultants. That is the future of Open Source in the business world. And it is a good future both for business and free software developers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Redundancy is good. Having diversity is a good thing, it's the sign of a thriving community.
What will you be suggesting next? That humanity should take up wholesale cloning?
Monocultures are evolutionary dead ends. Inevitably something comes along that devastates everything in the monoculture because it's all based on the same code. If you want to be taken down when that devastation is unleashed, be my guest. I'll take the other path.
Deleted
Let me tell you of a little "problem". I am writing a shareware application. And in this shareware application I am saving data to the users directory. Since this application is going to be cross-platform I decided to write it in wxWindows. All is ok.
But then I saw that the wxWindows call to get the users home directory was not working. So I investigated. It turned out that Microsoft "added" a new call to get the users home directory. Only this shell call will get the right directory. So I had to #ifdef WIN32 to get the right directory.
What is the moral of the story? Without this shell call I cannot write a good app. Since Windows XP requires that I save my data in the user directory. I do not want Win32 approved, I just want my app to work properly. Now imagine this one call was patented or hidden or whatever. At that point mono is left without a single call. What does Mono do? Invent a new call? What happens then? I am back to C++ programming with #ifdef's. To be frank I would rather go back to C++ then start anew to be confronted with that problem yet again.
Sorry folks Miguel has not learned from history and he is doomed to repeat it. Except he may pull down the entire GNOME project. Oh well c'est la vie that is why we have KDE!!!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Are you kidding? GNOME is the most controversial project in the history of Linux because it was basically launched, at least at first, to kill KDE (which is the second most controversial project in the history of Linux).
GNOME's GPL-ness and RMS-ness have been the subject of attacks and discussion and "I'm taking my ball and going home" for years now. Only KDE, with its former questionable-GPL-ness and non-RMS-ness comes close in terms of controversy.
I would suggest that there has never been either a GNOME or KDE story on Slashdot or most any other site that did not start a flame war on the related forum. It's the nature of GNOME and KDE... because they are the "desktops of Linux" people have the perception that whichever eventually becomes more popular will essentially be Linux (for the average user) for the rest of time... that kind of perception of finality brings out all the GPL-crazies, anti-GPL-crazies, make-Linux-like-Windows-for-the-user crazies and I-am-anti-Windows-don't-do-it crazies.
(Meanwhile, WindowMaker on the desktop has been silently winning in terms of actual usability almost since its inception.)
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Why do people keep bringing up DirectX as a competitor to OpenGL? DirectX came about because developers were tired of having to reinvent the wheel whenever they wanted to do something more complex than merely tell GDI to write out a couple of bitmaps to form a window. Read the DX developer books (the Microsoft Press ones) they give a good deal of insight into the original ideas behind DX. DirectX was never intended for people to use instead of OpenGL, if that were the case Microsoft could have kept Windows from properly using OpenGL libraries. DirectX is not a fucking product they sell, noone fucking sells OpenGL. Don't compare oranges to bricks man.
.NET is an API like DX or OpenGL, some portions are indeed APIs but most portions of it are just communication specifications. This whole todo about Mono and thus GNOME being Microsoft's bitch is so retarded. It is much better to have software that can talk to a wide range of software as opposed to only being compatible with a narrow range of software. It allows for vendor independence as well as forward and backwards compatibility. If a bunch of vendors produce software that does FOO and are all using specified guidelines for FOO communication you can pick any one of those vendors (or write your own software) that does FOO and you aren't locked into using software from a single vendor. Using Mono and supporting .NET communication schemes GNOME software can talk to closed source software using the same schemes. A great example is GDict, it is only going to work with dictionary services that it knows how to use. A SOAP version though could query a server to see if it is running a service and once it finds out if it is it can figure out how to query it as to get the results it is looking for.
You seem to think
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
"Now one of the biggest obstacles to Linux that I see is the lack of interoperabiity with other OSes, especially Windows."
.NET shit comes along and we have to try and be inteoperable with that?? I say, No. I'm tired of being yolked around by Microsoft. The Linux community, the free software and opensource movement is at a point now where we need and CAN start defining our OWN standards. It's funny people will believe that a company that has fought, extended and want's it's own standards so they work with nothing else all of a sudden want's .NET everywhere on everything. They submit some specs (not all) to a standards body and all of a sudden they are nice and want interoperability. I swear it's almost as if they have mind control over people.
I call bullshit on that. Linux works on more archs than windows does, linux is inteoperable with just about close to everything out there, we even try to read NTFS partitions.
The biggest obstacle to Linux is nothing.. an obstacle that this community has been trying to get over however, has been inteoperability with Windows(tm) by Microsoft. THEY are the ones that don't want interoperability. Now that ties are seemingly broken as projects like Samba and Wine come along (because of Microsoft these projects exist, my deepest gratitude to the developers of these projects) here this
Standards have never stopped MS before. If their monopoly was threatened they would break the standard in the windows implementation of the CLI. Code then would not be compatible with the unix version and voila they steer the ship back to monopoly land.
War is necrophilia.
That is the point exactly. MS is playing the standard supporters like a fiddle. They understand what is required to compete against Open Source. And sadly people like Miguel fall into it.
I look at Apache and PERL and LINUX... What do they do? They make sure they build the best applications there are.
Take Apache as an example. To be compatible Apache could have said, wow ISAPI is really cool lets build that and do a good job... What did Apache do? They did a rudimentary ISAPI, but kept focus on their API.
Or take PERL. Sure there are PERL extensions specific to Windows. But the mother ship PERL (Larry Wall) is more concerned about making sure that PERL solves the needs of all its users.
Maybe GNOME will continue since Ximian != GNOME. But with people like Miguel talking the way he does does not bode well. I am curious to see what Sun will say...
And remember track record of anyone building a symbiotic relationship with Microsoft is 0!!! Microsoft is a dictator (their right) and there is no way you can change that.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Mono is worthwhile developing even if it doesn't have full compatibility with MS dotNet Framework"
This assertion is just as vacuous this time as the last ~20 times it's been thown into Dotnet discussions.
Funny how no Mono proponents will go so far as producing a concrete list of requirements that cloning Dotnet (specifically and uniquely) will satisfy, presumably because they either don't exist or they can't guarantee to deliver them.
The fact is that there is precisely zero benefit in cloning Dotnet unless it offers real portability for real applications. All other requirements can better be delivered using existing or emerging platforms.