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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."
We saw those comments from Miguel a long time ago. He's not raving about Microsoft. He just likes .NET. So do a lot of us, and I'm a free software raving lunatic. Some of us even like Java. :) Representing those comments as "raving about Microsoft" is a deliberate misrepresentation.
If you don't want Gnome to be .NET, then fine. Stay with what you've got, and if it ever moves toward .NET, fork. No one will blame you, but you may find that Gnome/.NET outperforms what you've got.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
/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
Could Mono kill Gnome
I sure as hell don't know but I'm pretty sick of watching the redundancy in Linux. Sure, most of it has a purpose but I might be able to use the damn software if people made sacrifices for the sake of getting a desktop product out. I'm not trying to start a flame war about whether it is good enough for *your* desktop or not so please don't start.
What I would love to see is everyone who is working on anything remotely redundant to drop what they are doing, put their collective heads together and come up with a real competitor for Microsoft in something *other* than the server market. I don't care if it is a desktop product or an TV/entertainment product.
There are too many unfinished products and not enough of One Good Thing.
BTW - I mentioned the TV thing because I am currently building a home theater PC that has caused me much grief. I see that both Microsoft and the Linux community are addressing the market.
10 to 1 odds that Microsoft finishes a product that everyone buys and bitches about while the Linux product stays in beta stage for years to come.
Sigh...
This message has been brought to you by the department of the redundancy department.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
There's a Visual Studio .Net banner ad atop the front page at 4:59 pm Eastern.
Shall we expect more open and Slashdot now? :D
[Granted, it is served through Double-Click. Does MS outsource advertising?]
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.
Given that performance is not a show-stopper anymore and given that Managed Software (class library at OS level, GC, runtime checks) is the Next Thing (hey, there was a time when we though C was too much a layer over assembly language), your choices are Java or CLI/CLR.
Java has some nice stuff to it -- friendly documentation at the Sun site compared to that gibberish that passes for documentation at MS, a nice software-engineered feel instead of that steaming pile of stuff that makes up an MS API (I develop for MS API's). But Java is Java and Sun is Sun, and you have to take the whole thing or leave it.
Since MS has flopped this "CLR/CLI/.NET" standard out there, it really there for the implementing. Oh, the Borg we hear, we are about to get assimilated into the Collective.
My understanding is that the effort is not simply to try to clone .NET but to implement an Open Source managed software thingy, and if it forks from MS, who cares. MS can have all the proprietary extensions it wants and we can have our own extensions.
Why not clone Java? Sun won't let you. Why not invent our own managed software thingy? We could, but there is one already out there.
Maybe I am missing something, but I don't think that MS cares whether or not there is an Open Source version of dotNet.
.Net pieces to handle each. All the while, your passport account is getting billed a small amout for each use of each different function. So instead of paying $200 for Office, you pay a small amount (say .10) for each use of the spell checker. So maybe this month, your passport bill is 19.00 for use of .Net services. Instant revenue stream.
.Net function.
.Net Development part, not the .Net Framework. And, why would MS be porting it to FreeBSD if they did not want Linux to have it as well.
Follow me on this.
Operating System wars are over. Linux is making headway, and the courts are ruling that you have to open the source code. Microsoft has seen that revenue is not going to increase with the rapid OS upgrades. They want a month to month revenue stream. So they *invent* software renting. But this is not 'hey I am going to check out MS Office for a couple hours at 19.95 an hour', it is more like this as I read it. I need a new resume, so I start a wizard in Windows 2002 that helps me write one. So while the wizard is going through each part (like spellcheck, cover letter) the wizard automagically downloads the proper
When upgrades happen, then you automagically download the latest version of the
Everything I have read is that Microsoft want to push this everywhere. They want this on every computer, every PDA, even right down to your cell phone. So I do not believe that they care that it is on Gnome. If the passport stuff is in there, then it just adds to the revenue stream. That is what they are really after.
Plus, I see Gnome trying to implement the
The only interesting thing is if MS wants the passport/hailstorm added in. Then things could get interesting.
Mono only wants to do the software development side, and there are a lot of nice things in there. It is the passport side that makes us cringe.
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.
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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
The Mono controversy (with some RMS thrown in):
- The present story
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RMS comment
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Miguel responds
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Miguel talks about Mono at *gasp* MSDN
RMS controversy (apart from Mono):-
RMS not elected
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RMS says why he should be elected
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RMS IS running for election
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Breaking News! RMS running for a seat on the GNOME foundation
GNOME is behind or dying or a slave of corporate masters (see also Mono controversy):Etc. Almost half of the past 30 news posts on GNOME involve a political controversy. Is this news-site bias or simply GNOME's ability to stir controversy?
~~~~~~~~~
dissertus scribendo latine videri volo.
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"
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.
The only time anything changes with respect to Intel and patents is if Intel explicitly signs their rights away. I believe that if you distribute your software under a GNU license, that means you give others the right to use your patented invention. That's a nice safeguard, to be sure, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to protect Mono or Gnome from Intel.
If Intel were duplicitous enough to contribute a patented invention under an X11-style copyright and then, two years later, turn around, mention that they have a patent, and sue for infringement, Mono and Gnome might have to stop using that part of the software, but I seriously doubt any judge would award damages. And the affected parts of the software could be easily replaced, since patents are not like copyrights or trade secrets--there is no risk of "contamination".
Altogether, the article strikes me as being as the grumblings of someone who is just overly zealous about GNU-style licenses. Yes, GNU-style licenses are nice, but the sky isn't falling if something is distributed under some other license. The X11 license is perfectly fine for open source software and has been used for many projects (including X11 itself) that are a much more dangerous minefield of patents than a 1970's style object oriented language.
"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"
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Man, if I had a dollar everytime I've heard somebody say that.. :)
/.
You'd be a broke fucker on
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
I'm a developer on win32 platforms, so perhaps I shouldn't care, but I find it irritating at best that a person who put in so much effort to give the Open Source community the stuff they wanted, is critizised as if he's the lamest n00b in the world. And why is this? Because he's one of the very FEW on Linux platforms who has realized that today's way of computing is doomed and will be taken over by a new, more distributed way. Miguel took the brave stand to decide to implement a Microsoft based technique.
Oh brother, now he's true evil...
Get a life, zealots. If Mono kills Gnome (or better: makes Gnome obsolete), why would that be something bad? If Mono lets you run the applications you need, makes you use your Linuxbox the way you want and the way you need it, would you miss Gnome? I don't think so.
Mono is a hell of a project to complete, a lot of subprojects of Mono still need completion. If you want Linux to survive in the new era of computing, stop whining and start coding.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.