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."

Comments

Gnome can't die

[jdavidb]

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.

Re:Gnome can't die

[JordoCrouse]

If you get a map showing you how to get to Grandma's house faster (but it happens to go by the wolf's den), do you follow it without caution, or do you grab a shotgun first?

I don't think that the question here is if the .NET architecture is a good idea (it is), and if we should implement it (we should).

The point of the editorial (and of the /. post), is to wonder if we are setting ourselves up to be eaten by Microsoft (or indeed, anyone who may lay claim to the Mono libraries). It has become clear that Gnome could be effectively taken out through the current licencing. Microsoft would love to beat us at our own game - and use its influence on other companies to pull rank on Gnome and kill it, especially if Gnome/Mono does becomes a huge success.

Too much money is at stake in the next round of operating systems to leave anything to chance. Microsoft (and Intel for that matter) is setting themselves up for a free shot at Gnome if it ever starts threating the status quo. Thats scary to me.

Sick of this topic already .....

[reaper20]

/me thinks we've spent too much effort arguing about this.

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 .NET/Mono", "Linux desktop struggles" and "GNOME in Trouble" sensationalism for ZDNet headlines, and that's not going to help our cause one bit.

Re:Sick of this topic already .....

[curunir]

involving castrated rams is just going way too far!

Actually, considering the gnu logo and the dire predictions in the editorial, it seems strangely appropriate.

SlashFUD

[Apostata]

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.

Could it?

[swordboy]

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.

MS advertising on ./

[RampagingSimian]

Hrmm...(offtopic?)

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?]

So don't use it

[ajs]

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.

Re:So don't use it

[Keith Russell]

I think what she's trying to say, in a rather roundabout, "let me adjust my tin foil hat" sort of way, is that there's no legal precedent for this situation. Is there an implicit patent license when patented material is contributed to an Open Source project by the patent holder? Look at it this way:

1. Ximian adopts X11 license for parts of Mono
2. Intel contributes to X11-licensed parts, including Intel-patented code
3. Gnome 4.0 is converted completely to Mono
4. Gnome acheives World Domination
5. Intel calls in its marker on Ximian and Gnome, demanding royalties for that Intel-patented code
6. Everyone gets dragged into court
7. Miguel stands up in court and says, "Of course, there's Intel-patented code in Mono. Intel put it there in the first place!"
8. Intel responds, "Yep. We did."

So what happens now? Will the judge have a sudden flash of common sense and tell Intel where to stick it's legal briefs? Or will Intel's high-priced landsharks invoke some strange combination of DMCA, SSSCA, the Patriot Act, and a rider on some farm subsidy legislation to swing the case their way?

It is a valid concern, and I would hate to see projects as significant as Mono and Gnome be taken down by it. But I think Tina is being a bit too alarmist.

OT: This is what Slashdot's email auto-obfuscator generated for my email address:

krussell@ mEEEsa.com minus threevowels

Hey, Taco! I do not work for Jar-Jar Binks! :-)

Managed software

[Latent Heat]

Having tried C#/.NET at the command line, the performance hit over C++ is maybe 2-3 (18 months of Moore) instead of 5-10 (about 5 years).

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.

Why can't people see what MS is really up to?

[Reylas]

Maybe I am missing something, but I don't think that MS cares whether or not there is an Open Source version of dotNet.

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 .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.

When upgrades happen, then you automagically download the latest version of the .Net function.

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 .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.

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.

The real danger

[Ogerman]

OK, my turn to play pundit. (-;

It's one thing to support what could eventually be a necessary "embrace and extend" standard, but to focus everything on .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.

So it seems to me that supporting .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.

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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Re:/. pattern

[aussersterne]

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.)

Re:Miguel DOES NOT GET IT!!! So young and naive

[SerpentMage]

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.

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