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Mono Squeezed Into Debian Default Installation
pallmall1 writes "OS News reports that Debian developer Josselin Mouette got Tomboy accepted as a dependency for gnome in the next release of Debian (codenamed Squeeze). While that may seem like nothing big (except for the 50 MByte size of the Tomboy package), Tomboy requires Mono — meaning that Mono will now be installed by default. Apparently, Debian doesn't have the same concerns over using specifications patented by Microsoft and licensed under undisclosed terms that Red Hat does. Perhaps Debian doesn't believe that Microsoft might do something like Rambus did."
TFA: "However, Microsoft says clearly that only Novell can supply Moonlight to end-users:".
Rolling Mono (note: Mono != Moonlight) into Debian would be beneficial for both Debian and Microsoft. I don't believe that Microsoft will take legal action against Debian or Miguel, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least considering Microsoft's recent suicidal business divisions.
I see Microsoft having a field day with this...
Perhaps Debian doesn't believe that Microsoft might do something like Rambus did.
Rambus was chastised for their actions (like the linked article states). And I propose Debian approach this the same way someone would approach the Rambus situation from the beginning had they an inkling of Rambus' true intent.
.NET, MIcrosoft does hold at least one patent on the .NET infrastructure. So far, Microsoft has agred to offer these under a "reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms of use" and they are currently royalty free. No one seems to be clear on how you get this into writing but it's allegedly the way things are.
.NET. Should they fail to comply with this request in a timely manner, I would submit all communications with Microsoft to ECMA in a motion to dismiss the aforementioned "standards" and remove Mono--and unfortunately Tomboy--from the Debian default package. I'd beef up the Debian wiki with details on how to get these two packages to fix this bug and focus on the bug for a near future release after Squeeze.
Even though Microsoft submitted the CLI and C# main components of
Were I a Debian leader, I would simply approach Microsoft with the Mono code and the ECMA code of conduct and demand it in writing that for this snapshot of the code you have a forever royalty free to interact with
At that point, sit back and let ECMA and the community at large hash it out with Microsoft. Better now than later when other things may depend on this package and Microsoft has you right where Rambus has every memory maker on the planet.
My work here is dung.
Last I checked, the "default installation" of Debian didn't even include X. So I'm guessing what they really mean is that they've included it in the default repositories, and if you apt-get gnome you'll get tomboy and mono too.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
tomboy package "Description: desktop note taking program using Wiki style links"
"..except for the 50 MByte size of the Tomboy package..."
What's wrong with this picture?
we discovered a new way to think.
So, what's so good about mono?
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
The commit was done on Debian unstable, which is Sid, not Squeeze.
Am I missing something?
I've been using Debian for ..... 8+ years, since 2001, and I've NEVER heard anything about "GNOME" being in the "default" install. Anything resembling a "default" install would be the the Debian base system, which includes things like basic system files, core-utils, bash, pam, etc. Anything else is installed explicitly by the user (yes, installers make it easier, but still you need to choose the option). There are thousands of Debian desktop users who have no GNOME installed, and are either using KDE, or some other desktop environment.
Besides, isn't "tomboy" already included in the GNOME of Debian Lenny (the current stable release)? At least when I did an "apt-get install gnome" yesterday (source list pointing to lenny), it installed tomboy for me, together with the EVIL EVIL mono etc. And Debian has included mono as part of its repository for years. If it had licensing/patent concerns, there wouldn't be any difference whether it was in the "default GNOME" installation or not.
Argh.
Don't quote me on this.
It's actually 6 MB for Tomboy itself. The 50 MB figure must include Mono, I guess.
Not really being much of a Linux person myself yet, I was curious about the negative feelings I've read about for Mono, ranging from general dislike to outright hate, as I've had several people tell me that Mono is actually really cool and easy to use if you're used to doing .Net programing in general. Malevolentjelly posted this link a few days back in the Silverlight 3 post and I found it very informative:
http://www2.apebox.org/wordpress/rants/124/
Here ---> http://www2.apebox.org/wordpress/rants/124/
This space for rent.
Proven? Really? What's the proof? That Microsoft hasn't sued yet? That doesn't stop them from suing in the future. I'm not aware of any 'proof' that the Mono fear is stupid. If anything, I used to not be too worried about Mono, until Microsoft sued TomTom for their use of Linux. That was NOT a lawsuit over Mono, but rather over VFAT and some other stuff. But, it proved that Microsoft is willing to use stupid patents to sue Linux users. So, now I'm worried that in the future, they will decide to sue over Mono. What would stop them if they should decide to sue?
Open and Closed source worlds are not exclusive and can happily co-exist with each other.
You mean a closed source browser can access an open source web server (or vice versa)? Sure. No one in the FSF is trying to prevent that, as far as I know. But if Microsoft decides to use its patent portfolio to pull the plug on Mono then there's a problem for all of us. Looks like the "stallmanists" might be on to something after all! Like it or not, you can't guarantee that Mono will still be legal next year.
GNOME folks are really pushing the adoption of KDE 4 nowadays. :)
It is great to see so much friendship between open-source projects
I don't see how this wins anyone anything.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
As a .NET developer (at work), and a Linux user (at home), I don't like this idea. I'm sure you are going to label me "a big rabid stallmanist troll" for pointing this out, but those patents are real, at least if you ask Microsoft. And so is the agreement that gives Novell permission to distribute Mono.
Now, why would Novell sign such an agreement? Easy: Because their legal department advised them to do so. From this we can conclude that Novells legal department has knowledge of legal risks concerning Mono.
Microsoft has already shown that their patents are not for self defence only, when they sued Tomtom over several patents related to the FAT filesystem. Not only is FAT old, there is also nothing about FAT, that isn't obvious to someone writing filesystem. In other words: FAT is not even patent worthy. The .NET framework, however, represents a great value for Microsoft (for one thing, it's the first Windows API that doesn't suck big time), and it's got to have several patent worthy ideas in it.
So, why would Microsoft want to protect something worthless like FAT, but not real value like the .NET framework?
As I see it, it's not a question about if they are going to sue someone over the .NET patents. It's a question of WHEN and WHOM.
So how many more years of them not suing anyone over Mono is it going to take before you people finally calm down and shut the fuck up? We've heard for 5 years this constant drumbeat that Microsoft is always around the corner waiting to sue people for Mono and none of you Chicken Littles have been right. Seriously, Microsoft deserves criticism for many things they have done in the past, but they have done right by this and have been about as open and willing to work with the FOSS community on Mono as one can really expect from a company like this.
The last time someone came up with accurate figures, it was a 10 MB difference between including GNote and Tomboy.
When taking a stand towards something, I find it sometimes useful to look at the people being very for or against. Viewing some of the comments from anti Mono people like this, makes in itself a good case for being sceptical towards the anti crowd in this case.
To me, GNU/Linux is not a handful of fledgling arms and tinfoil hats, and that is excactly what I see from a lot of the anti Mono people.
Python is awesome. Linux is better for having it around.
Fixed it for ya.
Apparently, Debian doesn't have the same concerns over using specifications patented by Microsoft and licensed under undisclosed terms
Microsoft has filed a patent on the .NET APIs, but Tomboy (and most Mono applications) don't use the .NET APIs, they use the ECMA APIs and standard Linux APIs. Mono is no different in that way from Python, Ruby, Perl, or many other languages people commonly use on Linux: it uses proprietary APIs on Windows, and open source APIs on Linux.
Furthermore, Mono is way ahead of languages like Java in that regard because, unlike Java, Mono is based on an open standard and there are no known patents on the language core or core libraries.
If anybody can point to an actual patent that Mono or Tomboy violate, please file an issue report against the Mono project; if it is credible, the infringing functionality will be removed from Mono. So far, nobody has been able to come up with anything.
Have you tried gnote yet? It is a C++ reimplementation of tomboy. gnote's binary package itself is less than 4MB with only a few standard dependencies that you might already have on a GNOME desktop, significantly smaller than Mono. I made the switch fully from tomboy to gnote a few months ago and things are working very nicely.
the more Mono/C# apps we get into Debian, the slower and memory-hungry (and disk-hungry, but I find that a non-issue in general) it gets.
Disk-hungry implies bandwidth-hungry. If you "find that a non-issue in general", you must not have friends or family who live in an area that doesn't have high-speed home Internet access.
By the way, a useful hint - when a developer can't think of an original name and prefers to rip-off a name trendy at that time, expect the code to be as well thought-out as Nuka Cola Cherry.
And when app maintainers do think up an original name, such as "Karbon14" or "Sodipodi" or "Amarok" or "Totem", they get bitched at for not coming up with a name that suggests to newbies what the program does.
I see some interesting points but nothing explains why the free software community can't make their own mono, why Microsoft still can't use this against F/OSS, or why we should stop arguing.
It's more political bullshit...
"Many of those who advertise themselves as anti-Mono are, quite frankly, frightening. Calling for the deaths of Microsoft employees (see comments on Boycott Novell), or trying to have people who make positive comments about Mono fired (see recent comments on Ubuntu mailing lists), or making insinuations about anyone who does not agree with them (see pretty much every news post on Boycott Novell itself) â" this is ugly behaviour, the absolute worst kind of advert for the âoeFree Software communityâ imaginable. If people want to be âoeagainstâ Mono, then there are sane ways to do it â" for example, by working on or packaging alternative software. Calling for people to be expelled from Free Software communities because they donâ(TM)t work on apps you like is, in short, the antithesis of supporting Freedom. If the anti-Mono crowd want to be taken seriously, then they need to UNDERSTAND what they fight against â" they need to have sufficiently intimate knowledge of what Mono is, how it works, and why, in order to know where to direct their energies (and general shouts of âoeZOMG! MICRO$HAFT!â isnâ(TM)t well-directed). I would LOVE to see some high-quality apps for GNOME written in, say, Java or Python â" as the competition would only result in better applications."
Sounds like Republicans and Democrats fighting over how to tell people how to live their own damn lives. Just because I say Fuck Microsoft doesn't mean I'm a feral animal or that my words are a reflection of the Free Software community in general.
The only Microsoft employee I'd be happy to see dead is Steve Ballmer, the rest I hope just have to find new jobs when Microsoft collapses into it's own greed and blind destructiveness.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
What's the proof? That Microsoft hasn't sued yet? That doesn't stop them from suing in the future.
There is a "use it or lose it" doctrine at equity, called estoppel by acquiescence or laches. (And it's not just for trademarks.)
Even though Microsoft submitted the CLI and C# main components of .NET, MIcrosoft does hold at least one patent on the .NET infrastructure.
First of all, they "don't hold a patent", they have filed a patent application. Whether that application gets granted remains to be seen, and even if it does, it's unclear what such a patent actually would cover or whether it could be enforced.
Furthermore, even if the patent were valid and enforceable, it is irrelevant as far as Tomboy is concerned, since Tomboy and most other Mono desktop applications don't use the ".NET infrastructure", they use ECMA C# libraries and standard Linux libraries.
Were I a Debian leader, I would simply approach Microsoft with the Mono code and the ECMA code of conduct and demand it in writing that for this snapshot of the code you have a forever royalty free
What's there to put in writing? You might as well demand Microsoft to put in writing that GNU C++, the Linux kernel, and Python are forever free from Microsoft royalties.
Python is a fad language with hideous syntax. SciPy and NumPy libraries are -1 redundant. Why the hell would I want to code what Matlab or Maple can do right off the bat?
PyFag: "Wow look at me I'm cool because I use python it allows me to leverage my synergies lolz!!!!11!!!!!"
With Red hat/Fedora dropping Mono out of the gnome dependencies, and ubuntu and it seems even debian stick to their Mono ways. And ubuntu even threatening their users to install a lower quality Mono-dependent music player to replace Rhythmbox just because the Mono zealots are very, very loud about how they want to push this MS technology on everybody using free software. I guess I will have to change my current ways and just move to .rpm based Fedora. It's been a long time without red hat, shall be fun. "Let's all make gnome depend on MS technology just so we have a desktop widget that has already been ported to native code!" That's great...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Yes, Mono probably has "patents" against it.
So does every fricking application on the planet. 3D graphics? Patented. One click to buy? Patented. What's the bet that Microsoft has patents on half the Linux kernal?
Can't they just do what every other free software project does, and just ignore the bloody things?
Microsoft might sue, but they will probably just laugh. Nobody is going to re-implement the entire .net framework (including all the quirks of Microsoft's database layer, file system behavior, etc). Just look at the difficulties in getting data out of MySQL and PostGres in a sane way! Once you target a specific platform (i.e. the entire Microsoft stack) it's very hard to replicate.
20 minutes? I downloaded the source tarball in 10 seconds.
Homes in rural areas of the United States[1] often can't get cable or DSL Internet. So a 10-second download would mean 40 KB, not the 6 MB of the current Tomboy 0.14.2 release found here.
[1] The United States is home of Slashdot and Software in the Public Interest. People who live in rural areas grow the food that you eat.
You mean like Perl? or Ruby? TCL?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
> Mono Squeezed Into Debian Default Installation
It is not going into the Debian default installation. The Debian default installation does not include any "desktop environment". It is going into the Gnome "desktop".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
When Microsoft offer an unlimited patent covenant for all distributors of Linux software, people will stop complaining about it overnight.
This debate seem to stem from a fear that this is Microsoft's trojan horse that's going to sneak it's way into open-source and blow it up with frivolous patent suits. Never mind that Microsoft has started licensing more and more programs (more) openly specifically to help the Mono platform. There are plenty of other problems with other vague patents granted in the US in use by open-source today. But they aren't getting as much attention.
There are plenty of good arguments against bloat and the quality of the programs depending on Mono. But this patent rational isn't one.
It's not even the entire framework that's affected by patents. Only a few parts. The worst that could happen would be that a few non-essential programs would have to be tweaked.
Now, as I see it. This is Open-Source's trojan horse into a huge community of commercial .NET developers that are ever more embracing open-source software.
Mono is the best way to let Windows developers transition into open-source environments.
Legal departments are mostly "I'm scared Dave, will I dream?" They do anything that won't put them in an obviously worse position, just in case. Basically they're for negotiation and diplomacy; if Novell thinks Microsoft's claims on Mono are bullshit, they can call it, but Microsoft may raise something else real on them for happening to be uncooperative. If you are a ridiculous joke demanding money, they squash you; look at SCOX vs IBM vs Novell, with everyone else in the business world shelling cash to SCOX because they may have some legitimate claims, while IBM and Novell decided they were full of shit and not a real threat. You're too annoying and full of shit, IBM's going to stamp you into the ground.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
When Microsoft offer an unlimited patent covenant for all distributors of Linux software, people will stop complaining about it overnight.
Then maybe those other distros need to go talk to Microsoft and secure themselves a covenant like Novell did.
Just because they haven't been up to this specific case of scumbaggery doesn't mean they haven't been scumbagging the last couple years. They're scumbags; they keep demonstrating that. It's somewhat reasonable to expect further scumbaggery from them in the future.
.NET/Mono may be unsubstantiated but we could only tell if we knew exactly how Microsoft is going to act over the next couple years. Since I'm not aware of any decent psychics in the F/OSS scene all we can do is make assumptions. .NET patents in the future. I have no idea who of us is going to end up being right so I err on the side of caution and stay away from .NET as a development platform and from Mono in general.
Plus, it took them ages to start suing over VFAT. That still didn't help TomTom. Any concerns over
You assume that sine they haven't sued anyone over Mono yet they won't do it in the future. I assume that since they habitually use morally questionable tactics they're likely to weaponize the
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
And ubuntu even threatening their users to install a lower quality Mono-dependent music player to replace Rhythmbox just because the Mono zealots are very, very loud about how they want to push this MS technology on everybody using free software.
Almost as loud as the people opposed to "MS technology," developed before Microsoft had anything to do with Novell or any other GNU/Linux.
I like bashing Microsoft as much as the next guy, but only when it's necessary. If anyone on /. actually kept up with the Debian blogosphere and Planet Debian, they'd see that there are two sides to every issue, and those sides aren't always political.
http://www2.apebox.org/wordpress/?p=124 http://np237.livejournal.com/24065.html http://robertmh.wordpress.com/?p=12 "These are *APPLICATIONS* and forcing me to install them is, to my mind, antithetical to the open source ideal." "Evolution serves no useful purpose in today's world" Altogether, this whole argument just goes to show that users, even GNU/Linux users can be grossly uneducated on topics, hearing Microsoft, and jumping on the attack. We should mysteriously drop F-Spot and GnomeDo and Evolution and see how these morons react.
GNU/Linux: Freedom.
...I'm very excited by this. I've been using Mono in Linux and OS X for a long time now and it has been working great. I'm not sure what Microsoft will think of this, but from what I've read thus far (which is admittedly not a ton) they haven't been getting in Mono's way... in fact, I believe that they gave information to help the Mono project so that it could be leveraged for Silverlight.
Who knows what Microsoft is going to do in the future, but for now I'm excited for Mono.
but 50 MBs only takes 5-10 minutes on my pathetically slow DSL connection.
In the country, 48 kbps dial-up is the norm, and 768 kbps DSL is blazing fast.
But, you don't seem to get the idea of dependencies. To put it with a different language, you are complaining that a program coded in Java requires a Java VM to run
If I am "complaining that a program coded in Java requires a Java VM to run", and I don't already have a Java VM, then I am complaining that the program was coded in Java in the first place.
And this is an example of a good deal:
Non-disclosure agreements and time-limited covenants are by their very nature exclusive and are a complete joke to free software. If Microsoft really understood FOSS, they would have offered an agreement like that right off the bat.
If someone says it's going to snow in December this year, how many days of sunshine in July does it take to prove that the snow people are wrong?
People are saying that Microsoft are going to sue once a significant number of Linux applications are dependent on Mono. Tomboy is not a significant number of applications. They would gain nothing by suing now. They will gain everything by suing once getting an injunction against Linux distributions including Mono means no Gnome and no KDE.
You don't fire a cannon until your target is within range. Especially when you only have one cannonball.
So if the yonly have a 4KB/sec download speed the size of a 6 meg package considering the entire time it will take to get the 700 meg debian ISO is going to be trivial.
For people who use dial-up, ISOs are easy (CheapBytes, Ubuntu ShipIt, etc.), and updates are hard.
http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/pkg-gnome/desktop/unstable/meta-gnome2/debian/control?revision=20303&view=markup
"Depends: gnome-desktop-environment (= ${source:Version}),
gdm-themes,
gnome-themes-extras,
gnome-games (>= 1:2.24.3),
libpam-gnome-keyring (>= 2.24.1),
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly (>= 0.10.10),
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg (>= 0.10.6),
rhythmbox (>= 0.12),
synaptic (>= 0.62),
system-config-printer (>= 1.0.0),
totem-mozilla,
swfdec-mozilla,
epiphany-extensions,
gedit-plugins,
evolution-plugins (>= 2.24.3),
evolution-exchange (>= 2.24.3),
evolution-webcal (>= 2.24.0),
serpentine,
gnome-app-install,
transmission-gtk,
bluez-gnome,
arj,
avahi-daemon,
tomboy (>= 0.12.2) | gnote,"
note: tomboy (>= 0.12.2) | gnote
In plain English that means tomboy *or* gnote.
It's Debian, you have a choice.
Debian also offers an Xfce/LXDE version of CD1 and a KDE version of CD1, CD1 being the installer. Neither of these offer mono or Gnome (duh!). Debian also offers fine grained package selection in all the installers, and a netinstall and a tiny netinstall, the businesscard iso. There is also the DVD installer which offers a choice of desktop environments along with the usual options for fine grained selection of packages, the 'Expert Install' option.
So *one* of the numerous ways of installing Debian *may* offer Tomboy to those who want it. Cue howls of intolerant, ill-informed, unsubstantiated quasi-religious outrage.....
And anyway mono is accepted as free software by the two bodies which are best placed to determine its status, the FSF and the OSI (and Debian Legal as well). Their legal teams have somehow failed to persuaded by psychotic ravings and are obstinately insistent in assessing these things by means of reason, facts, law and other little know methods. How churlish.
On the other hand it might be a far reaching conspiracy and have something to do with the Kennedy assassination, 9/11 and Roswell.
Stallman did comment on Mono, and it's not necessarily what one would expect: See?
If that's true, could someone explain to me how MS.NET is "more free" than Qt?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
From bjorn.haxx.se (please think of the slashdot effect). I found this surprising.
captcha: arrogant
(/. mangled my last paragraph) ...what? It's not a fucking interpreter or an emulator, it's a compiler for Christ's sake! Read your fucking code before you compile it if you're that scared of the "M$ BOOGY MONSTER."
http://www2.apebox.org/wordpress/?p=124 irrational?
http://np237.livejournal.com/24065.html zealots?
http://robertmh.wordpress.com/?p=12 hm, this whole argument was blown out of proportion by the GNOTES DEVELOPER. Sounds more like a whiny developer pissed that his package wasn't included rather than a real issue.
"These are *APPLICATIONS* and forcing me to install them is, to my mind, antithetical to the open source ideal." No one is forcing you to install anything. Every reasonably competant debian user knows NOT TO INSTALL THE METAPACKAGES! Anyone else should run Ubuntu.
"Evolution serves no useful purpose in today's world" huh? Right, so the only thing that is going to ever get GNU/Linux accepted as a replacement for MS Windows in corporate settings is useless?
"It's just like Wine and DOSEmu: a gateway to viruses that originated on Microsoft platforms."
Altogether, this whole argument just goes to show that users, even GNU/Linux users can be grossly uneducated on topics, hearing Microsoft, and jumping on the attack. We should mysteriously drop F-Spot and GnomeDo and Evolution and see how these morons react.
GNU/Linux: Freedom.
I love zim:
Zim - A Desktop Wiki
http://zim-wiki.org/
How exactly is this article trollish?
To me, this whole discussion sounds like the "monkey see, monkey do" problem. Most people do not even know why they think that the other side trolls.
I mean, it sounds like a good point and an even likely thing, that Microsoft is going to sue and try to forbid Gnome, because they in fact have patents on .NET.
We remember how SCO happened, and the general EEE policy that killed or nearly killed Sun, Netscape, Borland etc.
We also remember that all of them had some kind of contract, controlling what is ok, and what is not ok. and Microsoft perfectly worked their way around it.
I also find is most funny, that the whole point that started Gnome, was that KDE was not entirely free, and Trolltech could sue. ^^ (Which now seems fixed, by the way.)
I am not taking any sides here. I am just using basic logic, and likeliness calculated from my experience.
Please enlighten me. But first think about the why, and stay with the facts (past and present), instead of being part of a lynch mob.
(Luckily, I use KDE, because it actually leaves the freedom of choice to the user. So I'm out anyway.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I can still remember the whining by the GNOME fanboys about KDE using that evil, proprietary Qt product. Remember how Trolltech was either going to clamp down and eventually destroy KDE, or worse yet fold up and leave them with unmaintainable code?
So now the GNOMEsters have taken the candy and are getting in the car with the serial corporate criminal and convicted monopolist.
Objective C beats C# like Chris Brown beats Rihanna.
Josselin Mouette does not speak for nor set policy for Debian. He's just a pushy immature unmannered jerk who managed to slip something in early in the development cycle. There's no way this is going to survive until the Squeeze release.
Read the bug reports, do a web search on his name. Read about his past censures by Debian's self-correcting policy infrastructure.
If there is one thing Debian is good at, it's a strong policy with strict procedural discipline. It's not about to go all mushy over a minor note-taking applette pushed in by a devel with very poor standing in the community. (did I mention what a jerk he is?)
Especially when Gnote is a near-identical clone to Tomboy, and it's not like this is a core feature.
AFFECT, something affects something else. The way in which it affects it often leads to effects.
My Babylon
Python is a turd. I don't know why it's so popular on slashdot. Oh, wait I do know. It's designed for idiots. Just like VB. Or PHP. Look through the Python FAQ sometime. "Why do you ...", "Why don't you ..." -- the answer is always the same: you're too stupid.
Wrong:
Appeal of C# over Objective-C:
C# code is less repetitive than Objective-C code
No need to declare every IB plug 4 times, only once.
Runs in a safe VM
No buffer-overflows
No crashes due to uninitialized memory
No dangling pointers
Garbage collection for all types
Lambda expressions (great for GUI programming)
Iterators
Generic programming for type safe coding.
Type inferencing for reduced typing.
Dynamic code generation
IronPython talks to C# objects naturally (out of the box)
Superior XML libraries
LINQ to XML, LINQ to Objects, and maybe some day LINQ to Databases.
This space for rent.
2. cat > /dev/null
3. type notes.
Just don't close the terminal window.
This particular outburst of concern is FUD. Debian already has Mono in the "main" repository (as opposed to "contrib" or "non-free"). That alone is a statement that they are not worried about the "free-ness" of the package. Even if it will now be installed by default, it was already made available by default to every Debian installation. The difference is very superficial.
If MS was going to go after them, they could have already. This changes nothing. (although this spat on /. might bring it to MS attention.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
What are you talking about? Windows.Forms works just fine and (to me) is the way to go if you want to develop cross-platform applications in C#.
The only part to watch is interacting with the file system. Everything else just works.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Informative...
riiiight.. because we all know how lax Debian/GNU is about their patent/license concerns compared to Red Hat.
moo
IronPython runs on the .NET framework. Dunno about Mono though.
This space for rent.
When Microsoft offer an unlimited patent covenant for all distributors of Linux software, people will stop complaining about it overnight.
Then maybe those other distros need to go talk to Microsoft and secure themselves a covenant like Novell did.
And then Microsoft becomes the gatekeeper the critics are afraid they'll be.
Since .NET is an entire platform "just like Java", let's compare their bloat. .NET framework is 231 MB big. And it will only run apps written for that version, requiring the "side by side" installation of other runtimes for other versions.
The latest version of the Java runtime is 15.50 MB big. And it will run apps written for *any* version of Java.
The latest version of the
Trolls don't discriminate, just because somebody makes crazy threats doesn't mean they actually believe in what they are saying or are supporters of one faction or another. some people just want to stir things up just for the sake of it. Mono's interesting it could be useful but its risky to build it into a core package without being sure that it can't be used as a lever against Linux. Anyone who is aware of the history of Unix and how it was taken away from the very people who developed Unix should be able to understand that viewpoint. Mono certainly isn't essential just yet and perhaps some distributions holding back is a good thing. If microsoft is wanting net to be a success across platforms you'd think they would be willing to clarify their stance, if there is no intention of using it against Linux or other operating systems.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
No. Distributors cannot "ignore the bloody things" because unlike hobby developers, they're commercial entities and Microsoft will sue them to death as soon as they start making money by distributing something that include Microsoft-patented technologies.
That's exactly what they've just done with TomTom and FAT (and that patent even was, unlike the ones on .NET, pretty weak).
Moreover, there is difference between a patent-ridden application and a patent-ridden execution environment. In the first case, should problems surface, we could just drop the offending application. In the second case, we would have to drop ALL applications running on that environment. (And by the way, those applications would keep running on Windows, so guess where would all "orphaned" users be forced to go?)
So, given the fact that there we already have perfectly equivalent technologies without the same dangers, the less .NET-based applications are there on Linux, the better.
Monday 6 April 2009 15:39, by Rahul Sundaram :: #
For Fedora, we had to remove tomboy from the live cd due to lack of space. Unfortunately, Gnote probably won't be a good replacement since it would pull in the gtkmm, boost and other dependencies. Have you considered Vala or PyGTK instead?
So the summary includes the dependencies for Tomboy but not for Gnote. If you add up gtkmm and boost and other dependencies, it might get close to 50MB. The summary is a troll for comparing apples to oranges.
This space for rent.
>So how many more years of them not suing anyone over Mono is it going to take
infinitely many, logically. If Microsoft would write that they won't, that would be a way for the people to "shut up".
>always around the corner waiting to sue people for Mono
>as open and willing to work with the FOSS community on Mono as one can really expect from a company like this.
Willing to work with the FOSS community _for now_.
I'm not sure what's so hard to understand, Microsoft is a company. They don't work with others for the fuzzy feelings and kinship.
And from a business standpoint it makes sense to be cautionous of other companies turning around to stab you, especially if it is Microsoft (which does that all the time).
Python is 18 years old... quite a long time for a "fad"
No sig for the moment.
... why does this feel like these Distros are "dancing with the devil" in that I can't imagine building open source on top of someone else's patents is a good idea.
KDE4 already has C# bindings.
It's a matter of time before some "revisionist" starts using them.
It's a victory for great free software applications that just so happen to use Mono. Mono often gets treated as a second class citizen because of its Microsoft roots, with zealots not wanting Microsoft's "unholy embrace" on Linux, whatever that's supposed to mean. Thankfully, there are sane people to defend it and because of this developers don't have to worry about their software not being included in a default install because they just so happened to pick Mono.
Also, how was my original post Flamebait?
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
Just so everyone else isn't snowed by this post, Fedora has not dropped mono and currently has no plans to, they have only said "we'll continue to look at it with our legal counsel to see what if any steps are needed on our part". The recent push to include mono based Banshee by default instead of Rhythmbox in Fedora and Ubuntu was caused by the one of the main Rhythmbox developers saying that rhythmbox has "several limitations" and that he was going to "still fix (some) bugs and review patches, but it's too much of a dead end for me to do more than that", leading many to believe it is in maintenance only mode. Not, as the parent says "Mono zealots".
There are two kinds of infringement under US patent law: Ordinary infringement and willful infringement. Guess which one carries triple damages? If you know something is covered by patent protection and you still infringe upon the patent willfully, you could be liable for triple damages. There are ways to keep the enhanced damages associated with willful infringement at bay (such as "advice of counsel," where you have expert legal advice to the effect that the patent is believed invalid), but that's something of a crap shoot.
So, how you act once a patent has been brought to your attention matters. In this case, it sounds like there are at least a couple .NET related patents that could apply to Mono. Infringing on those patents in the absence of legal counsel advising us that those patents are invalid would amount to willful infringement.
Don't take my necessarily-inaccurate-because-it's-a-sound-bite version's word for it. Here's an interesting article from the American Bar Association on the current state of this ever-evolving topic.
Program Intellivision!
I have already written 3 days ago about why almost everything that is told in this news is wrong. In the end, this is just a bait for Boycott Novell zealots who have nothing better to do of their lives.
http://np237.livejournal.com/23901.html
How is it a victory when there is another application that does *all* the same things except that it doesn't need the tons of dependencies?
By all means, let the tomboy developers enjoy working on their thing, and let everyone who likes it use it, but I could think about a couple of things I'd like those 40MBs used for other than Mono
Now, why would Novell sign such an agreement? Easy: Because their legal department advised them to do so. From this we can conclude that Novells legal department has knowledge of legal risks concerning Mono.
Actually, I suspect they signed it because Microsoft offered them lots of money to do so. Imagine Microsoft offered to pay you $1000 and also give you a patent licence to Mono. Would you accept their offer? Would that then mean that you believed Mono required a patent licence to use?
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
So, Debian can include Mono, but not Firefox due the Logo license? I think Mono has a lot more copyrighted stuff than the Firefox logo.
Or is Microsoft's use of the BSD TCP stack unethical???
You can't put your code out under a share license and complain when someone takes what you've shared and ports it unless the port cannot be shared likewise.
yeah i said it
however, the covenant as set forth above will continue as to specific copies of Covered Products distributed by Novell for Revenue before such update
so.. the stuff Novell gives away for free is not necessarily covered by the 'lets be good' bit of the covenant? that's more scary to the F/OSS community than any other part of it.
So MS could turn around tomorrow and say to any company that used Mono "we're suing" and they'd be within their rights. I doubt MS would sue anyone over Mono - they're too busy enticing Linux developers with "just have one go, just to see what all the fuss is about. Its sooo easy, you'll feel great developing using it" that they prefer the benefits of getting Linux devs to consider some cross-platform development using Mono.
However, I feel that if they see themselves losing the netbook or mobile OS space, they will do everything they can to reclaim it, using any and every weapon they have. Nobody thought MS would sue over VFAT - that everyone uses for their flash drives, but they did.
Hopefully, you'll effect a change in his future posts.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
IronPython runs on the .NET framework. Dunno about Mono though.
The Mono package for MacOS X comes with IronPython. I haven't really tested it, but it does at least start. I don't see why it wouldn't work essentially the same as on Windows, except maybe with GUI stuff, if there's some Windows.Forms classes that Mono hasn't implemented yet.
Open up a shell and type in: $ man mt
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
Mono is part of OIN. They won't open that can of worms. Actually that is much more proof for not sueing than most other applications/libraries have. As not having sued is not a proof for not suing in the future, not knowing of a patent infringement doesn't mean there is none.
What the hell is tomboy doing as a dependency in the first place? It's a totally unnecessary package which I have absolutely zero use for.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The only good thing about Mono is that you may have gotten it from kissing a girl!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
http://tim.thechases.com/mononono/
RMS is kind of an intolerant jerk, but I think he does have a point. Linux could end up dying at the hands of well-meaning, easily manipulated pollyannas and Benedictian insiders who took the money and ran.
There are reasons the linux industry doesn't want Microsoft's code involved, primarily the "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactic. Also the 235 alleged patent violations and the threat to industry that if they use linux they'll have to pay Microsoft, sometime. Also the fact that the industry doesn't want to be tainted. Many don't even want to look at Microsoft's code and certainly don't want it in the fold.
It's more a matter of self preservation rather than puritanical perspective that keeps Microsoft at a 1000 foot pole's length.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
I think I'd have to agree with the OP. Ape-ing microsoft is not where I'd personally like to see linux and its various desktop environments go. I'd prefer we do it *better*. Evolution, as far as I see it, is the former. Same goes for mono.
Example, with nautilus. WHY does nautilus do the copy/paste/rename cycle for making a copy of a file via GUI? The way ROX Filer (as an alternative example) does it is so much more elegant. On copy action, you can rename the file with a dialog that pops up and then drag to the location of your choosing. One step vs. 3 kludgy ones. Yeah, you could keep the microsoft copy behavior, and even add that ROX type stuff, but nautilus chose to do only the former. The restrictive 'scripts' directory is also annoying. This is supposed to be a flexible environment, dammit. Why do I have to have all of my apps I want to run from a menu in a specific place, ordered by name??? Windowmaker does this so much more elegantly. One reason I like linux is the flexibility and the 'fun' of being able to do things more suited to the way I like to work. That is being eroded by things like your beloved evolution and mono based apps.
If only all environments would take the best ideas from the others and choose to either get rid of or push aside the other stuff.
*On another note: What's the point of Gnome again, now that Qt/KDE is open sourced?*
To not be a cluttered piece of crap, which is KDE's job. See on UNIX, every program should do one thing and do it well.
I've always thought KDE's applications were much better than OpenOffice - and Gnome doesn't seem to have any productivity applications at all...
(I've run mostly KDE for a long time, though I have been running Gnome of late, on my new laptop - and I'm quite enjoying it...)
I really strongly feel that Unix lacks the coherent infrastructure needed for this "each tool does one thing well" philosophy... If each tool does just one thing, then your ability to accomplish things strongly depends on how effectively and easily you can link multiple tools together... I feel like the old Unix tools philosophy has gone AWOL of late, and it's pretty much absent from the GUI space, where an individual application is usually written to handle all possible actions for an individual problem domain, and there's very little consideration made to linking these applications together...
Bow-ties are cool.
When Microsoft offer an unlimited patent covenant for all distributors of Linux software, people will stop complaining about it overnight.
Given that "all distributors of Linux software" includes e.g. IBM, I think that such a deal could only go on a reciprocal basis (i.e. IBM offers an unlimited patent covenant to Microsoft) - otherwise Microsoft would just screw itself royally by unilaterally disarming its defensive patent portfolio.
And, compared to the above scenario, I think that snowball's chance in hell is pretty damn good.
I'm afraid mono-anything really is a second class citizen; Microsoft is widely untrusted, they actively have attacked and still attack anything not-Microsoft, they arm themselves and let people know it and the only incentive they have to not destroy opposition outright are the legal barriers they don't forget about.
Now imagine a citizen, a walking, breathing citizen walking around acting like this.
I do not doubt the defenders are perfectly sane, it is their legal and historical experience I do not trust.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
I think I'd have to agree with the OP. Ape-ing microsoft is not where I'd personally like to see linux and its various desktop environments go. I'd prefer we do it *better*. Evolution, as far as I see it, is the former. Same goes for mono. If only all environments would take the best ideas from the others and choose to either get rid of or push aside the other stuff.
First off, I don't use evolution, I only cited it as an example.
Second, this is not about "ape-ing" anyone. It's about getting the job done and creating great applications that rival Microsoft and other desktops. What tool someone uses should be a nonissue, in the long run. There is little issue with the Mono runtime, it's been around since (believe it or not) before the Novell Microsoft agreements, it has had no legal trouble in the four years of its development, and there is little reason that it should. This simply comes down to the issue of what a developer wants to develop from, and nothing more.
What if Microsoft had created C++? Would you be shunning GNotes?
If it wasn't the Gnotes developer that had started this little war, I may be more open to consideration of the issue, but there is a HUGE COI in that, imo. Comes across to me that he is just trying to get back at the Tomboy team because they made it into the dependancies and not him. And instead of one-upping the application with new features, etc, he decides to simply attack the framework which the application is based on.
And, for the record, I don't use any mono applications; I just have the ability to look at things objectively and not judge things on the company that may or may not be related to a piece of software's development language. Modding the OP +4 insightful just goes to show how narrow minded /. commenters really are.
GNU/Linux: Freedom.
Does C# offer compelling features over Java? Why do we waste our time building the same bridge twice? Java and C# go way out of their way to have nothing to do with each other, so it's not like there is some mutual benefit or that they learn from each other.
Java is really just a spec and people are free to implement it how they want. There is tremendous opportunity for vendors to be creative under the covers and provide all manner of functionality within the Java framework. This can be done with or without Sun's blessing, and there is a healthy competitive market for Java infrastructure.
On the other hand, C# is a Microsoft Platform and you pretty much have to buy into their thing if you want to get serious.
I'd like to know how that works out as I'm planning on doing the same (Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit---> Fedora 11 32-bit). Reason? My DVD writer will no longer read/write DVD/CDs. This was a brand new machine when I bought it. And I've seen a lot of forum posts complaining about this.
I'm also not too keen on promoting Microsoft technologies. Even if they *have* been submitted to the ECMA. After watching what they did with OOXML at the ECMA and then ISO, I'd rather avoid the drama.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Runs in a safe VM
No buffer-overflows
No crashes due to uninitialized memory
No dangling pointers
Unless you use unsafe.
This is where source based packaging makes sense. With a source based system (FreeBSD, Gentoo, etc) you have "knobs" to give you a little control over the dependencies. Thus you can have a GNOME without Mono. But with binary packages you are stuck with what the Committee decides you need.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Free software relies on all kinds of sources. The GNU system itself was/is a re-implementation of UNIX. Many of the languages used started off as proprietary. There's nothing new in this. Where is the campaign to purge Fortran or Pascal from the free software opus? Why no campaign against Samba and the use of the SMB protocol? Why is nobody outraged at DotGNU? Where are the calls to cease supporting .avi container and other MS developments?
The difference there, to my mind, is the extent to which we come to rely upon these various technologies. If the Samba project were defeated through legal measures by Microsoft (and please don't interpret this as a suggestion that this will happen - it's just a scenario.) then what would we lose? One LAN file sharing protocol out of many, the ability to share files over a LAN with Windows machines without installing any additional software on the Windows machine...
Mono (or DotGNU, if anybody actually used it) present a somewhat different problem: here you've got something which (IMO anyway) Linux sorely lacks: a coherent VM implementation that can be used in the implementation of different scripting languages, a consistent data representation that can be used to help bind different languages together, and additionally C#, which seems like a good language for application development. This places it in a much more critical position if one comes to rely upon it.
It's hard to debate with people when their fundamental position is composed essentially of hatred, fear and dislike of persons or groups. Where is the factual basis? Where is the ability to consider anything useful when hate or fear is the driving force? This is religion by another name, it cannot be reasoned with, it is impervious to contradictory verifiable fact, it allows no deviation.
There is no contradictory verifiable fact. In the end, Microsoft will either use legal means to defeat Mono, or not. Nothing they say or do now actually prevents this from occurring. Likewise there's not much in the way of "factual basis" apart from what Microsoft has done in the past. You are right that this is largely about fear: though personally I am not entirely convinced that this fear is entirely unfounded. Sometimes there's not a lot of solid information to rely upon: in that case there's no choice but to guess, gamble at what will and won't happen in the future.
Personally, I feel like Mono is not necessarily what I signed on for when I chose to use Linux in the first place. It's a petty reason, really, but even such simple things as putting ".exe" on the end of a filename, or using the same file type signature as DOS executables - these aren't things I really want to see on my system. It gives the programs a bit of an alien character. I don't think it's especially sensible in general for compiled programs to run in a VM, for that matter. Matters of taste like this may seem silly but they are relevant, to my mind: if things don't fit my own idea of what I'd like Linux to be, as a system, then I generally won't be too inclined to stand behind them.
Really, any time you try to introduce some critical piece of infrastructure to the system, people will be hesitant to invest themselves in it - they need to be convinced that it's the right thing. Any facet of the system that people don't like will count against it, and stand in the way of people adopting it. It's not enough for a bit of technology to be good - people have to embrace it or its merits won't make a difference.
It's a tough problem for a platform where there's no central authority - how does one make the platform as a whole advance at a fundamental level, when there's no one to lay down the law about how the core components will work? Groups like Gnome or KDE or major distributions like Debian or Ubuntu are about the closest thing we've got to an "authority" to make these decisions stick - honestly it makes me a bit uneasy that Gnome has gone with
Bow-ties are cool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)
Mono consists of three groups of components:
1. Core components
2. Mono/Linux/GNOME development stack
3. Microsoft compatibility stack.
The Microsoft compatibility stack provides a pathway for porting Windows .NET applications to Linux. This group of components include ADO.NET, ASP.NET, and Windows.Forms, among others. As these components are not covered by ECMA standards, some of them remain subject to patent fears and concerns.
Mono's implementation of those components of the .NET stack not submitted to the ECMA for standardization has been the source of patent violation concerns for much of the life of the project. In particular, discussion has taken place about whether Microsoft could destroy the Mono project through patent suits.
The base technologies submitted to the ECMA, and therefore also the Unix/GNOME-specific parts, may be non-problematic. The concerns primarily relate to technologies developed by Microsoft on top of the .NET Framework, such as ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows Forms (see Non standardized namespaces), i.e. parts composing Mono's Windows compatibility stack. These technologies are today not fully implemented in Mono and not required for developing Mono-applications. Richard Stallman has claimed it may be "dangerous" to use Mono because of the possible threat of Microsoft patents.[9]
On November 2, 2006, Microsoft and Novell announced a joint agreement whereby Microsoft agreed to not sue Novell's customers for patent infringement.[10] According to Mono project leader Miguel de Icaza,[11] this agreement extends to Mono but only for Novell developers and customers. It was criticized by some members of the free software community because it violates the principles of giving equal rights to all users of a particular program...
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Myself, I don't see the need for tomboy or anything like that. If I want to keep notes, I make a text file in my home directory and edit it with gedit or some other text editor. It's much faster, just as convienient, and doesn't require any special software.
and..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infectious_mononucleosis
Well, at least some of the things you have mentioned do not seem to bother Smalltalk people at all, and Objective-C was designed to appeal particularly to them. (Typesafe generic coding in a language with mutable state, what a joke! Smalltalkers are clever and don't even try.)
Ezekiel 23:20
What would stop them if they should decide to sue?
aptitude remove?
What's the best alternative distro to Debian? Fedora isn't really aimed at desktop users, Ubuntu is also going to be including mono by default. Etc.
I think that I'd be able to hash things around to avoid mono anyway, but I'd rather not have to hassle with that, so what's the best alternative? Space isn't my problem, but I'd really rather avoid mono, and I need an end-user distribution.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The JVM has far more languages than the CLR, several of them far better than C#. Scala for example makes C# look like QBASIC. Java as a language may be stalled, but the JVM as an open platform is currently unbeatable, especially by Mono.
Sam ty sig.
It's not that I hate Mono--I just don't want it inflicted as a dependency of one of the standard (the better of the two big, IMO) Linux desktops. People who want/use Mono, like people who want/use Java should be free to install it and run it for whatever they want, and share free (and Free) apps amongst themselves, but I've already got about a dozen programming languages and runtimes installed, and I DO NOT WANT OR NEED this huge, bloated monstrosity (hugeness, bloatedness and monstrousness all confirmed when I manually purged the beast after the last time some lame dependency dragged it onto my system).
Heck, I came within inches, last year, of using Mono for a port from C#/.NET to Linux, and I would have been perfectly happy if that's the direction we'd chosen (although I'm pleased to say that our C++ port is working beautifully now), but I still don't want it embedded into my desktop!
I realise the media are ... slow, don't do their research, and like to cause a scene, but seriously - how long does it take people to understand that mono is not implementing anything patented, or even worthy of being patented.
The classpaths it does implement are overly generic (if patents get to the point of patenting a string, process, or window... so help me...) - and the non-generic ones it uses (eg: ASP.NET) use Microsoft's own shared source code, under their own shared source license (without breaking it) - and the rest, are all mono/posix/unix specific classpaths anyway.
Get a brain, and a life... seriously.
Shame on you all.
I once thought I had Mono for an entire year. Turns out I was just really bored.
Bow-ties are cool.
Why should Linux projects live with the uncertainty, specially when Ballmer has spelled, in no uncertain terms, what he thinks about Linux and the precious MS "intellectual property".
I just don't get it why so many Linux and FOSS heads are so eager to ingratiate themselves with Microsoft. It reminds me of people that are into abusive relationships....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
MS's CEO made specific patent trolling threats against Linux in no uncertain fashion, combine this with their "agreements" with Novell and other Linux packagers and you know what they are aiming at.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Microsoft has not put forward a single bit of evidence about somebody in the Linux world infringing their precious patents (where software patents apply, there is still hope that in vast swathes of this planet such lunacy is not allowed to happen).
That is why so many of us dislike Novel, Xandros & co with a passion: they gave credence to Microsoft's position without the monopoly abusers having to do as much as to say which patents they have been talking about.
Novell has given mixed signals about the deal, and have declared in many occasions that they are not infringing any patents, in which case one just don't understand why they got into bed with Microsoft in the first. Protection (have you seen any gangsters' movie?) comes to mind....
So to reiterate, no, nobody in Linux land has accepted that there is any infringing code in Linux. Educate yourself and stop to spread this unsubstantiated rumour.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I want a legally binding document in which Microsoft assures the Linux community that they will not attempt to screw up Linux development for, most likely bogus, patent infringement claims.
If they really want to show some good will I want to hear their lawyers, not their developers and Engineers (all of them very cool people I am sure).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... were worth the paper they are written in.
After the procedure witnessed during the approval of another ISO "standard" pushed by Microsoft, it is quite rich to name ISO as something to look for as worthy.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Is anybody controlling Fortran or Pascal threatening Linux with patent litigation? No.
CIF (the protocol behind Samba) predates anything Microsoft came with network wise. This is well documented, so I don;t see what your point actually is. If anything the Samba team have to bend over backwards in order to accommodate the capricious ways MS treis to use the CIF protocol.
You can say whatever you want about the reasons why people don't like Mono. I met Miguel a couple of times, he is a very nice, clever and enthusiastic chap, but he is completely misguided about trusting Microsoft. The bodies of competitors and, more worryingly, former business partners should tell you all what you need to know about collaborating with that company.
But lets say I am deluded. But surely I did not imagine the public threats against Linux made by Ballmer and his accolades regarding patents.
Any bogus patents claims will have to start in places where Microsoft has a foot in the door. They will not start with sendmail, bind ro any other targets in which clearly they haven't had any input, but the threat would clearly come from somewhere where they are calling the shots.
Any .Net technology has the potential to be the trojan horse MS uses to attack Linux.
SCO showed what a real PITA it can be to defend against bogus claims, just imagine what MS could do if they decided to throw a hissy fit.
Everybody not realising this is naive to an extreme that is inexcusable.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm not aware of any proof on the contrary.
You can pick any related story about VFAT you want, it still doesn't say anything about Mono.
What would stop them? How about a dozen other companies with similar patent portfolios?
Microsoft have no intention of suing Debian. Their agent, Miguel, is doing fine work, making Gnome dependant on Microsoft technologies and that is the whole point of this exercise.
Mono is already required by F-Spot photo manager which many Gnome users are dependant on. Pretty soon Debian will be riddled with other mono dependencies and there will be no easy backing out of it. Once Debian is undermined, Ubuntu will be down and out for the count.
Never underestimate the reach and power of a company which has tens of billions of dollars sitting in the bank.
Being concerned about non-free frameworks such as .NET is almost as important as supporting Open Document Format as opposed to .doc and other proprietary formats. Many software users are very aware of the freedom-limiting and encumbering nature of proprietary software solutions, such as avi, flash, jpeg, .NET and so on. I never quite understood why so many people never give a damn about being on the legal side of things; they actually prefer, say, a pirated copy of MS Office as opposed to the free equivalent, OpenOffice. Maybe because in the Windows world, there is hardly any distinction, since most of the time "free" means "warez" anyway? This semi-legal attitude is supported by the industry: I am virtually prevented from converting all my CD's to .ogg for listening to on-the move, because hardly any portable music player supports .ogg! Of course, on certain players you can install a software player that supports .ogg, but the fact is nevertheless severely limiting to people who prefer legality as opposed to the patent-encumbered mp3's. Moreover, the .NET framework is superfluous not only because of its "legal" status, but also from the bloatware point of view: having to run yet another slow, bloated, RAM- and CPU-hungry runtime at every boot -- and for what: just for being able to run a tiny yellow sticky-notes applet? No, thanx. The Java runtime is enough. And free. And better.
Intellectual Property: an immaterial non-entity, most fiercely contended by those with no proper intellect to speak of.
If there's such a thing as legitimate patents, .NET ones are certainly a good example of MS making an investment in innovation and appliing for patents to protect it. And you compare that with "one click to buy" junk. Very appealing...
Theres an exceptional rebuttal against the rampant naysayers posted here by one of the members responsible for the Debian/Mono integration: http://www2.apebox.org/wordpress/rants/124/
WARNING: May contain traces of nut
IMHO MS has a better plan than patent trolling for future with the Mono project and its puppets paid to work (or simply stupid enough) working on it.
In Helloween docs, specialist reporting for Microsoft puts Linux'es strengths like very advanced command line and how impossible to implement them on Windows.
Of course, the one weakness has been reported. A community which is easy to divide even with political arguments.
Right after that report, first KDE got hit by not being GPL (an argument still being used) or the Library it relies on is not being totally free and Gnome started. Icaza... That is one division still lives and effects Linux today.
After years when Novell had serious issues that even non tech people argued whether they will go chapter 11 or straight out of business, they deal with Microsoft accepting their terms and hire Icaza.
Microsoft does a last attempt to gain back its users giving them something that is claimed to work anywhere but being Windows only. The functionality developers love and rely on starts with 'win' like windows forms. Right while people jokes with the framework and even MS only shops reject to be bound to it, some half ass working thing ships named 'Mono' supposed to be cool open source name of Microsoft .NET. Today, MS .NET is 3.5 SP1 (stable) and 4.x betas started to be talked about, people actually use 3.5 features and Mono is stuck somewhere as 2.x. Guy behind it is Icaza again.
Silverlight ships, becomes industry joke because of the lack of multi platform support while Adobe seriously readies 'one flash for all' concept which will work even on handsets, same guy pops up and pulls the exact Mono scheme. ''1 major version behind but open source (in OUR terms)''. Just like .NET MS also have a good argument when sane people asks ''Shouldn't you be OS neutral when you try to race with Java?'.
As Debian took this decision to allow that trojan to their distro, all my respect to their freedom standards, ethics, perfectionism has all gone. They should join Icaza when he goes to Redmond instead of celebrating their own OpenSUSE major release.
One more thing I can't stand not saying in this long message... Gotta respect to Apple. Even in their darkest days, they have put a boundary, a limit.
For Linux, we still have Volkerding and Slackware to rely on.
You write in something including 'C' in its name right? You write programs so you should know why the C language was invented and designed from start.
So far, it has delivered its promise as the real multiplatform compiled language.
Can you point your apps OS X, Linux, FreeBSD downloadable binaries so I can run them? If I sound like asking too much, Opera which is written in 'bulky' language runs the very same core both on my 8 Gig Quad G5 and Sony Ericsson P1i smart phone having 128MB RAM and also right on this Mac Mini G4.
You can say ''I prefer C# because all my audience is running Windows (Mo)'' but please, please don't even use C/C++ in same context as that Microsoft abuse of C.
THERE ARE *NO*, *ZERO*, *ZILCH* "specifications patented by Microsoft and licensed under undisclosed terms" used in Mono. *NOTHING* is "licensed" from Microsoft for use in Mono by anyone at all.
When will the flaming @*^$*&^@ ignorance stop?
Do people realize that a software patent that applied to Mono would almost certainly apply to Java? And very possibly GLIBC? Maybe even X? Or GCC? And that Microsoft holds patents that relate to HTML, AJAX, and CSS? Get your heads out of your collective asses and learn what your talking about - or shut the hell up.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
Being concerned about non-free frameworks such as .NET is almost as important as supporting Open Document Format as opposed to .doc and other proprietary formats.
Why? Contrary to the article: *NO* "specifications patented by Microsoft and licensed under undisclosed terms" for use in Mono. This is confusion by the ignorant of the M$/Novell deal with Mono, the two have nothing to do with each other. The Samba team works very closely with M$, has accepted code from M$, and M$ testes Samba on M$ servers... should Samba be excluded from Debian?
Moreover, the .NET framework is superfluous not only because of its "legal" status, but also from the bloatware point of view: having to run yet another slow, bloated, RAM- and CPU-hungry runtime at every boot -- and for what: just for being able to run a tiny yellow sticky-notes applet? No, thanx. The Java runtime is enough. And free. And better.
Better how? Have you done benchmarks? Run some, you'll be suprised.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
Even if c# is marginally better than java or python or (insert favorite opponent here), this seems a really weak reason to insert a huge piece of Microsoft property into the heart of Free Software. I can't understand why Mono has happened and why this contamination is going on.
Or what's the "old and understood" method for an application to receive notification when the disk is full? Or when a USB device is inserted?
I agree with the above sentence (and I completely agree with the GP, he nailed it on the head). The problem I see with modern distros (modern GNU/Linux) is that many of those features that somebody "needs" are being hacked into the system without really thinking about the big picture. Basically, we're just hacking extra stuff into GNU/Linux that somebody wants to have now, because she saw it in a different OS and it seemed nice.
Could you elaborate upon that? Like what's an example of such a system? Why is it not necessary? Or why does it not fit in with the rest of the system?
I have to admit I'm still not too familiar with a lot of this stuff - for instance I don't know much about hald except that it delivers hotplug notifications and such, and most of what I know about dbus I learned yeaterday after a cursory google search. But from what I know so far it generally seems like good stuff.
Bow-ties are cool.
This Mono encumberance spreads via dependencies. Installing GNOME or certain GTK apps without any Mono dependencies is extremely difficult. Even more so when these packages and dependencies are tested and become part of stable, yielding silly situations, like when 'bootsplash' is replaced with 'splashy', which requires the 'gnome-desktop-environment' meta-package, 'gnome-desktop', 'cheese', etc.
From what I've seen and read, the dependencies in Debian are being swept in as a means to resolve inter-package dependencies within Debian. It's GNOME and subcomponents, and some tertiary apps that require Mono, but oversight in keeping barriers between 'default' and 'encumbered' is falling short, despite claims to the contrary:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=473118
"This is why gnome-desktop-environment doesn't depend on it despite being
part of the official GNOME desktop.
The gnome metapackage is here to bring a full-fledged desktop with all
the bling. If you don't want everything, you should install
gnome-desktop-environment and pick other stuff depending on your choice."
As it happens in some other distributions - SUSE, for instance, the dependency web is such that basic GNOME components have a cross-dependency with Tomboy, and as GNOME is headed by Mono-centric developers, it's to be expected that the interoperability of GNOME components will continue to depend on Mono. Evolution, Tomboy, Beagle, will each require similar effort as has been put into Gnote, and similar vigilance in assuring compatibility.
http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/faq_opensource.html
Q8. What does this mean for Mono and its inclusion in non-SUSE distributions? Does Mono infringe Microsoft patents?
"We maintain that Mono does not infringe any Microsoft patents. This agreement does not impact the rights and abilities of other distributions to bundle and ship Mono.
Novell is the leading contributor to Mono and we remain committed to the Mono project. Mono is a community project with many constituents and collaborators from companies, universities, governments and individuals.
The Mono project has a set of rules it uses to handle patents that might read on its implementation. The general policy is to work around, remove, or find prior technology on any patents that might read on any implementations in Mono. We continue to support this policy."
Also,
http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing#Patents
" Could patents be used to completely disable Mono?
First some background information.
The .NET Framework is divided in two parts: the ECMA/ISO covered technologies and the other technologies developed on top of it like ADO.NET, ASP.NET and Windows.Forms.
Mono implements the ECMA/ISO covered parts, as well as being a project that aims to implement the higher level blocks like ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms. ...The core of the .NET Framework, and what has been patented by Microsoft falls under the ECMA/ISO submission. Jim Miller at Microsoft has made a statement on the patents covering ISO/ECMA, (he is one of the inventors listed in the patent): here (http://web.archive.org/web/20030424174805/http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-sscli/msg00218.html)
Basically a grant is given to anyone who want to implement those components for free and for any purpose."
"Mono is part of OIN."
Mono is a Novell/Ximian product, not a Microsoft product. Unless I'm mistaken, Mono being part of OIN doesn't put ANY legal restrictions on what Microsoft can do. So, I don't see how Mono being part of OIN really has anything to do with whether or not Mono is 'safe' for use by developers and end-users?
I've been trying to read more about this the last couple days, and from what I can find, the 'core' Mono/.Net technologies are apparently considered pretty 'safe' because Microsoft published it as part of an ECMA standard. I guess that provides some protection against lawsuits about that (I'm not really sure, though - I'm not a lawyer, and all that).
Still, there is some question surrounding the ASP.net, ADO.net, and Windows.Forms parts of Mono.
One of the claims used to push Mono was that Stallman was OK with it. He has just recently issued a statement that he is against mono being included in Linux distros.