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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."
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.
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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.
I guess Tomboy is a nice test-case. But all that junk to install just for a note-taking program? Also, wouldn't it be nice if the Slashdot summary told me what Tomboy does?
The project page is a little more informative:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/tomboy
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.
Tomboy is not 50MB, the whole Mono framework is that much, Tomboy is relatively small. If you use F-Spot or Beagle, Mono runtime is installed anyway.
And if you dont(most people), it's not installed. It's available in the repositories if you want it, why crap it into the base install?
Debian had reason to include Tomboy instead of Gnote. Also Tomboy does not have Applet support, which is why Debian wants it in the Gnome install instead of Gnote
Gnote 0.3.0 released 2009-04-29 adds applet support. Why use Tomboy at all now?
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