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."

Comments

Frist

[Ethanol-fueled]

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.

Re:Frist

[maxume]

It seems to me that, even if Microsoft threw a fit, the worst case scenario would be that they have to pull the package out of the releases.

I suppose it might be a bigger deal for Canonical, but even the craziest judge isn't going to impose some ridiculous punishment for actions they take on good faith.

Call Upon the ECMA Code of Conduct

[eldavojohn]

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.

Even though Microsoft submitted the CLI and C# main components of .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.

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 .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.

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.

Re:Call Upon the ECMA Code of Conduct

[Aphoxema]

Microsoft may just have .NET patents and contracts for their own sake, as SOP. Pragmatically, it would be a mistake for them to sue Debian or Miguel. I think they realize that because they haven't yet gone after Miguel.

Or they've already gotten him.

Re:Call Upon the ECMA Code of Conduct

[TheRealMindChild]

Did you read their patent claim? If you closed your eyes, had someone else read it to you, and you had no idea the company of which it came from, you would swear it was a Sun patent on Java/SOAP.

Re:Call Upon the ECMA Code of Conduct

[EvilIdler]

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

Re:Call Upon the ECMA Code of Conduct

[Hurricane78]

Sounds to me like the "no bugs have popped up yet, so there are no bugs in the program" logic fallacy.

If one company of all has proven to follow the rule, that if they have some strange clause in the contract, and on asking about it, they say that it's just for safety and will never be used in reality, they intend to use it as early and as often as possible, then it's with no doubt Microsoft. (Health insurance companies would come to mind too.)

I think, given the happenings of the past, it is far more likely, that as soon as Mono became an essential part of Gnome, so that to remove it, you would have to kill Gnome entierly, Microsoft will load its weapons. ;)

Which means that soon, the argument of both troll teams (the pro-mono and the contra-mono side act very trollish, I must say), will be settley, and we can go back to VI vs Emacs. ;)

On another note: What's the point of Gnome again, now that Qt/KDE is open sourced? (Remember how Gnome started because it was not.) ;)
Oh well, I am always for more freedom (and more choice, if it helps freedom), so why not? :)

Re:Call Upon the ECMA Code of Conduct

[Hatta]

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?

Default installation?

[Hatta]

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.

Re:Default installation?

[Norsefire]

Did you figure that out all by yourself, or did you do something as unslashdot-like as read the summary?

OS News reports that Debian developer Josselin Mouette got Tomboy accepted as a dependency for gnome

Incredible horrifying bloat

[k-zed]

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?

Re:Incredible horrifying bloat

[Freetardo Jones]

What's wrong with this picture?

You mean other than the fact that the statement is bullshit? I have a compiled version of Tomboy and it only comes out to around 5-6 megs. The 50MB size is them including all of it's secondary dependencies (which are used by other programs as well) to create a completely misleading picture.

Re:Incredible horrifying bloat

[suffix tree monkey]

Indeed, that is my problem with Mono (or C#, for that matter) as well. We can't expect small, lean applications written in C# because of the language's design. C# is only good for writing code blazingly fast. Which is kind of silly to me, because as a semi-experienced programmer, I know that writing code is the easier part of software development.

So yeah, 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. However, most people with enough RAM just 'meh' it out, after all, there is no such thing as Page's Law, right?

But it's not just Microsoft's products that bloat Debian. My personal windmills are applications like HAL, D-BUS, any gnome-*-daemon, any {Policy,Device,Console}Kit and so on. 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.

(I get agitated when software bloat is discussed, I know.)

Re:Incredible horrifying bloat

[TheRealMindChild]

"bloat" - I do not think that word means what you think it means.

.NET is an ENTIRE platform. You likely could have a whole system where this is the only accessible API. Just like Java. Would you fault, say uTorrent, for having 40 megs of win32 dependencies?

This is the unfortunate case of a .NET application being apparently the only one in the core system, so it gets all of the weight of the dependency on Mono. However, when a few thousand applications in the system are .NET, that kind of a dependency is not even a second thought.

Re:Incredible horrifying bloat

[Bob54321]

Look for GNotes. It is Tomboy ported to C++. That has annoyed to Tomboy developers....

Re:Incredible horrifying bloat

[recoiledsnake]

Gnote is a line by line clone of Tomboy from C# to C++. Even the GUI is exactly the same. Don't believe me? See the screenshots at http://robertmh.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/mono-in-the-default-install/ So his complaints would all be still valid, unless he's biased against mono.

What the F...

[sydneyfong]

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.

Re:What the F...

[sydneyfong]

PS: From TFA (I confess not having read it in full before typing the above rant ... I did read TFA.... just not in detail ;-p)

The news got out via a blog post by Debian maintainer Robert Millan, who maintains the Gnote package for Debian - Gnote is a non-Mono replacement for Tomboy written in C++.

In other words, it's a non-story about two maintainers trying to get their packages accepted into the "default" installation (from TFA it sounds like it's an issue of what to include in the first CD). Yeah, raise patent concerns, size concerns, blah blah blah blah, but it all boils down to ego stroking and comparing dick sizes.

Duh.

Re:What the F...

[Fallingcow]

Of course, it's under GPL so Gnote is within it's rights, but there's a thing called professional courtesy and respecting a developer's wishes.

If it runs faster and takes up less space*, who cares what the Tomboy developers think? May the better app win, I say.

*disclaimer: I have no proof that either of these are true, but it seems likely. If not, then Tomboy ought to thrive and Gnote will probably not gain many users anyway.

Another good reason to use KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME folks are really pushing the adoption of KDE 4 nowadays.
It is great to see so much friendship between open-source projects :)

Re:Yessss

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

what a troll

[jipn4]

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.

Re:what a troll

[0xABADC0DA]

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.

Java is based on an open standard... the fully open-source reference JDK.

The reference JVM is also significantly faster than mono and somewhat faster than Microsoft CLR and has loads of somewhat useful other languages implementations that compile to it (Ruby, Python, Scala, Groovy, etc). So I'm not sure where you're pulling "way ahead" from.

Try Gnote instead of Tomboy

[Laven]

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.

that's irrelevant

[jipn4]

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.

Re:An interesting read on the subject

[Jesus_666]

The problem is that Microsoft has an extremely bad reputation. We expect them to do absolutely everything they think could be to their advantage because, well, that's how they behaved in the past - even going as far as subverting ISO to get their document format declared a standard.

As long as Microsoft retains any control over .NET I won't feel safe around the platform simply because they could decide to screw over everyone at any time and given their past behavior I expect them to.

Whatever Microsoft comes up with, it's either a fully integrated part of their software stack or too hot to get involved with. I don't want to get caught in the fallout of a patent lawsuit. That sounds paranoid but, well, Microsoft's actions so far have been fairly consistent.

awkward fact, may ruin exciting story

[julian67]

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.

FUD

[gd2shoe]

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.)