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Richard Stallman Says No To Mono
twitter writes "There's been a lot of fuss about mono lately. After SCO and MS suing over FAT patents, you would think avoiding anything MS would be a matter of common sense. RMS now steps into the fray to warn against a serious mistake: 'Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use. .... This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. ... [writing and using applications in mono] is taking a gratuitous risk.'" Update: 06/27 20:22 GMT by T : Read on below for one Mono-eschewing attempt at getting the (excellent) Tomboy's functionality, via a similar program called Gnote. Update: 06/27 21:07 GMT by T: On the other side of the coin, reader im_thatoneguy writes "Jo Shields, a Mono Developer, has published an article on 'Why Mono Doesn't Suck,' why it is not a threat to FOSS, why it is desirable to developers and why it should be included in Ubuntu by default."
LastGuyonEarth writes "Gnote was started on April 2009 by Gnome developer Hubert Figuiere, known also for his work on Abiword. The goal of Gnote is to provide a Free Software implementation of Tomboy that doesn't rely on Mono. The ultimate goal is to replace Tomboy in an effort to make Gnome and GNU/Linux distributions non-dependant on Novell's implementation of Microsoft's .NET platform. For our testing purposes, I installed Gnote 0.5.1 on Ubuntu Jaunty through a personal PPA, but I would love to see it officially packaged in the near future."
Wow, what are you, four years old? Is it really that hard to just use Microsoft?
Where is the editor to edit this graffiti out? This crap does not belong on the front page of news site at all.
rename it to GNU/Mono
WTF is up with these editorialized summaries. The abbreviation is MS, or Microsoft if you prefer the long hand. Let people form their own opinion without stupid name calling.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
Can someone tell me what the icon is supposed to be for GNU is Not Unix??
he can't make us call it "gnu-mono", so it must be bad.
I tend to think of Stallman as a bit of a nut, but I pretty much hold the same view of Mono. It's a trojan horse.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's absurd that Stallman has to actually issue this warning considering Microsoft's history of behavior not only with competition but with their business associates as well. Anyone who has been both alive and conscious these past twenty-five years knows forming any sort of relationship with Microsoft, either directly or indirectly, customer or partner, is just asking for a raping.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Sorry for the rant, I just simply come here for a little higher caliber discussion.
Stallman also says no to web browsing.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Just say no.
I've been writing some winforms applications and all I've got to say is "no". As a long time Qt programmer, I found winforms initially familiar, but it's got a lot of quirks that drive me nuts.
I'll stick with Qt on C++ thank you very much.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
He actually didn't make himself look like the raving lunatic he usually does. His argument is hinged on the idea that one day Microsoft is planning to ruin C# for everybody, which I don't think will happen, but he raises a valid concern nonetheless.
Also, get off it with the "M$" bullshit. Yeah, companies like money.
I'm a C# [doze] developer, but I'm with the Linux/GNU crowd when it comes to FOSS ideologies. Installing mono by default on all Linuxes I think is a great idea, because it gives me the opportunity to port my apps painlessly to the widest possible audience! This includes mac.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
I don't get why Stallman keeps trying to influence what others choose to do with the software? Why does he feel the need to keep pushing his socialist-community-commune-communistic-leftist software agenda when it's one of the most successful models out there? I just don't get it. He's not the only voice and if they choose to add the "evil" mono to their distribution of Linix that's their choice not his. I just don't get why he keeps meddling in the affairs of others. Doesn't he have his own GNU/Linux/Hurd distribution anyway? Oh, right it's not that popular... oh well... I guess he just needs the attention or something.
I see a spectrum of various forms of open software from the locked up tight GPL crowd on through the truly free *BSD crowd to the awesomely free public domain crowd. There is room for everyone's choices just don't try to force them on everyone else.
When I used to use Bulletin Board systems to download software most of it was in the public domain. Now evil software licenses like GPL have ruined the public domain. It's quite sad to impose so many restrictions on free software.
Microsoft sueing the mono project and forcing it underground through software patents would be an enormous shoot to the foot. Mono does nothing more and proliferate the .NET platform, often at the expense of Java. The thing that Microsoft likes so much about .NET is that while mono and Portable.NET provide a way to make true cross platform apps, there are many, many Microsoft specific extensions to the core, which makes it very easy to make a .NET app that is not portable. In the late 90s Java was the same way thanks to Microsoft's JVM with builtin COM support, and various other Microsoft technologies. The Java of today however is designed in such a way that it is difficult to make a Java app that is not cross platform, which is why that hate it so much.
Mono makes .NET exactly what Microsoft wants it to be, technically open yet easily locked to thier platform.
What part of mono is he saying is dangerous?
the language c#?
the class library (API)?
the intermediate byte code spec?
All of the above? C'mon now. The pragmatic approach is to identify what parts of the mono project are supposedly at risk and figure out how to get around them. There are many languages that target mono. Not just C#. What about them? One could branch mono into a version that uses a completely different class lib (API) if that's the issue. One could rebuild the back end intermediate byte codes it uses to stay clear of patents if it were really necessary. All would cause pain, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
In short:
In otherwords, I'm confused. Does he like C# or not? If he doesn't, why does the FSF have their own .NET implementation? What makes theirs so special?
It's GNOME. AFAIK Debian developers basically want to lessen the amount of resources devoted to repackaging GNOME.
Apple has "Mac vs PC", Microsoft has "Laptop Hunters", Linux has recession
Mono is a cleanroom implementation of the CLR as specified by EMCA and .Net libraries, right? What exactly do you risk by using it?
It is not going to be revoked, it cannot be revoked.
Although initially this seems to give support to the MS platform, IMHO this is a move that will start to break the idea that to use C# one must have windows and say that you can write the same applications on linux.
Once people can write an application and deploy it anywhere, users will have real choice, even if C# isn't the best basis to stay on for life. Worry about getting users to the platform and then worry about putting the code in C/C++.
Check. We'll see what the other FOSS clerics say.
Ok, but what about Java? It's just a matter of time before it licensing model changes. What are we going to do? I don't think I will start coding ERP applications using C,CPP, PERL, etc. I would pretty much install Windows or something that would get the job done faster.
Mono is dangerous because it isn't "DotGNU Portable.NET". In otherwords, it is dangerous because it wasn't created by the FSF.
Mono is a free (GPL) reimplementation of commercial software. Isn't that how GNU got started in the first place? Didn't Stallman and friends reimplement the commercial Unix libraries as free (GPL) software? Wasn't he potentially violating patents? Why was it okay then when it's Unix, but not okay now when the technology came from Microsoft? Do the commercial Unix vendors holding those patents behave any differently than Microsoft (ahem SCO)? Mono is 2 generations behind Microsoft, yet has a pretty good stable offering and makes a very nice easy path for the majority of all developers in the world (WINDOWS Developers) to make the transition to Linux and GNU...this isn't something Stallman should be against, IMHO.
Another reason to avoid Mono is that IMHO it doesn't play to Linux's strengths.
C# is almost kinda almost neat on Windows because it interacts nicely with windows's objects. On Unix/Linux where things more often communicate through pipes, streams, files, etc, it seems to me Python's a better tool for most jobs.
And another gripe with C# and .java is that they don't seem to me to ever be the best tool for a job. They're horribly inefficient to develop in (python's much better), mediocre OO languages (ruby's better), bad at doing low level stuff (C's better), etc. I'd say that Python + C extensions is a better solution for almost any problem C# can be used for except for interacting with Windows internals.
what amazes me is that RMS is saying at the same time that it is good to have a C# implementation, but warns against writing apps in it... if not outright imbecile, that's at least a very stupid position
I don't know if this is overreaction. But I can certainly agree with him under some circumstances.
1) Is there a licensing concern using the C# language, or any of the compiler technology? Specifically, are there any software patents that could be leveraged against the open source community for using the C# implementation that could result in a massive court action? I do not know the details of any agreements (if they exist) but knowing Microsoft's stance on OSS, there is certainly potential for future abuse. Something along the lines of "Use of C# on any non-Microsoft platform is henceforth prohibited."
2) Is C# considered an open standard? Secondly, is the specification controlled by Microsoft directly? Or, is it influenced by the communities? Java is a similar monster, but it's been my observation that Sun (Oracle) is a willing participant in the Linux/Unix space so it hasn't been such a problem. An Example here would be something like, "C# compilers and applications now depend on a library that is currently available on Windows platform, any reverse engineering or decompilation or efforts to replicate this library will result in criminal penalties."
I'm certainly hesitant to use C# in anything simply because I don't trust Microsoft. I admit it openly. It doesn't mean I won't use what they make, and I think a healthy distrust isn't always a bad thing. If I end up using anything based on C#, I'll keep it in the Windows space.
As much as Stallman would like to say otherwise, Linux is not GNU/Linux, and GNU is not all free software.
And lets face it, Debian has a choice:
Either not include a useful application for the sake of "purity", or include a useful runtime and applications which use it.
IS the goal to create a useful system or a pure system?
Test your net with Netalyzr
Brushing his teeth
Bathing
Putting on clean clothes
GNU and GCC are just as much open source implementations of proprietary technology from convicted monopolists as Mono is. QFT
Change the damn summary to read Microsoft, or MS. This is really, really stupid. Is slashdot's target audience 10-year olds now?
I think /. is brilliant by posting an article from twitter. This way he can keep himself occupied by having a conversation among him and his sock puppets on this board and leave the rest of the stories alone. twitter, I hope you're having fun making points and counter-points with yourself, then modding them all insightful. What is your story dude... really?
Also, M$... what is the point of that... really? Reminds me of people calling Obama Obummer and McCain McLame. You do realize you don't do ANYTHING for your argument when you use these ridiculous word games, right?
Then why is he pimping his own c# implementation in the very same article? Their project sounds exactly like Mono.
Interesting, compared to this which has been his comment earlier. Nice to see RMS give the Mono haters more fuel to their flame wars, so that developers can get tangled up in endless discussions about this in stead of actually hacking away. Again, this is one of the reasons GNU/Linux is not gaining more than it does. All MS needs to do in order to keep hackers busy not making great software (and cloning already great C# apps instead), is issue some kind of new vague statement on the nature of .NET. Then, we all lose. Like we've been doing since day 1. Nice. Thanks. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
M$ Mono -- bringing M$ Conficker, Nimbda and Slammer to Linux.
Does anybody really care what he has to say about Mono & C#?
After fighting a decade+ long losing battle about Linux vs. GNU/Linux naming, he just enjoys trying to continue controlling others and telling them what to do and not do.
su manpage - GNU Shell Utilities
Love him or hate him, but at least listen to what he is actually saying.
All he is saying is that Microsoft has already publicly claimed that Linux violates a couple hundred MS patents. Recently, Microsoft invoked the Linux angle in a patent suit it filed against Tom Tom.
Therefore, he says, it should be obvious to all that MS intends to enforce its patents. So, the more one uses software based on MS technologies, the more likely it is that you may be impacted by a suit in the future. He calls this a "gratuitous" risk.
Or, in his words:
The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
It is quite ironic: Even though Stallman is one of the most passionate advocate of open source, he might the worst thing that ever happened to it.
> "Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation..."
Mono is not included in the Debian "default installation". It is merely pulled in by one of the several "tasks" that the user may (or may not) choose to select. The Debian "default installation" -- all pacakges of "standard" or higher priority -- does not even include X.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Completely agree with you. I don't see how Mono is any better than most of the programming languages out there that have a great support and communities behind them. I don't see what's so great about Mono that you can't just build on, for example, Python. And no, I don't want Windows applications and DLL's running on my system. If I see a stupid .exe file I'll delete it into oblivion. I'm just sorry for all the effort that the Mono Project and related projects are wasting when they could be making something else more useful.
oh, wait, that's a kde thing... I forget, is that evil or not now?
'Nuff said.
what does RMS use on his personal computers in his home, basement boiler room or wherever he lives?
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Oh, hell. Isn't anyone concerned that this is all for Tomboy, an app which is frequently so sluggish as to be completely unusable? Remind me why we're not all simply using Gnote?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
if i said i didn't believe in blood transfusions, would that color your impression of any medical ethics opinions i might have?
lets be intellectually honest here: anyone who doesn't browse the web is completely out of touch with the main thrust of anything and everything computer related in the last 15 years
you say its not related. i'm saying it is
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Everything is bad and evil going on. Does he ever turn off his soap box and see the good things in the world. He had his time and used to be relevant in the past, now his rants are getting old and tired. This is bad that is bad... Chill man!
There is a difference between Vigilance and Paranoia. You don't cross the line between good and bad by walking towards that line.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
this is statutory rape.
But I suppose you're so used to being anal-raped my Microsoft that you think it's normal. Like a hand-shake.
Is Stallman also saying Open Office should be discontinued because it can read a Word document? The .doc standard is closed, heavily patented, rigidly controlled, and arbitrarily changed... yet I think we all agree an office suite that wants to be relevant better be able to save files in that format. So sure, use .odf as your default... but if you can't convert to .doc, you pretty much can't use it in the business world.
What about Wine? That implements the entire freaking Win32 API. If Mono, which implements a single language and a single programming technology for using multiple languages (.net) scares him, Wine must have him jumping at shadows.
Hell, even drivers could fall into this category. If you allow an MS mouse to function in Linux, are you afraid of patent suits there too? I certainly hope not, as mice are something you very much expect to work with zero effort.
C# may have been developed by a big bloated corporation that many consider evil (or at least unethical), but so was C! (AT&T - anyone boycotting C/C++ over warrantless wiretapping? Didn't think so.) Does anyone coding in C or C++ (or making a compiler or IDE for it) seriously fear a patent lawsuit from AT&T?
.net was clearly built as a Windows technology, but that's simply because MS made it. MS pretty much CAN'T claim patents on it, because .net itself implements so many languages that MS had nothing to do with developing, that I think it's safe to say any .net-based patent suit would die in seconds.
I'm no fan of MS, but I really don't see a problem with Mono unless you have Stallmanian paranoia.
Aw...
And I was just trying to find a way to install paint-mono since Gimp sucks.
The issue is not Microsoft controlling the implementation of Mono. The issue is Microsoft's patents on various technologies used in the C# specification. If Microsoft ever got desperate enough they might start to sue people who used any Mono based applications, because *MICROSOFT* owns the patents that Mono *MUST* use to properly implement C#. There is no getting around the fact that parts of C# HAVE BEEN PATENTED.
Richard Stallman over the years has made it his goal to encourage and promote the creation of free software alternatives of commercial products, patented or not.
RMS decided to clone Unix when he started his GNU project. This was at a time when ATT might have hold patents on the technology:
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
Microsoft has been vocal about their patent portfolio, but the danger of patents extends beyond anyone that is vocal.
As we saw with SCO, a company that is desperate for revenue will start taping into whatever they have at their disposal. SCO lost market share and tried to capitalize on the Unix IP.
The same can easily happen to any software company today that owns patents and finds itself in financial trouble. They will either try to license their patents or sell the patents for a third party to buy.
SGI was in such situation in 2002/2003 when they sold their OpenGL patent portfolio to Microsoft which now owns the OpenGL patents.
Smaller companies go out of business constantly and sell their patents as a last resort or as part of the bankruptcy proceedings (Chapter 12) that force a company to sell their assets to pay their debt.
Today the FSF is requesting clones for a number of technologies as can be seen here:
http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority.html
As the FSF becomes more irrelevant, their list of tasks becomes more irrelevant as well. Most of the work is now driven by external communities and there has not been a need for RMS to push for free implementations of key pieces of software as he did in the past.
Or they sponsor projects like GNUstep that would violate Apple/Nextstep patents as much as Mono would violate Microsoft patents. The only difference being that Apple is more litigious than Microsoft. It is part of their culture.
Link to Novell Microsoft FAQ
When Microsoft submitted C# to the ECMA standards body they specified which parts are patented. They further did NOT give any guarantee that they would not sue anyone who implemented C# at a later date. There was an article about this some months ago in which Miguel de Icaza himself was asked what the status was on Mono vs. the patents and he DOES NOT KNOW. Microsoft was asked for a clarification and none was given.
citation: http://www.osnews.com/story/21586
Haircuts, shaving, dieting, and exercise.
Sig this!
Stop whining, if it's all our code, it doesn't matter. For all everyone knows, our implementation is better because it's way more portable. It's NOT impure, it's NOT bad, it's just a recoding of commercial software. If we get in trouble for this, then's the time to worry! If not, then bloody hell, use it if you have to! But it's quite slow though. Why not use Vala?
Microsoft wants people to remain exclusively Windows. Mono and similar implementations allow people to run their .NET code on alternate platforms (eg. Linux, Mac, BSD) if the code is sufficiently portable (not that hard to do). By refraining from exploring portable solutions on other platforms due to vague, non-specified fears about some nebulous future threat, developers are doing what Microsoft wants most: giving people a reason to stay devoted to Windows. It's the safe bet. As others have pointed out above, the threat of patent infringement didn't prevent re-implementation of other commercial technologies. Linux as we know it today wouldn't exist if people had succumbed to the same kind of fear. I always thought one of the more ethical aspects of free-as-in-freedom software was to provide an alternative to less-free proprietary software. As such, Mono should be welcomed as a way for people to escape the control of Microsoft. I'm not sure I like this new fear-driven approach to deciding what's worthy of being acceptable as FLOSS.
MS or M$ - Who cares? If people use M$ you can see their bias right away, which may be a good thing to help you evaluate their position. Should a website thriving on user comments start implementing strict spelling rules? MS also stands for a disease, which I find kind of ironic. So does mono.
I really don't understand all the fuzz behind this. .NET (CLI, C#, MSIL) has been submitted to ECMA/ISO and its an Open Standard. Assuming a completely hypothetical and unrealistic scenario (where MS is desperate to attack mono despite officially supporting it via moonlight and others (read: Novell agreement)), It is legally impossible for MS to sue mono in the long run because its based on a OPEN STANDARD. It's like saying Adobe can lash out a patent against all .pdf documents which is impossible since Adobe passed on the PDF as an open specification. Eventhough Adobe invented it, they have no legal control over it anymore.
FOSS crowd should wake up to the realities of the world. Whether you like it or not, managed languages are definitely the future and MS came up with the best specification for it in the industry (yeah, .NET is lightyears ahead of Java, don't kid yourself). The key word here is "specification". Not the implementation. Mono does not use *any* code from the official MS C# compiler for example. Its a totally different compiler based on an open specification just like how the "official" C# compiler from MS.
I am frankly tired of C++ (after professionally coding in it for years). Not to say that C++ limited me. I'd say 90% of my applications were very successful but I can literally write the same application in C# at least 50% faster without any worries on security, memory management, etc and just as efficient. Only true C/C++ gurus can truly optimize a C/C++ application and theres not many of them. I don't claim to be on of them either. The CLR is just as fast as a "regular" C++ application anyday, if not even faster. Besides, the FOSS community or actually any organization has no alternative for some of the cool technologies in .NET like WPF for instance.
I think Mono is the answer Linux has been waiting for all these years. A multiplatform and more importantly a "consistent" framework. Like it or not, you need to get those Windows Dev crowd to Linux. Once Mono really takes off, I reckon most .NET app devs will pay attention to Mono and attempt to make it compatible (if not for Linux, at least for Mac which is again good for Linux anyway). Might as well as switch to Mono/C# sooner than later than rejecting it with...well...for no apparent reason except that it originated from MS of course.
MS can be an acronym for many things. Multiple sclerosis is usually abbreviated like this, for instance. It's the initials of coach Mike Sanford and of governor Mark Sanford. Et multiple cetera.
M$, on the other hand, is almost universally recognized as an acronym for Microsoft. It's more easily distinguished, it has less entropy.
Frankly, I don't understand why people become so angry at this use of M$. Are they trying to negate the fact that Microsoft makes a lot of money? Why should the association of a dollar sign to a commercial corporation be insulting?
It's easier to understand, there is no logical reason for it to be considered offensive. M$ should be the preferred way to identify Microsoft in a short form.
I've seen stallman's mailbox (seen, not read up close). If you had a much correspondence as he does, I'm betting you'd be a lot more in touch than now.
It seems the excellent look, ease of use/install and several binary stuff (not evil) like Nvidia drivers, Adobe Flash made people forget what GNU/Linux is and the philosophy behind it.
Novell is a company who was going all GM way before MS deal. The guy behind Mono is at a very high position at Novell and also happens to be behind Silverlight clone, Moonlight. Half of his blog includes Microsoft, Redmond. His fame comes from Gnome when it was created because of non technical, political reason of Trolltech Qt not being really GPL (which is all fixed now), he applied for a job at MS before open source and got rejected, there isn't a single reason to code Tom Tom in that language, there are dozens of ways to code it, it doesn't even get mentioned in windows scene...
Should I be reminding these as a OS X user? RMS, being founder of GNU has all the right to bitch about Debian GNU/Linux including a patent death trap. That trojan developer really knows what means to be included in Debian distro, it is some sort of unofficial proof that Mono is a credible open source framework, not a trojan half ass clone.
Debian guys must be fools to allow their credibility and respect earned for years to be abused like that. At least Novell got saved from Chapter 11 and Icaza has a job, what does Debian earn except the loss of respect?
What an idiotic statement by RMS!
>>It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use.
Why should it be a danger? If there are any software patent issues, they are certainly not on C# which is an open standard, but on the .NET library (BCL). If RMS is worried about that, GNU should strive to provide an open and different alternative to the .NET library. But the BCL has got nothing to do with C# since it is used by all .net languages (VB.NET, J#, IronPython, IronRuby...)
"The Microsoft .NET Framework is the predominant implementation of .NET technologies. Other implementations for parts of the framework exist. Since the runtime engine is described by an ECMA/ISO specification, other implementations of it are unencumbered by patent issues. It is more difficult to develop alternatives to the base class library (BCL), which is not described by an open standard and may be subject to copyright restrictions." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework#Alternative_implementations
>>any free implementation of C# would raise the same issue.
Again, nonsense
>>This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. Free C# implementations permit users to run their C# programs on free platforms, which is good. (The GNU Project has an implementation of C# also, called Portable.NET.) Ideally we want to provide free implementations for all languages that programmers have used.
Talk about being coherent. If C# is bad, then why is GNU implementing it? You can't say one thing and the opposite two sentences later...
>>The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#.
Ok, so now the problem is Tomboy? And again, what's the problem with C#? It's... an... open... standard...
Oh, and by the way, Microsoft has a "shared source" implementation as well (free for non commercial use), called Rotor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Common_Language_Infrastructure
I am a big, big fan of Open Source. I actually maintain an open source project, and it so happens that is written in C#. RMS is actually harming many F/OSS projects with these stupid comments. What a letdown.
My Stack Overflow user
I agree with just about everything MS has ever written (not said, as he's famously hard to get along with in person), except for this. I really don't get why it's better to have one root user, rather than many. Especially when, even with a single account and a shared password, anyone with the password can change it easily.
but you actually want me to take advice on technology from this fossil?
its hard to be an authority on a subject matter you do not fully and freely partake of, don't you think?
"Just because the guy doesn't take the well-worn path he's out of touch?"
considering that the concept of taking "the well worn path" and the concept of being "out of touch" are pretty much antonyms, then yes
as for being an "intellectual conformist": conforming the validity of opinions to those who actually attempt to engage in the subject matter... that's not intellectual conformity, that's topical conformity
i mean i have a great opinion for you on the proper engine to use in race cars. but i don't actually race cars. pffffffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yes, he does:
For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer.
He quite literally says no to web browsing. Which is what I said he said. I didn't say he went around advocating that no one else use web browsers.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Mono was great for porting Visual Studio projects to Linux, etc. Mono supports the C# and Visual BASIC languages.
When you are a Windows developer that writes software for Windows, you usually use Visual Studio and C# or Visual BASIC as your primary language and like to take the code you write and port it to other platforms. Novell Mono made that possible, with a few rewrites of Form code as Windows Forms are not part of Mono. Windows developers use Visual Studio because Microsoft gives them a discount on it and even bundles it as part of the MSDN Microsoft Development Network subscription program to get Microsoft operating systems and development software and applications at a discounted rate for developers.
Visual Studio is easy to program in because the IDE is as easy to use as a paint program and you just drag and drop objects to create the Forms needed for the application, Delphi and other languages had about the same type of IDE. So an open source alternative would need an IDE that is just as easy to use as the Visual Studio and Mono IDEs.
I had planned to develop software for Windows under Visual BASIC 2005/2008 and then port it to Linux and Mac OSX using Novell Mono. But now I cannot if Richard Stallman says not to use Mono and I had planned on an open source version using Mono. So now what Visual BASIC code I wrote is useless and I'll have to rewrite it in a different programming language. Thanks Richard Stallman, I can see why you are the Saint of Open Source Software now. :)
Good thing I got some Python, C/C++, and Java skills, even if they are older skills I haven't used in a while. I have to give up my Visual Studio and Mono IDE easy to use crutch, and I hope I find an IDE for an approved Open Source Programming Language that I can use easily, without a huge learning curve and adapt to a different language.
Basically my Visual BASIC skills are now obsolete for Open Source Programming. This will either force me into close sourced code, or a different programming language I am not as good in for open source code. I've spent almost 17 years on Visual BASIC programming from Visual BASIC 1.0 for DOS all the way up to Visual BASIC 2008, including the conversion from Classic Visual BASIC to Visual BASIC.Net which was hard, but I made it.
I am currently out of work and on disability, and had hoped to create some software applications in open source code for various businesses to use, and offer a professional customized version that is released from open source code and available for private use for a certain fee. I had also considered forming a non-profit like the Mozilla foundation and make open source programs available for free and ask for donations. But now, this changes everything and I have to reinvent myself and my business ideas and my plan to get off disability, and this will cause major delays.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I define useful as something that doesn't contain superstition.
I am reminded of a message I need to give to you all...
"Let us open the book of GNU and read from it, brothers . Sisters .
And Tard said, let us create an operating system free to all and let it trully be free.
But alas, it was not fore it had copywrite. And the Foundation would persecute all that
used the code freely but did not give everything related away."
In the end we realized that his whole plan was to turn us away from personal self destruction and worship only him.
The stallman, who was the anti-root. Know him and his followers, the Torvaulds, The Cox. The shuttleworth, The ian of deb..
But salvation is not far away. The Daemon, the true path is set before us. The regents of Berkly! be praised!
The gods of code created it and it was BSD. Our salvation is at hand....
The prophet of slack who was directed by the Dobbs to create a path for us to BSD.
Volker of Ding.
"
So let it be written so let it be done.
stallman's opinion valid on inbox organization would have a lot of validity
on mono, not so much, considering his bizarre detachment from contemporary web reality
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The joy of C# is windows. If you are a Windows developer, using Visual Studio, then you pretty much have the ideal coding environment. Its like VB with curly-braces, its easy to use (as the IDE help you out a lot), its quick to compile (apparently that's a big plus), and it has a huge library full of useful functions. I think the last one is the killer app - you don't need to do anything yourself, MS provides a library function for you.
On Linux, I'm not sure its quite as good as it is on Windows. It beats me why they couldn't implement the big library using C exported functions instead and expose that to all languages. I know why MS did it that way - lock in to C#/VB/Windows/.NET (a bit like 'pure java'), but I'd have hoped Linux development would be more open.
You know this for a fact, that it doesn't have any MS code hidden in it? How would anyone outside of MS really know that, anyway? MS and Novell signed this deal, all about some secret patents, remember, and MS only claims to never sue any of Novells customers..they left it open to sue later on anyone who was running a non blessed distro. Now, where does Mono come from again, and what exactly does Mono do? Starting to get the picture now? RMS is just being cautious, because there's a big fat REASON to be cautious, and that reason is the 800 lb gorilla who has been known in the past to drop zillions on destroying their enemies, or to usurp "open standards" and some dubious "voting" and so on. They are not to be trusted, and the potential taint with Mono should raise some cautionary flags. It *might* be free and clear and open.and it might not. There is a distinct possibility bordering on probability that it is tainted, and perhaps on purpose, a stealth long range trojan.
What happens when Java is little but a memory (woot!) and large important parts of the non-microsoft users desktops are .net based?
Stallman is well known and respected for his accuracy in predicting future risks. Did it occur to you that he might be thinking a bit further out than you are?
so would the amish be a good group of people to consult on mono?
i'm sorry, if the guy doesn't partake of contemporary technological reality, he's just a bizarre fossil, and his opinion loses validity
i'm sure the man is a genius, but if he consciously curtails his involvement in how the rest world interacts with the web and adapts some alien SMTP modus operandi, i'm not going to take his opinion on web-related technologies seriously. you really think there's no basis for me doing that?
now give me my troll mod for not kowtowing to the apparent sainthood of RMS in your eyes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Thank God since nobody except some little fan gang of that guy cares about Mono enough to rely on it.
Of course, if the real evil plan of getting it included like a trojan on a respected, definition of open source Linux distro like Debian works, things may change...
Funny is, people not caring enough to figure Mono is nowhere near to be replacement/alternative to real Microsoft .NET. There isn't a single important application which exists both on Windows and Linux thanks to Mono. Oh some music player maybe? Well, for me, download.com top 10 matters. I always see Limewire, Vuze in top 10 lists since they are written in true multiplatform language which has feature and major version parity between all major operating systems one way or another.
Mono is more like gcj I would say but gcj can actually run pretty modern Java code with all the GUI tricks if needed and it runs even faster. Can you picture MS allowing their multi billion dollar clone framework to perform better on a free operating system? I wished MS really changed their attitude and for example, release IE for Linux which would exist thanks to Mono and save millions of people from virtual machines. If this sounds funny to you, tens of nerds trying to catch a moving multi billion dollar target from a convicted monopolist looks funnier to me.
The Bilski case is right around the corner and will give us better picture of how software patents will be implemented in the future. Who knows, might even make this Stallman issue moot? I find it strange that stallman even cares about patents. Software patents are pretty much a joke nowadays.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Specially if it is calling names!
And particularly if it is against a nasty company that breaks the law with impunity with almost clock work regularity.
Oh yeah, but the people writing a little $ are immoral, unethical or whatever...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yes, Unix and C were developed by an eviler company than Microsoft... About 40 years ago. Any patents filed on the core of C or Unix have long since expired.
When the GNU project started there were virtually no software patents, and what existed were effectively non-enforceable. It wasn't until 1981 that anyone really believed a software patent could be enforced, and not until the creation of the federal circuit (which handed the patent attorneys complete control of the courts for patents) in 1982 did you have any chance of enforcing one.
The GNU project started at a unique moment in history when technology was cheap enough to make it possible but before the patenting of software could make it impossible.
Were it not for work sparked by the GNU project unix systems would likely have died out over a decade ago, and certainly would have missed all the user friendly enhancements built by the linux distributions in the intervening time. There would also be a lot less open development generating an undeniable wall of prior art, catching up using 20 year old technology would probably not be possible.
Because of the patent situation it seems pretty unlikely that the GNU project could be started today.
And another gripe with C# and .java is that they don't seem to me to ever be the best tool for a job. They're horribly inefficient to develop in (python's much better), mediocre OO languages (ruby's better), bad at doing low level stuff (C's better), etc. I'd say that Python + C extensions is a better solution for almost any problem C# can be used for except for interacting with Windows internals.
From your listing of languages, it sounds like you're a fan of dynamically typed programming languages in general. If so, then there might not be any point in discussing this, since you are inherently biased against any statically typed language such as Java or C#... but I'll try.
C# the language does not "interact nicely with Windows objects". It doesn't even know anything about them. It's just a language, pretty much like Java, but with a few additions that make it somewhat more convenient to code in.
It also has a bunch of stuff in it that makes it easier to interop with OS APIs, and C libraries in general - not just on Windows, but anywhere. For example, it supports raw pointers and pointer arithmetic, packed structs, and unions. It also lets you access functions from C libraries far easier than, say, Python - because C# type system overlaps with C, you can just import functions directly from shared libraries with a single declaration.
I'm not sure what you mean by "mediocre OO language", and how Ruby is better there. It seems that most stories about how superior Ruby is are centered about blocks & lambdas - but these are present in C# as well, and let you do similar things (even if the syntax is not quite as neat).
So, can you be more specific about your dislike of C# as a language?
"Purity". You make it sound like the Aryan Brotherhood or something.
Well, this discussion wouldn't be complete without some mention of Nazis or Neo-Nazis, I guess.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. (Ambrose Bierce)
yet a further degree of separation from the reality the majority of us living and working in the field
and yet you apparently think RMS is beknighted to command unquestionable authority on the subject matter
no. how about he is a bizarre fossil?
now give me my troll mod for not kowtowing in unthinking cultlike worship to your saint
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Comparing to Python is comparing apples and oranges - Python is dynamically typed, C# is statically typed. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. For a hint of why static typing can be better - try to find any Python or Ruby IDE that can correctly do basic refactorings such as "rename method".
Comparing C# and Java is more reasonable. Here is a Wikipedia article that tries to do that point by point.
Interoperability is a great thing to have, and might even spur more everyday people to adopt Linux in the future.
and therefore of greater validity than anything RMS could utter
i question the validity of the man's authority on technologies he does not partake of
so where's his unthinking cultish followers with my troll mod?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Oh, sorry, you are posting as an AC.
Surprising how many MS defenders decide to post as ACs....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This is actually informative.
C - over 20
Trust me, you'll eventually see the difference. Probably around the time you start paying a house mortgage.
then yes, i have to question his authority and opinions on contemporary technological issues
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There is no use to have a system that is open to be torpedoed by a company that actually has threatened to use its patent portfolio.
Why should one ignore the threats?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
About time, but did anyone expect anything different from him?
FYI, I refuse to use mono, .net or c pound. (Man does it piss off the ms marketing rep when I call it that)
I've been a Novell guy since the their very beginnings, Anyone else remember Non dedicated 286 Netware? DCB's?
Ahh, the good old days.
you tell me the real experts don't have time or interest in mucking around with the latest flavor of the month technology
under a story about RMS issuing an opinion on the latest flavor of the month technology
pfffffft
look: i'm sure the man is a genius, but you have to understand, google was once a flavor of the month. html was once a flavor of the month. hell, tcp/ip was once a flavor of the month. thousands of flavors of the months come and go. but some stick around and become the "real issues" you refer to. and you can't be "too busy thinking about the real issues" when you don't even have a grasp on what the real issues are anymore, partly out of your own conscious effort to shield yourself from the entire framework of interaction that defines the reality of any users or developers in the field you are issuing edicts and opinions on
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
> Wow, what are you, four years old?
And when are you from? The 1900's?
> Is it really that hard to just use Microsoft?
Yes, it's very hard to write Microsoft when they really mean "M$". It's done on purpose, you harebr...
This is the "Then they fight you" phase. They're coming at us with all they got... people say they're burying stories left and right, maybe they start even here, who knows?
AFAIK who can't say some aren't even pro-M$ astroturfers using M$ just to look like Linuxers?
Microsoft wrote its libraries in .Net for many reasons. One of the bigger reasons people use .Net is for its security and memory management model. C libraries wouldn't honor either of these. Also, consider a C function that returns a string (well, conceptually since it can't literally return a string). Either the caller has to pass a reference to a buffer that the function then fills, or the function has to allocate a properly sized buffer and return a reference to it. In the first case, that would force C# to use C's memory allocation rules (yes, C has rules, like you have to actually know the address and it can't be moved). In the second case, it would force the function and the app to agree on a memory management scheme. The chosen scheme would be guaranteed to be more difficult to use than the C# native scheme.
Also, C# isn't VB with curly braces. VB.Net is C# without curly braces. There is an important distinction. I have been around as many VB6 programmers transitioned to VB.Net. It is always a difficult process because almost none of the techniques necessary to write good VB.Net code are known to VB6 programmers because the features are new to VB.Net.
Finally, quick to compile is only important for those developing in Visual Studio. VS gives a lot of help and does a lot of reflection on the current code to give very specific help. VB.Net essentially incrementally recompiles the application every time you hit enter and in C# it is important to recompile often to keep intellisense up to date.
What you are advocating is to ignore the long term game for the sake of immediacy.
Hackers that have a tunnel visions strictly concentrated on hacking should be considered incapable technicians.
Hackers should understand the context in which their applications work and how they will affect and be affected by the society in which they will be run.
When I studied Engineering (Computing Engineering), we attended the same lectures as Civil or Industrial Engineers regarding ethics and how your work happens in a context.
What you are advocating is to ignore the social context in which applications are deployed and carry on coding with blinders firmly worn. Such attitude is short sighted, fortunately people like Stallman point to the perils ahead, wise hackers should pause, take notice, and then reach their own conclusions.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Otherwise you would not be incensed about he talking.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Funny to answer a question with another...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Since someone already jumped on the argument that C# is as good a high level language as any, I'll jump on the low level argument. C# is actually a good language for most application, even if they have a smattering of low level sections. I wouldn't write a device driver in C#, but I would write an image processing application in C#. One of the nifty features of C# is to admit that it isn't perfect for everything and it allows in-line C. So, instead of throwing away a high-level language for the 90% of an application that can benefit from it, simply write the application in C# and implement the 10% that would be better written in C, in C embedded directly in C#.
and stop issuing opinions on subject matter he doesn't have the time to partake of. seems rather straightforward, no?
i'm sorry. i admire the man, but that doesn't lend me to unthinking cultlike worship of him, as it apparently does with you
this is typical cult of personality bullshit you find in any academic institution. i'm sorry that slashdot ends in .org and not .edu, for the sake of my impertinent insults on your religious hagiography of computer science
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It makes your life more difficult. I will not even point you in the direction of people that decide to live by them.
But it sucks even more to be "pragmatic" and accept publicly to have non principle at all, save a naive attachment to view all through a rose tainted.window, or should I say rose tainted Windows?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
He didn't say what you seem to believe he said.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
are you frakkin kidding me, all this mono runtime crap because of a stupid
notetaking app? people to stupid to use a textfile? yeah windows sucks, but you know, linux stinks as well.
http://freebsd.org/ the new linux.
In this case part of the job specification is to protect any Linux projects from possible patent threats.
You would not whine about it if you were being paid for your work and your employer was asking you the same, but somehow because it is Linux some folks believe that they don't have a duty of care in regards to protecting this important project.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you do not like the mean bad old boss or I.T. department mendling on the systems you use at work then buy your own computer.
Sorry RMS but work is not freedom. Its just a paycheck as you no longer own your time in exchange for money to live.
If you are in charge of a system where other people at work need access to it and you are *paid* to keep it up then what are you supposed to do? Restrictions at work make sense as they are not being paid to play with their computers but to work.
I think you can tell RMS is out of touch with reality. Administrators need complete control in order to lower TCO and keep productivity. I want the file server to just work in the office where is my power to enforce this?
http://saveie6.com/
and part of that reason IS web technologies that use it, how it can be intertwined on many platforms
so yes, RMS is issuing an opinion that is not directly related to web technology, but that's the whole problem
nowadays, pretty much if is not web related, or if its an opinion on a non-web related aspect of development, it IS of lesser import
and all i am saying is that by shielding himself from how most of interact with communication technology, RMS is winding up issuing edicts out of touch with the most important thrusts
i am asserting the dominance of communication technology above all else. i think reality bears me out on that assertion. and i am finding fault with RMS for not taking that into account when delivering his opinion on mono
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Java has the problem of doing things its own way in its own environment. For example no cleartype fonts for X make netbeans painful and horrible looking running it on Linux. No integrated KDE or gnome support because of swing and other issues make it hard to write easy code. Also overiding objects with the super statement is difficult ... at least for me with doing g and paint.
Anyway database access, debuggers, and threading make it scale well on a server. It runs well from a 1 to a 32 cpu system.
Also google apis are written mostly in Java if you want to do things like add google map support for your website and other things. Hibernate and spring are java based too which is nice. I believe there is a .net port of hibernate coming into maturity but I do not know if its finished yet.
For these reasons Java is still ahead of .NET for web server development. .NET actually does not suck and you can make great win32 applications with it. Linq and other things being ported may make it better for server development. Like the other poster mentioned platform independence is nice as MS has been known to change licensing fees to loansharking levels for SQL Server and IIS if you add clustering and unlimited seats. With Java if Oracle does that garbage I can simply switch from solaris to Linux and use postgresql or sysbase. No platform entrapment.
http://saveie6.com/
Rape doesn't simply mean forced sexual intercourse. As a verb... well...
But that remains its prime meaning.
To use the word in any other context pretty much ends the conversation.
I'd say they have abused their dominance in the tech world to the extreme more than once.
The same could be said of every other company that is strongly positioned in tech - or in any other sector of the economy.
Corporate hardball - not Base Ball - to use the old spelling - has always been the American national game.
Mono doesn't even run netflix so who cares?
The "cleanroom" technique to which you are referrring is a precaution against inadvertant copyright violation and NDA violations. It has nothing to do with patents.
Patents can be enforced even if the "offending" party has never heard of either the patent or the product protected by the patents.
That's why people who understand software generally think software should not be patentable, or at least patents should not be enforceable without evidence that the "infringer" "stole" the idea covered by the patent from the patent holder.
Funny, we've been a customer of Microsoft's for 20 years and have yet to experience this "raping" you speak of. I know it's all sorts of fun and games to bash MS on slashdot
Funny, I don't even buy their software frequently. And I've *still* been a victim of a bunch of their practices over almost two decades, from having to work around ridiculous problems with DOS to having to having to work around ridiculous problems in their web browser. Given their level of success and the unprecedented resources they have to bring to bear on a given problem -- particularly in the case of IE6 where they basically gave the idea of advancing the web as a platform (and every web developer who built on it) a giant silent middle finger for five years *after* they conspired to "cut off the air supply" of a viable competitor -- pushing these issues onto the backs of everyday devs is a pretty crappy thing to do. Maybe it's only kindof miserable, rather than "rape." But given the number of man hours lost to these flaws, "theft" is nearly an apt metaphor.
So, perhaps rape is over the top. Perhaps it's merely theft or abuse, perhaps both are metaphors or even hyperbole. In any case, I'm glad it's worked out for YOU as a customer, and hey, feel free to keep buying from them if that's your choice. But it's been pretty far from a picnic for a lot of people building on top of their platform (to say nothing of competitors coming up against their market manipulation).
I'd say chances are that it isn't so much that you *haven't* been negatively impacted by Microsoft software and their business practices, it's that you haven't really considered how their development and business practices have impacted the industry and by extension your options and costs as a customer.
Tweet, tweet.
Listen Mono developer. Ubuntu is ''owned'' by a very successful billionaire and last time I checked, even makes money. It has a huge community which are there because they love the product, not like they are paid to be there.
Don't confuse Ubuntu with that bailed out by Microsoft failed server company named Novell and your once famous now sold out false prophet.
If I had the smallest clue how you guys tricked Debian into this...
The community isn't stupid, they figure the entire thing from basic users to legendary, pragma shifting developers. Please use your MS coupons whatever for Visual Studio 2008 and real .NET and leave Linux alone.
By MS helping to implement parts of Mono, they have, at a minimum, given up their rights to sue over those portions with which it helped. IANAL, but I have worked in the world of IP for a few years and from what I understand, MS has surrendered its rights to sue over those portions of Mono because of promissory estoppel. That is, since Mono was being implemented with help from MS, thereby giving the project its blessing to continue, MS has essentially given the developers of Mono a promise that it is OK for them to continue on.
What remains to be seen is whether or not MS would be allowed to sue for those portions of Mono that were implemented without help from MS. As usual, software development makes established IP law far more interesting to apply...
Are you sure you're not suffering from stockholm syndrome?
Microsoft offers a bundle of products and services which have become the de facto global standard for office work.
That solves many problems for your employer.
He can open an office anywhere south of the Arctic Circle - an office of any size - with perfect confidence that an MS Office solution will scale to his needs and that local recruitment and training will present no particular difficulty.
It is rather typical of the geek to focus on something like the "openness" of a file format - and miss the significance of The Ribbon.
The Ribbon speaks directly to the productivity of the office worker - and nothing lies closer to the heart and wallet of the office manager.
I won't use Mono either, and it has nothing to do with Microsoft. I'm a big fan of C# and would love to see it available everywhere. I won't use Mono because Miguel deIcaza supports terrorism and terrorists, and is active with the group "The Electronic Intifada" which supports blowing up innocent women and children. Our company won't purchase any Novell products either, because of this. SAY NO TO TERRORISM and SAY NO TO MONO
Thats pure BS. Microsoft hardly forces anyone to upgrade Office. The following work just dandy in Office 2000 ::
FileFormatConverters.exe
compatibilitypacksp2-kb953331-fullfile-en-us.exe
Office 2000 can read AND write Office2007 document, along with WordPerfect and the redundant "Works".
As well as security fixes still - Word and Excel for Office2000 this past patch tuesday. Though I believe end-of-life support is ending soon. It still works just fine. So one MIGHT have to upgrade for the next office iteration.
I'm calling you out. Right now.
We know you're on Slashdot, so don't be a coward.
Tell us how you know that Mono doesn't infringe on Microsoft's patents. Tell us how Moonlight doesn't infringe on Microsoft patents. Clear this stuff up.
Unless you and Novell answer this, without weasel words Mono and Moonlight and everything else you contribute to GNU/Linux based on Microsoft tech will be suspect.
Thanks.
--
BMO
Or hoping for a lucrative buyout and subsequent retirement on the beach..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Any competent and well-informed programmer knows that the openness of C#/.NET is a total sham. Sure the core is open, but there's so many Windows-only extensions that it's virtually impossible to make cross-platform apps. Plus the fact that the Mono implementation is always waay behind Microsoft's.
But MS has been very clever. They know that it's only technical people who can see this; the rest will just get the subliminal message that ".NET is now also cross-platform, just as Java".
This is the real damage of Mono. Its existence provides the right excuse for PHB and clueless tech decision-makers to sway the decision towards .NET instead
of Java, because, "hey, Microsoft is also cross-platform now".
I've kept that quote for ages and I have yet to figure out what the hell he is talking about. It does fit with his MO though. I mean, its either him or ESR who insists on the whole hacker/cracker thing. I think he uses cracker only to water down and soften the idea there could be computer "criminals" (I use the scare quotes assuming he would use them).
Somebody else said it, and I'll repeat it. Nothing personal, but the guy gets more attention then he deserves. He validates a whole swath of people who think our computing golden age was in the 80's when the "unwashed masses" weren't using computers and we didn't have to concern ourselves with usability,security or good design. Toss in the classic cypherpunk attitude and you got quite a character. It is so naive it is almost cute.
This made me laugh because I guess "good documentation" must only apply to hardware. The GNU utilities have horrid documentation. Well, unless you "info" stuff because, after all, "Man pages are obsolete". .. Obsolete my ass.
They just dont hang out in your echo chamber. Check out places like codeplex. Tons of stuff pull in Mono libraries.
Wrong Question - the question is if C# and mono are a patent trap. Currently, they are a patent trap. Program in C#/mono all you wish, just don't bitch when somebody else owns your work. And they want to charge your users a fee for using C#/mono.
Stallman is right. Those of you that say he is nuts don't have the faith. All of you unbelievers please exit to the door on the left. The rest of you may continue to listen to the truly enlightened man Mr. RMS. His position on digital freedom is important for society. Mono is a subversive measure for Microsoft to undermine digital freedoms and the do-it-yourself trend, if not now then later on given the first opportunity. The fact that someone actually had enough influence to put tomboy and mono in the default debian repository is quite scary. It should stay in the contribs and not be installed by default. Let the mono believers install it from contrib repository.
Anyone in their right mind knows all the viruses in Windows are brought to you by the wonderfully obfuscating automation technology OLE/ActiveX/COM/DCOM/.NET. If you bring .NET to Linux by installing MONO, then you invite all the computer viruses already written for it to automate their obfuscated infestations on your computer.
I prefer my computer without MONO and hope the rest of the Linux users listen to RMS because he is among the oldest and the wisest of all the computer gurus out there and he is looking out for everyone's digital freedoms.
Mono is great! Faster than Java and more skinnable, but harder to code. While I do fear non-native code, Im totally fine with it as long as you have the option to write native apps, unlike , say, Android.
For those of you saying that RMS is being hypocritical with the Portable.Net project, you should read this first:
Don't get caught in .NET
With all the RMS-bashing that slashdot has turned into lately, you'd wonder what the point is in providing arguments for your position.
Old CS Professors are still pissed that "any slob in a smelly T-shirt" is able to use a computer thanks to PCs.
RMS had his moment in time/history. Unfortunately for him, he's become a dinousaur, and we all know what happened to dinosaurs...
Nevertheless, we must be thankful for his work, and the work of other programmers as well, on the GNU software which is a very very important part of any Linux distro. However, if people would have blindly followed all his recommendations, ou favorite OS would not have support for binary/proprietary dirvers such as nvidia's and we would be nuts trying to use the GNU/Hurd microkernel. Who would use anything else but Windows in today's modern computers?
Fortunately, there's more to GNU/Linux than the GNU software plus the Linux kernel.
All fanatisms suck big time.
Wrong: http://web.archive.org/web/20030609164123/http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-sscli/msg00218.html
RMS says no to most basic personal grooming habits as well. Does using a comb every now and then put free software in a precarious situation?
Saying Debian is including Mono by default just for Tomboy is a bogus statement made over and over again by members of the church of free software. So it is no surprise that the high priest has now been quoted saying it too. When the guy who made Gnote also puts together a coding framework that the zillions of C# coders in the world can easily port their stuff to Linux thereby making it easier for them to transition away from Windows then I think we should seriously look at getting Mono out of Debian.
Why Free Software Shouldn't Depend on Linux or Any Programming Language
Another self-contradictory screed by Shoeless Joe Stallman
Debian's decision to include Linux in the default installation, for the sake of all applications which run on it which are written in many different languages, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on Unix clones and programming languages, so we need to discourage their use.
The problem is not unique to Linux; any free implementation of a Unix clone would raise the same issue. The danger is that SCO is probably planning to force all free Unix API implementations underground some day using software patents. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_v._IBM.) This is could possibly be a serious danger maybe, and only fools, heathens, curs, Protestants, people with dandruff, girls with cooties, and the profoundly ignorant would ignore such a certainly probable danger until the day it actually maybe happens. We need to take precautions now to protect Ourselves from this future possible danger which might happen maybe.
This is not to say that implementing Unix and various programming lanuguages is a bad thing. For example, Free(tm) C implementations permit users to run their C programs on Free(tm) platforms, which is good. (The GNU Project has an implementation of C also, called gcc. It's OK for us to do it, just not you. Also note how I freely conflate language and platform in this screed - pretty clever, huh?) Ideally We(tm) want to provide Free(tm) implementations for all languages that programmers have used, even the ones that are encumbered by patents. But we don't want you to do it. Your obedience to Us(tm) is the only true Freedom(tm).
The problem is not in the C implementations, even though that's exactly what I've just stated, but rather in all the applications written in C. If we lose the use of C, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk. And only suckers, the unemployed, and idiots take gratuitous risks. You don't want to be a sucker, do you?
We (not (tm), this "We" means "You") should systematically arrange some sort of Final Solution of the C Question, and depend on the free C implementations as little as possible. In other words, We(tm) (back to the (tm)'ed "We", this "We" is not "You") should discourage people from writing programs in C. Therefore, We (=="You") should not include C implementations in the default installation of Debian/GNU/Linux distributions (yes, true Freedom is Me(tm) telling You what to do), and We ("You" again) should distribute and recommend non-C applications rather than comparable applications written in no language and tied to no platform whenever possible.
Now, if y'all will excuse me, I am woefully behind in my screed quota for the year. But fear not slavish Disciples, in the next few weeks, prepare to have your mind blown by the following rambling and often nonsensical manifestos, hot off the manual typewriter in my Montana-based tarpaper-shack headquarters-slash-kitchen-table-slash-place-where-I-sleep:
- Why You Must Switch From Linux To The GNU Hurd Kernel (Hint: I control the naming of one of them!)
- Why Unwashed, Shoeless Hippies Get All The Chicks
- Why We Have Two Emacs, and Why That's Now Good When It Used To Be Bad
- Why I(tm)'m Still Relevant And You Should Continue To Obey Me(tm) And Stop Laughing At Me(tm).
- Why You Should Browse The Web In Text Mode (Hint: FOR FREEDOM(tm)!)
- A Survey Of Developments In Computer Science Prior To The Invention of The VT-100 And Subsequent End Of All Development In The Field
Until then loyal Stallmaniacs, you remain faithfully mine,
Shoeless Joe Stallman
I think that the Debian folks, although they are doing a impressive job in maintaining the project, are very close to a situation where one could wonder if they don't keep double standards. But to make matters more grim I can't help wonder if they didn't bring this whole situation upon themselves.
When it comes to licenses and the slightest indication of software possibly being "non free" then Debian holds very high standards. And don't get me wrong: rightfully so. But where things started getting heavily off course (IMO naturally) is when they include broken software to make up for the loss of the original. There are many examples but the one I personally experienced was with Java. Instead of simply making the point "No, we don't include Java because its not open source" (an opinion which I still find highly questionable) they chose to include broken software and presented it in a way as Java (it "looked" and "felt" the same after all). Unfortunately, that horribly POS (personal opinion) wasn't even capable of getting people through the first chapters of the official Java tutorial. A situation which I think has put many people on the wrong track with regards to Java, even to a point where they concluded that Java on Linux was broke.
And now I'm wondering if that same approach hasn't moved many Debian (or deratives) users away from Java due to the extreme hassle around it only to adopt another (seemingly) better supported platform; C# in the form of Mono. Maybe this is a little too black/white portraited but I still think it might apply to some of them. So in that aspect I can't help wonder if Debian brought this entirely upon itself.
As for Stallman and his worries; I have to agree to some extend. History has shown us multiple times that you can't trust MS with things like these. I'm even shocked to see that Debian would exclude the official Java implementation because they deemed it "not open source" (only because the source was freely available, but not under a license which people liked) but will happily include an environment which cannot be deemed entirely free (yet?). But on the other hand, if you take a closer look at MS's trademarks you will see that there isn't any friction (yet) when comparing those to what can be seen on the Mono website.
Because please bear well in mind the header of that MS page: "The absence of a name or logo in this list does not constitute a waiver of any and all intellectual property rights that Microsoft Corporation or its subsidiaries have established in any of their product, feature, or service names or logos.". But one could always wonder; should MS do start throwing some weight around; what is stopping Mono from changing their: "We provide C# on other platforms" to "We provide a MS powered java-like platform on other platforms.".
All in all I think Debian is making a grave mistake, but I doubt it can result in a scenario as forewarned by Stallman.
... is specious at best, damaging to Open Source at worst.
Everything that Richard Stallman is for is damaging to the Linux community ultimately. He takes some cosmetic issue like the one at hand and turns it all political for some perceived benefit and ends up screwing up Linux in the process. If Linux is going to thrive the Linux community needs to not be such yes men to what this idiot says. Many distros out there have been shipped half unusable because of political infighting like this. Face it guys. You can't change the world with your angry rants. Just because you have an idiotic opinion does not mean everyone else should do things you want. When did Linux become more of a religion than an operating system?
You need to parse Microsoft's statements better. They have not. I'm not feeling like searching the web for you, but I believe the sentence goes "royalty-free or otherwise RAND". And also it only mentions C# and the CLR. And what will these "potential licenses" look like? They've left themselves plenty of room.
Even in the best case scenario where Microsoft is unable to torpedo the big distros, this state of affairs (patent FUD) retards Linux adoption in corporate systems. Do you really think that 348 million dollars exchanged hands for no reason?
Anyway, this argument sucks. Every two weeks, you guys read the same responses from us and then promptly forget them. Every Mono story, we're dragged back to first principles.
I can't take it seriously anymore; you have to be faking it. I know you read a comment in the last Mono story (or in the thousands of comments in mailing lists, forums, blogs, or even my comment further up this very thread!) that described both Miguel's statements at MIX 08 and Novell's official statements about the patent covenant, which makes this semantic exercise utterly pointless.
Either you're true believer or you got a free laptop. In either case, I'm not interested debating small details anymore. Google is your friend.
Btw, I know what it's like to fall in love with a framework. But take a step back from VS and take a look at what's out there. Or just look at the history of development since Smalltalk. I promise it will be rewarding.
Just wondering ...
- sigs are for wimps.
> "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without the Bible." -- George Washington
You should know this quote is bogus
After very long and careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that Richard Stallman is a nut.
He seems to miss the point repeatedly, and ends up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The idea of FOSS is to make development easier and lest beholden to special interests. But he [and his cabal] are becoming their own special interest -- just like Microsoft, Novell, etc...
You must have a brain even neutrinos can't penetrate. Here, I'll put it in the most simple baby talk language that you might be able to understand: You can "browse the mono source" all day long and never know whether or not microsoft patents are in there.
Get it yet, el comprehende? Did you even read what richard wrote?
Only people on the inside at microsoft can answer that question on any hidden patents that could turn around and bite one day, no one else can answer it, YOU certainly can't, and MS have already hinted that one day they could and probably would sue other distros outside of blessed suse/novell over various patenting issues. That they haven't so far means nothing, they'll do it when they think they have to do it.
You can avoid a whole lot of that potential crap by just dropping mono and using some language other than c sharp. The deal is, why take the risk when you don't have to, no real need? You want to wake up one day and owe royalties to MS for stuff you wrote, supposedly in good faith? Do you think MS is ever going to be a nice guy about IP? You got enough cash personal just stashed away to go up against an MS team of lawyers? Right or wrong is immaterial, they could still bankrupt you with extreme prejudice (and the next 1,000 "yous") if they wanted to be asshats about it. And their track record is 100% asshat.
You make the call there, but logic is not on your side in this case, proven by your inability to recognize you need access to all the MS code to find out if mono is pure or not, *not just look at the mono code*.
So you were an admin for Windows systems and didn't feel like a developer - Perhaps because software development WASN'T YOUR JOB!
I noticed you just made a new account to troll and spread FUD on this article, and I was wondering, who do you work for, and how much do you get paid to make these posts?
Do you get paid by the hour, or is it per post or per word? Do you get benefits? How's the work environment?
I only ask because I've been thinking of making a move into the "PR" and "viral marketing" space myself. Put the liberal arts education to work, you know.
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The man basically made a lot of the internet and the modern computing experience possible. His foundation is responsible for some of the most vital, widely used, and essential software in use today.
And yet whenever he opens his mouth, cue the ad hominem attacks. They come hard and fast. Ignore what he said. Just question his character - change the subject, pick apart some wacky thing from his life. That should settle the matter.
Do you only converse with people who are absolutely normal, totally conventional, and who never make any mistakes in anything they have ever said? Because that's the only way you can bring this stuff up and be intellectually consistent.
And what's worse, this is not the ESPN forums. We're supposed to be nerds here. The man can't be weird and still be right?
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LOL. Heaven forfend we offend the sensibilities of a notorious, convicted monopolist, so successful in his illegal anticompetitive activities that he became the world's richest man for a number of years?
Whatever were we thinking. We'll go back to being good, obedient consumers now. Not.
How about this. M$ stops subverting standards bodies, engaging in barratry, and submarining "software patents" to squash competition, and we stop using the initials.
Why not let people form their own opinion by not misleading them?
Espousing false and misleading neutrality between a sensible viewpoint and a ridiculous one serves only to confuse.
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Haven't personally used Gnote or Tomboy, but it sounds like TiddlyWiki gives similar functionality, with the only requirement being a suitable browswer, e.g. Firefox.
For fucks sake man, how idiotic can you be? Never once did I state an anti-microsoft bias was undeserved or undesirable. I hate Microsoft as much as anyone though that is complelely irrelevant to the point I was trying to make.
It's rabid idiotic zealots like you who randomly attack people for percieveably supporting Microsoft that give the rest of us Microsoft-haters a bad name.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
For me what will happen is that Microsoft will claim in the future that Linux is very good because it uses part of Microsoft technologies. It will sound to the noob as it was Microsoft that made Linux great. I even go further:
.NET, a robust and feature rich API that developers developers developers love so much. Thanks to our efforts Linux is now gaining momentum. Next year we plan to release Microsoft Linux XP...
Why Linux is so great mr. Balmer?
-Linux employs one of our core technologies,
Then the world implodes. *mooB*
I can understand that - he's "eating his own dogfood" like an Apple rep having an Apple laptop (or the infamous rant here long ago about a RedHat sales guy that missed the point of his job and didn't want RedHat on his laptop).
As for the second paragraph - you misunderstand that he is the heckler shouting from the back row while what is actually happening with linux is things like the closed Nvidia drivers that he would never allow to happen. RMS is trying to make himself a figurehead but he really is not even if those who believe his press releases are saying as much. What you are seeing here is really just MIT staffroom politics that somehow escaped out into the wider world - this bullshit of claiming ownership of the work of others for one thing and the insistence of everybody trusting GPLv3 before it was even finalised for another. I pretty well dismiss the "cult of RMS" as newbies that don't know any better and are looking for a hero instead of just good ideas. The need to grow up and treat him as a peer instead of a hero.
I disagree with a few things in your article due to experience with some of the things you mention - the shambolic monolith that is Exchange is something you are really stuck with until you want to migrate to a completely different environment. You are better off keeping a legacy server than attempting to play catch up or migrating to a completely different web and email based solution of which there are probably thousands better than various parts of Exchange - but it's a matter of two or three solutions and not one enormous heap. Exchange is definitely the worst email server in production on any platform (although full backups are actually possible now so it has improved) so the email portion is easily replaced on the same or lesser hardware, but it's a matter of finding out what other portions the users require since it does a lot of other stuff.
The printer problem is vanishing as more and more cheap postscript printers that will run with anything are becoming available - there are just enough Macs and just enough home networks out there to kill the winprinter. I disagree with the attitude to the CLI - that is the one thing that has made large linux deployments possible since you can run the same command or script on as many machines as you want. Eventually there is a point where it is more productive to type instead of pointing at pictures - the difficult bit is sorting out which tasks are better done in which way. The main offender newbies hit is X windows configuration but there are now a few decent graphical ways to sort that out and you ALWAYS need a text based way to configure video so you can do something about it when the video settings are wrong. The text console is the linux "safe mode". Consider something like "powerdesk" or the multi-page nvidia or ati GUIs for video settings on MS Windows and you'll see how incredibly hard it is to have a GUI for something that only has a fraction of the options that X windows has - it really has to stay as a text configuration for the complex stuff especially as more extensions or single vendor only options are added. Personally I just copy the working nvidia dual head file to a new machine each time instead of the hunting through a maze of twisty config options that you would have to do with a pure GUI system.
The amount of linux compatible gear on the consumer end seems to have run backwards at the moment (paticularly with the rapidly changing state of WiFi hardware) and I really don't know how things will go.
RMS did not invent the internet, nor did his software have much to do with the internet. It's true that Linux heavily uses GNU software, but if GNU software weren't around, they could just as easily be using BSD versions of most of those commands.
RMS wrote Emacs, and without Emacs programmers might be a lot less efficient, but Emacs is really the only thing he "created", everything else was just copies of other stuff.
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All of this because of an application with such features as:
Highlighting text
Inline spelll checking
Auto-linking web & email addresses
Undo/redo
Font styling & sizing
Bulleted lists
Wow! I bet that couldn't have been written using languages and libraries that everyone is practically guaranteed to have - say oh, C and GTK!
I'm not a big fan of RMS. He's a bit of a nutter. But in this instance (ok, not exactly the first), he is absolutely correct. Inside every large horse that you see camped outside your walled city, lies an army waiting to kill you while you sleep. In this case, the horse has a large emblem written on the side that says "MONO", and inside is a patent minefield which wants to punch big holes in your city walls and bring ruin upon you. Microsoft teamed up with Miguel de Icaza to destroy Linux. de Icaza is no mere pawn. He is in league with microsoft. There is without a doubt, a paid connection between the two. Anything relating to mono should be an 'add on after', and not part of the native distribution. I have never expected microsoft to do the right thing, and they have never failed to disappoint. "MONO NOT WELCOME HERE" should be the official Debian line. Likewise with Novell. They did the dishonorable act, and now must be treated as the vermin they are. I don't want my system tainted with anything microsoft (I've seen, administered, installed and cursed their systems). I know exactly how bad microsoft software is. The only thing lower than the low low quality of their software is the moral compass of the company. Stay away from mono, and remove it from my Debian (and Ubuntu). Don't ever include it again, don't even consider that.
Take a deep breath and think twice.
Read up on oxml or ooxml or whatever "standard" microsoft is proposing to replace odf with.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Oh you lovable scamp. Indeed he did not invent the internet - which is why I did not say he did. :)
The software he personally wrote is also unimportant - which is why I didn't mention it.
But... this doesn't have much to do with the internet?
You have to introduce me to your dealer. :D
You can't go 5 seconds on the net without hitting free software. How many webservers run linux? How many routers, firewalls, and load balancers, for that matter?
Your first google search... bzzt. Google uses free software heavily.
The top 10 websites by traffic? Guess how many use GPL software in the stack. Just guess. Come on. Show of hands, who uses MySQL? Heck, for the new fangled folks, who uses Ruby on Rails?
This goes beyond the internet, man. The goddamned NSA uses Linux. Yes. RMS' work has contributed to the safety and security of the United States, FWIW. :)
You should take another look at what the FSF has in their directory. Just, give the page a while to load, OK? It's big.
http://directory.fsf.org/all/
Emacs? Screw Emacs! What would the world be like with GCC? Without glibc? What about if Perl just disappeared? What if wikipedia and all the sites based on mediawiki disappeared? And over half of sourceforge? And on and on and on...
And the funny thing is, the individual projects and products are almost beside the point.
What would the world be like if we didn't have the collaboration that happens in free software projects? We can't even count how many technical achievements were only possible this way, when everyone feels safe contributing, knowing that their work will not be taken and exploited by others who will not give back to the community.
Why is it that virtually none of the proprietary unices still survive? Why is it that BSD's marketshare is miniscule compared to Linux?
I'll give you a hint, it's not because of whose command line argument styles were better and it's not Linus' winning personality. :)
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Oh you lovable scamp. Indeed he did not invent the internet - which is why I did not say he did.
And I didn't say you said he did. See, that works both ways.
I was making a point, not claiming you made one.
You can't go 5 seconds on the net without hitting free software.
True, but irrelevant. BSD is also free, and they don't like the GPL much.
Emacs? Screw Emacs! What would the world be like with GCC? Without glibc? What about if Perl just disappeared?
What does RMS have to do with Perl?
Before GCC existed (or rather, before it became popular) there were other free compilers. There was a BSD C compiler also. Granted, GCC won out, but if it wasn't around, something else would have replaced it.
What would the world be like if we didn't have the collaboration that happens in free software projects?
Free software existed long before the GPL was created, and there's a ton of it that is not GPL'd.
But all this is beside the point. You made it out that RMS was basically responsible for the internet existing or functioning. The fact of the matter is that the internet doesn't run on Linux, it runs largely on BSD based products (Cisco, *BSD's, etc..) Most Web sites run on Linux, but that's not the internet itself.
Yes, RMS is responsible for a lot, but I don't for one second believe that it was impossible for that to happen without him.
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here.
While I disagree about the idea that M$ (No, I am not twitter.) would not be stupid enough to bring suit over mono, that post really explains it all.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
but I do in this instance.
Linux IMHO should not be incorporating Microsoft's standards in any form. Doing so could lead to litigation, and eventually the death of the system.
Ballmer would probably love to see Linux implementations of a few bits of Microsoft's stuff, purely so that he would have the grounds to sue someone later. Integrating such material is therefore very dangerous.
Patents, in their current form and use, are clotting up pretty much every industry these days.
They were originally meant to be limited monopolies, but because the Constitutions says limited time (but nothing about monopoly, per se), lawyers and legislators and judges have been having a field day making pretty much every industry a king-of-the-hill competition.
There was a time when we were supposed to want to protect the market, the economy, and society in general from king-of-the-hill games.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
(1) Although Microsoft has applied on a patent for the (non-ECMA/ISO) .NET APIs, Tomboy and other Mono applications don't use those.
(2) Any free software is threatened by patents and the patents can come from any company; with C#, people at least have looked at this issue in detail and come up empty.
Legally speaking, it's probably safer to use Mono than any other platform other than C at this point.
The statement from Stallman is particularly bizarre because the entire GNU project started out under a huge cloud of legal uncertainty: AT&T had extensive intellectual property claims to UNIX, including patents, and Stallman just ignored all of those.
Furthermore, if Stallman wants us not to use Mono, he needs to come up with a better alternative; so far, there is none. The closest we have to a successor to C/C++ is D, but it has limitations and isn't widely accepted.
I was making a point, not claiming you made one.
You were making a deceptive point - by responding to what I said with an exaggeration of what I said.
OK, apparently you did so knowingly - points for you. :)
True, but irrelevant. BSD is also free, and they don't like the GPL much.
BSD is not free. It is merely open. That is why it is so utterly marginalized, and why i.e. Linux server adoption is approximately an order of magnitude larger than BSD server adoption. BSD was there first, too, and there's a very good reason almost everyone switched to GPL projects.
RMS created the legal and social model that made software freedom possible. GPL projects are so important and ubiquitous that you cannot use the internet for 5 seconds without them, and you find it irrelevant?
You are high.
What does RMS have to do with Perl?
He created the GPL, which is the legal and social model perl is based on.
Granted, GCC won out
Why did it win out?
Coincidence? RMS's personal charm?
Oh, come on. You're totally sure "free as in speech" had nothing to do with it? ;)
Free software existed long before the GPL was created, and there's a ton of it that is not GPL'd.
No. Wrong.
Open source software existed before the GPL. I would argue no software was really free (as in speech) before the GPL was codified and used.
You made it out that RMS was basically responsible for the internet existing or functioning.
Ahhh... OK, so you are claiming I made this point? This is getting confusing. :)
The fact of the matter is that the internet doesn't run on Linux
A rather meaningless statement. I notice you haven't said a thing that refutes my points. (You cannot use the internet for 5 seconds without encountering software that uses his license.) Great! My work is done. :)
Yes, RMS is responsible for a lot, but I don't for one second believe that it was impossible for that to happen without him.
Oh, you are so stingy with your praise. :D
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The fact that he 'eats something from his foot' is totally irrelevant to the whole discussion - but does help you to put rms into a negative perspective.
That's not really a fair way to do make your point, right ?
CSS is also a "standard". The problem is that it describes "what should happen in a parallel universe". If you write a "conforming" web browser based on the CSS specs, you just won't be able to do anything.
IOW, this is the time of broken pseudo standards. A standard is something you're supposed to be able to implement easilly from the specs. Giving a 200MB "specification" that doesn't cover all the corner cases is useless as a standard.
NET is a typical case of a non-implementable standard.
And it was about time RM$ said something because GNOME took off as the "GNU desktop system"
Small patent trolls will come out of the woodwork anyway. You don't really want to base much of an argument relative to putting mono in a default install on small patent trolls.
And we should note that the guys in charge of Microsoft own (controlling interest in) a few patent trolls, but that really is beside the point.
We know from past experience that Microsoft will not openly attack a competitor if it thinks that will cost them mindshare. Unless they think they gain offsetting mindshare.
We also know that the will attack the enemy by underhanded means. No, their patent trolls probably will not attack Linux based on mono, but some lapdog patent troll which cannot be directly traced to them will use something in mono to attack members of the Linux community.
We've seen it happen.
We have seen some of their lapdogs exposed, others we have only seen indirect evidence of the connections.
We have not seen any evidence that they intend to quit doing it.
But the risk is the underlining point, not the main point.
The point here is what you push on the end user versus what you merely enable.
Do you make/let the end user go find Tomboy for him-/herself or do you give it to him for his/her efforts at downloading and installing your distribution. The former approach is neutral. The latter approach legitimizes mono and encourages people to use it.
If you think mono is wonderful stuff, then I suppose it's worth the known risk, to you. VB was wonderful stuff to managers who had never been able to figure out how to use a command line or read raw text.
But the use of VB is what established Microsoft as a legitimate "business" software company.
Using mono now is repeating the mistake of using MS-DOS, MSVB, MSIE, MS Foundation Classes, MSVS, MSOffice, MSWindows, etc. They were not usually better in the long run, although you do have to be willing to be the tortoise instead of the hare if you use the options. Patent traps are not the only traps in Microsoft's stuff.
Anyway, yes, don't prevent individual users, individual companies from using mono if they choose to. Not including mono in the default distribution in no way prevents people who want it from loading it.
But, now, don't push it on the individual users, hidden underneath an application like Tomboy, that could well become yet another hidden psychological dependency that Microsoft salesman will tell their customers (with a nudge and a wink) that you have to buy Microsoft to get (and so you might as well get the real thing from Microsoft, and, no, all that stuff about malware isn't really true, of course, computers are supposed to start running slow after a while, that's why you should buy MSWindows 21 or whatever, etc., etc., and a glad-hand slap on the back).
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I've been burned by Microsoft often enough that I know I don't want to go there again. And I have not once been disappointed that failing to go with their stuff.
OOXML is evidence that Microsoft cannot be prevented from abusing standards the get involved with, especially standards they sponsor.
Besides, C# is just like VB, solving the wrong problems, helping people use the wrong solutions. I'm not a fan of Java, but C# is definitely several more leaps in the wrong directions.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Please see my post here about why my simple statement of fact is not an ad hominem attack, or a suggestion that Stallman is incompetent, or really anything other than an interesting tidbit of information.
For me, it's been interesting to see how many people have responded to my original post by accusing me of attacking Stallman. (One response even likened me to George Bush).
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Except BSD is more free than GPL. GPL isn't really even free since it restricts what you can do with software covered under the license. BSD doesn't have those restrictions and can basically be used by anyone, for any purpose at any time.
You need to lay off the crack pipe and learn how to read.
Originally, it was Dump And Examine Monitor - an utility used on TOPS-10 for debugging the kernel.
We all have preferences. You're no different.
If you are a Microsoft loving, freedom hating, dictator hugging, love thy master kind or wally, then you are in the wrong place. Go off and find some fellow, sitting, begging, tongue hanging, spittle dripping, hear his master's voice, Microsoft worshiping, suited, suckers somewhere else.
Phew! Get out of here.
Stallman is right.
Microsoft would prefer open source and Linux not to exist, but if they can't have that, then second best will be to have open source and Linux reliant on Microsoft technologies. That way there will always be a market for Microsoft products. Which organisation will do mono best? That's what the large corporations will ask themselves and the answer won't be Linux.
That is why Miguel and his team introduced Mono into Gnome (and Debain) some time back, and why Debian (and Ubuntu) are increasingly now reliant on Mono based applications. It is not just Tomboy. It is F-Spot the photo manager and others too.
I have been using Gnome for some time now and I have increasingly noticed error messages informing me about Win32 errors. Each time it happens, I do a double take. I can at last see the day coming when I will be shifting to KDE.
What has happened at Debian? Who is pushing these decisions? Something decidedly nasty is happening there.
Mono is a free (GPL) reimplementation of commercial software. Isn't that how GNU got started in the first place? Didn't Stallman and friends reimplement the commercial Unix libraries as free (GPL) software? Wasn't he potentially violating patents? Why was it okay then when it's Unix, but not okay now when the technology came from Microsoft? Do the commercial Unix vendors holding those patents behave any differently than Microsoft (ahem SCO)? (...)
SCO was suing on copyright grounds AFAIK, not on patent grounds. I would say a fundemental difference may well be the software patent landscape that we are currently living under, where it is to be expected that all sorts of trivial and non trivial "innovations" in the C sharp language are covered by software patents, that can be used to shut down anyone re-implementing the language. If microsoft comes up with a patent that some aspect of the linux kernel infringes on, the kernel can be patched to work around it. If they have a patent that a C sharp implementation cannot work around while still remaining compliant to the language standard, what do you do?
Do you understand Microsoft actually helped Mono be created?
Do you know that the .NET CLI has been submitted and passed as a ECMA standard ?
Mono is very clearly a fully ligitimate, independent implementation of the open .NET 1.0 CLI standard. Microsoft can't change this standard its already out there. They can submit a new standard as they did for .NET 2.0.
There's simply no logic to anything you're saying. It's pure stupidity/FUD.
"The man basically made a lot of the internet and the modern computing experience possible."
So what? Metallica made a lot of heavy metal possible, and they haven't released a front-to-back solid album since 1988.
Eventually you lose relevance - and the longer you stick around after having done so, the more of a parody you make out of yourself.
Please see my post here [slashdot.org] about why my simple statement of fact is not an ad hominem attack
OK, I have seen it, and I think it's BS. You made an ad hominem attack (by implication, rather than explicitly, but there is no other purpose for your "statement of fact"), and apparently now you have become embarrassed and are attempting to weasel out of it.
Hopefully you learned something.
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I love that! "Paranoia compatible". I'm gonna steal that :-)
BSD is not free. It is merely open.
Gee. You might want to inform the FSF then. They say very clearly that *BSD's are Free Software.
You seem to think that only GPL software is Free software. This is not true. Not even the FSF believes or says that. Read their list of Free Software licenses.
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses
Until you are cognizent of this item, we can't even have a discussion, because your entire belief system is a lie.
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How, pray tell, did he do that?
He wasn't at MITS, where the home computer was invented.
He wasn't at IBM, where the PC standard was established.
He wasn't at Xerox PARC, where the GUI was invented.
He wasn't at Apple, where Hypercard, MacPaint, MacWrite etc. were conceived.
He wasn't at Microsoft, where the most common software business model today took root.
He wasn't at Cisco, where the infrastructure for our modern Internet was built.
He wasn't at UCLA, where our packet switching protocols were developed.
He wasn't at CERN, where the Web was invented.
You can credit him for GPL (without which, BSD would have served just as well) and GCC, which is widely used but hardly the only compiler choice.
Such as what? Anything that couldn't have been built without his help? I think not.
Isn't C# a threat to C / C++ for which RMS' GNU tools contributions are the primary tools on Linux? Perhaps there's more at work in this protest than his usual all open, all the time crusade?
It would at least be useful to see him separately say whether C# and Mono are bad because they're not GNU vs whether they're bad because of perceived IP risks and to see him specify what he thinks those risks really are.
The fine article quotes Stallman as saying:
The entire article (it is only five short paragraphs) makes it clear why what Stallman is saying is not antithetical to GNU in general.
The +5 Insightful moderation indicates that many moderators are also anxious to take a swipe at Stallman without even bothering to read the fine article.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I would like it if in Debian-like linux distro's, mono can be easily uninstalled (which also un-installs all "dependent" packages (programs and libraries)). This means that if I've installed your apps, and if (for whatever reason) I decide to purge mono from my system, that I would have to give up using your apps, too.
So far, so good. My personal gripe is if important packages (Debian version of openoffice.org 3.1.0-5) that everyone uses are dependent on mono.
Do you happen to be one of the developers of openoffice.org?
On the bjorn.haxx.se site describing when packages go into testing, there seems to be somewhere a "Build-Depends:" of the openoffice.org package on mono, which is why openoffice 3.1 is currently not yet in Debian testing.
Before you flame me, I know that this doesn't mean that all openoffice.org programs actually depend on mono, it's probably only for cli-uno-bridge, but I would strongly prefer an openoffice.org NOT dependent on mono, and then if necessary, an openoffice.org-extras-mono package containing those parts dependent on mono.
I haven't yet had time to open a wishlist bug against openoffice.org. Sorry.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
This is for Debian, maybe not for Ubuntu: bjorn.haxx.se/debian reports when packages can go into "testing".
openoffice.org 3.1.0-5
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
You've got to be thick as a brick to let yourself get locked into anything. If that's what RMS is trying to say, he's got it nailed.
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20090421111327711 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20031121013756776
Don't worry it is open source here, in 5 years they will have redeveloped a bunch of similar applications like Tomboy (already Gnote announced which is just a port of Tomboy using C++) which eventually means that they will cover all possible patents for the given problem. Now here is the trick, then they should go make a patent for the list of patents
"[W]e should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take more advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps." --Microsoft's Thomas Reardon
"Please give me one good reason why we should even consider [enabling Microsoft technology to work on competing systems]. (Hint: any good answer needs to include making more money and helping kill Unix, Sybase or Oracle.)" --James Allchin, Microsoft Senior Vice-President
The Windows API is ... so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows
apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system
instead. ... It is this switching cost that has given customers the patience to stick
with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO, our
lack of a sexy vision at times, and many other difficulties... Customers constantly
evaluate other desktop platforms, [but] it would be so much work to move over
that they hope we just improve Windows rather than force them to move. In short,
without this exclusive franchise called the Windows API, we would have been
dead a long time ago.
"The approach we will take is to detect dr [DOS] 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'" --Phillip Barrett, Microsoft Windows Development Manager
"This anti-trust thing will blow over. We haven't changed our business practices at all." -- Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and then-CEO (1995)
Much more here: Microsoft A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm
(PDF) http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf
of the truth, like the above, do not get modded up?
OK then which tool should I use for the job of helping me to get off disability and getting an open source software company or non-profit organization founded?
Clearly I cannot use Mono and get the support of the Free Software Foundation to have my open source software application bundled with a Linux distro.
When I was paid to work it was for Visual BASIC, and that was my employer's choice, I did not whine about it, I did my job to my best abilities. I earned almost 17 years in Visual BASIC programming.
Yeah I understand about protecting Linux from the IP Police and Microsoft, SCO, et al trying to sue Linux companies.
Just that I hate to see all of the years I spent developing a skill to go to waste for Linux development. I cannot use Visual BASIC via Mono to write a Linux open source software application now. So it forces me to learn a new and different language and a new and different IDE in order to develop open source software for Linux.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
...is not RMS-style bitching out people who don't follow his One True Way(tm,) and avoiding things that just work purely because they deviate slightly.
I suspect the best way is to actually use a variation on Microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish methods.
Here's what that means:
1. Throw support behind ReactOS and Mono. Embrace.
2. Get them to be ~100% compatible with Windows. Extend.
3. Once you've achieved compatibility and feature parity, you'll have control of the API. Add new features that Microsoft doesn't have, in a way that would be very difficult for Microsoft to implement in a real NT kernel. Extinguish.
I wonder what was the reason for C#? Did we not have enough languages?
If you've used both C# and Java, you already know the answer to this question. ;)
If you haven't, consider features like attributes, properties, delegates, iterable sequences, varargs, enums, a unified type system for classes and primitive types, and pointers. Java has added some of those, but it took a while: Java 1.5 was all about catching up to C#.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that they failed to hijack Java (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B) and create a lock~in with their proprietary version, so they said "Hey lets make a C++ knockoff and lock them in with that!".
Except no one is actually "locked in". You can develop and run C# applications without using any Microsoft products, and MS can't do anything to stop you. Go spread FUD elsewhere.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
I usually read "M$" as M-string. Yes this is BASIC. The company that gave us BASIC = M$.
Microsoft didn't give us BASIC (Dartmouth College did), but it did help popularize BASIC on microcomputers. So I see the BASIC expression M$ to represent Microsoft as no worse than the Perl/PHP expression $DEITY to represent a god.
"[W]e should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take more advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps." --Microsoft's Thomas Reardon
The quote can be found in the following document (PDF)
Microsoft
A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm
http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf
I'm using a relatively recent P4 running Ubuntu Jaunty (Tomboy 0.14.0). When typing, I can see the CPU usage spike, and every so often, the window becomes nonresponsive (though all the text appears when it comes back). When it's being unresponsive, I can see that the Tomboy process is chewing CPU.
The reports about Mono apps freezing for a few seconds seem to point to some common problem in the runtime. Good luck getting a developer to look at it, of course.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Seriously... Since when was JJ Star Trek about "Integrity"? Or coherency, for that matter... It's about attaching a name people know to the cinematic equivalent of a liquid lollipop...
Bow-ties are cool.
I like how that page lists two Microsoft licenses (including Mono's) as "Free Software" licenses. It does say GPL incompatible though.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Love Stallman. I am sure many of you do, but surely many people think he's a little too far over the edge. Honestly, this is a good thing. We need crazy people on both sides to even things out. On one side of the ring we have the beloved Mr. Gates. I am glad we have Richard Stallman to lock in a cage with him.
Also.... Sadly, with much regret to my fellow nerds, I mistook Mono in the title for the kissing disease. I am sure most of you usually do the opposite.
It's not my intention to spread FUD, and it's disengenious of you to accuse me of that.
Maybe it's not your intent, but it is what you're doing. "Microsoft might someday somehow lock you into their products if you use C#" is FUD, plain and simple, just like "Linux might be insecure" or "Linux might contain copyrighted code". You're raising fear, uncertainty, and doubt based on no real evidence. There's nothing disingenuous about pointing that out.
More importantly, there is no disputing Microsoft's business model of lock~in, so their reason for the creation of C# is obvious after their humiliation with J++.
There is no disputing that Microsoft tried to do this a decade ago with J++. There is, however, disputing that Microsoft has done so with C#. I'm disputing it, and you're not backing up your claim, you're just pointing to J++.
If you want to write a cross-platform app in C#, you can do it easily. If you want to write a Windows-only app in C#, you can do that too. It's not much different from, say, C++, where you can choose between cross-platform libraries like Qt and platform-specific libraries like MFC.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Bring it!
If Microsoft EVER makes any threatening sounds regarding Samba, I hope the EC Competition Commissioner will come down on them like a ton of bricks: link
the ECMA standard standard (just as ISO standard) says that the company implementing the standard must give every other implementer a licence for all those patents:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030424174805/http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-sscli/msg00218.html
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I wonder how people feel about Vala, a language similar to C#. Is it also too closely tied to Microsoft technology and should it be boycotted??
See http://live.gnome.org/Vala
It is still not widely adopted, so now would be the time to kill it before it becomes too popular...
Do you really [generic: induced-epithet.verb] like that?
If you like to ignore current events, so that you don't acknowledge the storm over ooxml, and the damage the spec took, nor the (documented) fact that c# was Microsoft's response to Sun telling them that they weren't going to be allowed to embrace and extend Java, not to mention the recent suits Microsoft has pursued over FAT, well, there's not much use talking about whether Adobe has been significantly more circumspect in what they've done with pdf and such.
Nor will it help to point out (yet again) that refraining from putting mono in the default distribution is in no way a ban. (I assume you know how to install packages?)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
You're going to tell me that Microsoft developed C# out of the goodness of their hearts, because Java is so limited, and that it has nothing at all to do with Microsoft responding to Sun's insistence that Microsoft refrain from embracing and extending Java?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Well said!!!
- Java
- Javascript
- Cloud Computing
- Talkies
- Certain crayons
- and now, Mono
Well done sir.
Except that's not what you said. You claimed "The man basically made a lot of the internet and the modern computing experience possible. His foundation is responsible for some of the most vital, widely used, and essential software in use today." Utterly false!
You want to claim Linux as an RMS achievement, fine but only if you ignore that the FSF's part of the distros, GNU, is a re-implementation of software that already existed. What's more, they never finished it! We're still waiting for HURD. It was Linus who "made a lot of the internet and the modern computing experience possible," so thank him.
Read the title. That is all.
OK - we can say copyleft and non-copyleft? Or GPL and non-GPL? If it pleases you, I will be happy to use whatever terminology the FSF approves. :) To me when I see Mac OS X, it doesn't feel all that "free" to me, especially since it costs like $130 bucks. But it's based on BSD! o_0
Oh right, it's re-licensed now. OK, maybe now we begin to understand why someone wouldn't feel as happy contributing to BSD. They are working for Apple (and everyone else) for free. In exchange they can pay to receive the work that they donated.
Maybe we see why individual contribution to Linux has been so much more popular than at to all of the BSD variants combined. Hence why, just for example, this GPL project, based on Stallman's work, has been so active and so important.
Has it dawned on you yet that we have this conversation on a technology stack that is almost entirely GPL?
You suppose non-copyleft contributors would have created it all, just the same, if the GPL and FSF never existed? This can be proven wrong with a thought exercise and a look at history.
If the GPL was irrelevant, why did anyone go to the trouble of using it or switching to it, when the BSD licenses and the like already existed?
Do you also argue that if America did not exist, there would be little difference as well, since the gap would be filled by Canada and Mexico?
Notice I will not even claim that this means your "entire belief system is a lie" (lol). Also, you can respond to my other points anytime, if you can. Or you can continue to use logically specious attacks (ad hominem, coy implications and exaggerations, and now nitpicking vocabulary and unjustified expansions) - they make it clear how little you can argue the actual matter at hand. :)
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Uh, because Mac OS X is not free software?
Yes, and you can get the code to the BSD part of it for free. You can do pretty much whatever you want with it, even close it, sell it, and not give anyone your changes.
I don't understand how Apple having the same access to the same BSD code as YOU do, somehow makes it "not free"?
How is that different from GPL'd software?
Wrong, see above - you can download that part of the system for free. Nevertheless, Apple could charge you for the modified code because the BSD license allows them that choice. It's freedom for the developer, not necessarily for the user.
To me when I see Mac OS X, it doesn't feel all that "free" to me, especially since it costs like $130 bucks.
How do you feel when you see Red Hat Enterprise Linux which costs as much as $18,000?
https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/server/
Red Hat does not offer a "free" version of RHEL, though Centos is essentially the same thing. That doesn't change the fact that Red hat is charging massive amounts of money for what is free of cost from others.
Likewise, There are free distributions of apples core OS as well (not the GUI and many of the libraries, but the OS itself is free). It's called Darwin.
In both cases, Apple and Red Hat add value and sell a product without offering a free version. One is GPL, one is BSD.
You were the one that claimed that *BSD's weren't free software. That's not "nit picking". The FSF would violently disagree that the difference is nit picking. I said your entire belief system was a lie because you have this mistaken belief that only GPL software is free software. That is entirely wrong, and the basis for most of your misunderstanding.
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How do you feel when you see Red Hat Enterprise Linux which costs as much as $18,000?
I'm so glad you asked - since I think this will help clear up some confusion!
The answer is: I don't know - since this has never happened. The market's cost for RHEL, the software, is exactly $0.
Oh yes, I know what Redhat charges for the software. It is optional. Anyone can give me a copy of it for free. Someone organized this process into a distro and calls it CentOS, as you yourself pointed out. Hence, the market's cost is $0.
Why don't you ask Apple if you can give MacOSX away for free. Or if they will give you the entire source code for it, so you can share that as well?
They will give you a very different answer than Redhat will. And that is the heart of the matter.
What Redhat charges for is a service and on some occasions I have been quite happy to pay for that. Others, it wasn't necessary. Support, updates, and so forth. Quite different from paying for a software license. This is the new model of free software companies you may have been hearing about, services not software, etc.
You seem confused about how different Darwin is from CentOS. Remember, the question is, can you get the entire sources for MacOSX? Is that Darwin? And the answer is no.
Darwin is what little bit they feel like giving you. They have no obligation to give any, and they can stop at any time. And they do not feel like giving the rest. Perhaps they never will. This is as different from Redhat as night is from day.
I don't call this free software, and I don't care who does. It's also clear which codebase I would rather contribute to, and most people in the community feel the same as I do. That's why all the BSD variants put together have so much less activity in the community than Linux, for instance, and Darwin has almost no activity by comparison.
In both cases, Apple and Red Hat add value and sell a product without offering a free version. One is GPL, one is BSD.
Now I have made clear your confusion, hopefully.
Again, if I follow your logic, "your entire belief system is a lie" as well, since you made a single error - let alone one much more significant than demanding the terminology of "GPL" versus "Free" and "BSD" versus "Open." But I do not say this - merely that I think you are confused and I hope this helps you understand the point.
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Hi there! I am sure you are not one of the OPs and I am definitely not either. We're just two ACs who happen to follow this thread a week after it was posted. LOL.
So, you will not have seen the answers to these questions, posted here.
C# and CLI are ECMA standards, so what ? They're safe to use ?
Remember MP3 ? This is an ISO standard.
Try to implement a commercial MP3 encoder, and in no time Thomson/Fraunhofer will knock at the door to reclaim payment of a license fee.
Oh... and Thomson/Fraunhofer have themselves been attacked (by Alcatel) regarding patented technologies used in the MP3 format.
Don't assume because something is a standard is has no strings attached (patents, licenses).
Why don't you ask Apple if you can give MacOSX away for free. Or if they will give you the entire source code for it, so you can share that as well?
You are mistaken, again. Centos is not a copy of the entire RHEL. RHEL includes proprietary programs that are not part of Centos. Further, Red Hat does not offer a free binary version, they only off the source code which you can build yourself if you're so inclined (which is what Centos did).
So, while more of RHEL is open source than OSX is, it's still the same basic premise, they give you the open stuff, which you have to build yourself, and prevent you from using the proprietary stuff.
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No, you're wrong again.
You seem eager to go to the FSF for terminology. Why not go to them and ask whether OSX is equivalent to RHEL, and Darwin is equivalent to CentOS? Or go to RHEL and ask them if their GPL binaries (as well as their source) are free, and you can copy them and give them to anyone?
The answers are so obvious that I wonder if you know you are dissembling.
Anyone can load proprietary applications on Linux. And I can even sell you Redhat Linux and MacOS in a bundle. Whoa. Does make Redhat Linux any less free? Does that blow your mind? :)
Redhat and MacOSX are based on utterly different premises, and if you doubt me, ask either RedHat or Apple? Or just try demanding the source code for everything linked against the BSD portions of OSX. Or try distributing both OSX and Redhat GPL binaries from your website. See what happens. :)
Go ahead, I'll wait.
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