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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."
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...
Except that's not what he said. He said it's good to have an implementation but bad to include that implementation and applications that reply upon it in GnuLinux distros and components. It's akin to saying that it is good to have support for FAT filesystems in Linux, but stupid to include a FAT partition by default when installing Linux along with applications that only work on FAT.
... if not outright imbecile, that's at least a very stupid position
Not everything you don't comprehend is stupid. Sometimes, you're just a little bit stupid instead, and so misinterpret the words of others in stupid ways.
Being owned in court by Microsoft due to patent infringement.
Or more likely, losing customers because mid development cycle Microsoft starts threatening to sue companies using Mono, as it infringes their patents.
They've rattled this sabre before.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Ask Spyglass, the company from which MS "licensed" what became MSIE, whether they felt raped when MS started giving away MSIE thus rendering the royalties to Spyglass $0.00 (plus the minumum quarterly fee)...
Maybe as a customer you haven't had anything to rape you for aside from license fees for products. If you were a developer / business partner, I suspect you would say differently.
Stallman also says no to web browsing.
No he doesn't. As the linked post says, he doesn't browse the web for PERSONAL REASONS. That's a completely different thing than advocating against using software that is patent bait.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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
Rape doesn't simply mean forced sexual intercourse. As a verb... well...
Verb
Infinitive
to rape
Third person singular
rapes
Simple past
raped
Past participle
raped
Present participle
raping
to rape (third-person singular simple present rapes, present participle raping, simple past and past participle raped)
1. To force sexual intercourse or other sexual activity upon another person, without their consent.
2. To abuse an object in an extreme manner.
The loggers raped the virgin forest
3. (slang) To dominate in a contest.
My experienced opponent will rape me at chess.
I'd say they have abused their dominance in the tech world to the extreme more than once.
No sig for you!!
As he explained, a C# implementation is useful in that it lets you run C# code that already exists, on non-Windows OSes. That is a good thing, and that is why he says he has no problem with the implementations. But, he says, writing our own apps in C# is a bad idea.
Feel free to disagree with him, but I thought the distinction between the C# implementation and the act of writing apps in C# makes a lot of sense.
Daemon simply means demon in mythology so I would bet in his eyes the term is interchangeable, it is in mine.
Um, no, this is pretty much the exact opposite of the truth. In modern usage they've become nearly synonymous, but in mythology "daemon" refers to the ancient Greek beings that are really more closely analogous with "angels" in modern usage. Daemons are intermediaries between men and the gods, including everything from minor divinities down to ghosts of dead heroes. Of particular interest was the "agathos daemon", which is rather like a Greek "guardian angel".
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Do you remember WISE? Windows Interface Source Environment. A program that purportedly allowed developers to write software to Windows APIs and run the resulting programs on Macintosh and UNIX systems. It was issued in 1994. By 1996 Microsoft had captured a large share of the corporate market and has proceeded to the next step: Microsoft has extended the Windows API without copying its changes to the WISE program. This meant that developers could no longer smoothly port applications to UNIX and
Macintosh. In public, however, Microsoft continued to lead developers into believing that this software was still fully cross-platform. In 1997, Bill Gates noted in an internal email that those developers who wrote applications for the then-available software without realizing that it would not port all APIs to UNIX and Macintosh were "just fucked."
He still browses the web - he just does it via a method that works:
Other people also use other means to "browse" the web that don't involve conventional interactions with a web browser. Programs like JAWS (a screen reader for the blind) and blinux don't meet your metaphor for accesing the web - BFD, get over it.
Also, computing is much more than just the web. For many researchers, email is a LOT more convenient, and more important, than the web ever will be.