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."

Comments

MS not M$

[basementman]

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.

Re:MS not M$

[Sir_Lewk]

Since I seem to have been unjustly voted overrated I'll back up my assertion with a quote from CmdrTaco himself:

Ravn: Slashdot is well known for its bias (if you'll forgive the term) towards Open Source Software. Slashcode itself is Open Source. Why is this? What was involved with the decision to make Slashcode OSS? Why do you think it is important? What, in your opinion, makes Open Source Software so great?

CmdrTaco: I'm a very biased person. And I bring many of my biases with me to Slashdot. No apologies are necessary ;) Slashcode is open source because my readers clammored for it in the late 90's. Today thousands of websites use the code. That's very cool. Unfortunately almost none of them contribute anything back, so while it was great for them, it continues to be a burden for us. Not every open source project is the kernel ;)

http://www.cyberarmy.net/library/article/994

Ok, perhaps that quote doesn't perfectly illustrate a pro linux and anti microsoft bias. If you need anymore comfirmation though I suggest you look no farther than slashdot's "borg Gates" image they use for any microsoft related story. For better or worse, slashdot does have a bias and anyone thinking otherwise is quite foolish.

Microsoft, I said NO!

[eyepeepackets]

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.

Re:Microsoft, I said NO!

[Directrix1]

That is a very shallow analysis. If I recall correctly Microsoft successfully sued TomTom for violating FAT patents in the Linux kernel on their devices. Furthermore, yes, if Microsoft took a litigious stance on .Net, then Mono would just get rid of the offending code. Thereby, breaking every single program written that depends on that feature. And M$ (yes M$) could do that over and over again, effectively killing the ecosystem on anything besides Linux. Stallman is 100% correct in his opinion here. Mono is good to run shit written in .Net. But don't rely on it as a platform in a free ecosystem. It is unadvisable in the long run.

Re:Microsoft, I said NO!

[hey!]

Well, if you've ever had to make a business decision (as opposed to armchair quarterback), you'd know that "bad" is sometimes a relative term.

If the choice is (a) sign a deal or (b) compete against the company that owns the platform your software have to work on, the scales are tilted towards signing the deal.

Now you can argue it's Microsoft's right to use its platform control this way. It's a position worth discussing. But you shouldn't sneak that position under the "bad business deal" banner.

Yes to Mono!

[burisch_research]

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.

MS is smart enough not to do this

[nateman1352]

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.

Re:MS is smart enough not to do this

[satch89450]

Add to that the fact the M$ published the spec under a recognized standards body and that was the point at which the zealot's heads began to swell until the point of explosion.

That "publishing under a recognized standards body" didn't stop RAMBUS from trying to pull a fast one. It all depends how Microsoft presented the specification that determines what they can and cannot do in court to cripple use of Mono. Most of the recognized standards bodies have required that the contributor(s) grant licenses to use the ideas described by the standard. The licenses do not have to be royalty-free, just "reasonable" and uniform. Most licenses have a fixed payment per use, which means that "free" is not an option.

Isn't this antithetical to GNU in general?

[jjb3rd]

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.

Pot calling the kettle black

[Vahokif]

GNU and GCC are just as much open source implementations of proprietary technology from convicted monopolists as Mono is. QFT

Re:Confused

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

As non-american (your senseless patents don't apply), I'll re-ask the question again.

Don't be absurd. Just because software patents don't apply in a given country doesn't mean they can't cripple Linux development in that country. Do you really think forking Linux and having all the countries that currently enforce software patents and all the companies that do business in that country developing one fork and the rest developing a different fork would not be a crippling blow to Linux? I don't care where you live, if all the Linux developers in the US are stopped from using the Linux after it started to include Mono and have to go back and rewrite all the subsequent application built upon it in 5 years time, that will hurt all Linux users around the world and significantly slow progress.

You also failed to address my point about intentionally incompatible versions of standards. Since you're posting AC you're probably a troll. Get an account or make less trollish posts if you want further replies from me.

Re:that mail interface sounds pretty cool

[honkycat]

Using a web browser is not a prerequisite for being an authority on programming, let alone an authority on IP policy implications. What specific information is he missing out on by not using a web browser that gives you a reason to question his knowledge? Your little analogy about engines is laughably pathetic, unless you really mean to question the software experience of the guy who wrote emacs...

In my experience, the real experts frequently don't have time or interest in mucking around with the latest flavor of the month technology because they're too busy thinking about real issues.

Re:that mail interface sounds pretty cool

[arose]

Donald Knuth doesn't use email, what could he possibly know about computers?

Re:.NET is an Open Standard

[VGPowerlord]

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.

Have you ever looked into why the Microsoft Office 2007 RTM had its PDF writer as an add-on rather than integrated into Word like it was in the Office 2007 betas?

"Microsoft's general counsel told the WSJ that Adobe has threatened legal action unless Microsoft agrees to charge for the PDF support patch, a step it refuses to take."

While Adobe can't lash out against PDF documents, it can against software that creates PDF documents!

Incidentally, the actual MS Office add-on is still free, but the above quote was from 2006.

Re:RMS == bonkers!?

[cheesybagel]

There are plenty of patent issues, and you cannot write desktop apps without using APIs outside the .NET ECMA specs.

C# is important to the discussion because Tomboy, the application Debian decided it must have, is written in C#.

GNU does not have to provide any alternative to .NET. Java is free software and Sun has released all necessary patents. .NET is a copycat of Java. It is better than Java at some things, worse at others, but both are evolving. Java is not encumbered, so why the hell should free software use patent encumbered .NET?

Stallman does not see free software implementations of .NET as a problem since they provide interoperability with non-free software written for other platforms. He just claims free software should not be constrained by such limitations, and I for one agree with him.

The real damage of Mono

[Phatmanotoo]

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".

Re:"M$"

[TarrVetus]

It pisses off Microsofties, who, being narcissistic freaks, can't stand being reminded that millions of intelligent people hate them, their software and their company with a passion.

I think it has more to do with wanting to see article descriptions that make an attempt at remaining neutral. Using "M$" is as charged and biased as saying "Linsux" or "crApple," and undermines the article post, making what would normally be a news post into an opinion editorial.

Many people want to make their own decisions, and not be told what to think of things before even investigating them. Isn't that kind of spirit how things like the OSS movement started, anyway--not being told what or how to do things, but doing them for themselves?

FSF threatens corporate $$$? Cue the Ad Hominem...

[Concern]

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?

Re:He doesn't really count for much

[Blakey Rat]

As for part one - yuk! You people in cold climates should wash more often and it won't happen.

Just FYI, I live in Washington State, and I don't have toe cheese, neither does anybody I know. The point that there's something *on* his foot to pull off in the first place is the opening act of the nasty; the part where he eats it is actually the encore performance.

I can understand that - he's "eating his own dogfood"

Eating dogfood would be substantially less disgusting. ;) (Yes, I know the phrase.)

Exchange is definitely the worst email server in production on any platform

I hope you're making use of hyperbole and don't genuinely believe that. Exchange is certainly not the best, but it's nowhere even close to the worst. Hell, it's arguably better than its direct competitor-- Lotus Domino-- and that's all that really matters. (It certainly uses less bandwidth than Domino.)

The real genius of Exchange isn't the server; the server's an implementation detail and nobody really cares, except hard-core geeks. The real genius is the client software, which is quite simply excellent. To the end-user, the UI of an application *is* the application. (Thus: Outlook *is* Exchange, Lotus Notes *is* Domino.) I think if more open source developers realized that simple rule, open source could be vastly more popular.

(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.

That "lot of other stuff" is the reason it's deployed.

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.

You could do this on an older Mac using AppleScript, for example, and never leaving the GUI. Unless you find some weird way of defining AppleScript as a "CLI" (which would be a huge stretch), you can do this particular without ever leaving the GUI.

Also note that Windows designed the Registry specifically to address your problem... again without requiring a CLI. You can deploy a registry entry to thousands of machines, and they'll do your bidding.

It might make large Linux deployments more pleasant, but that's only because Linux has no other technology designed for that purpose. It's definitely "possible" to do, other OSes have already done it.

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.

Yah, but all you need is a "Safe Mode" (to copy a term from Windows) that boots the GUI into a resolution that's guaranteed to work on every piece of video hardware. You don't need to be able to set every single parameter from a CLI, and your OS should protect you from picking un-display-able settings in the first place. And, needless-to-say, it shouldn't crash so often as to make this a consideration.

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

Yeah, but those are shitty GUIs. And even those shitty GUIs are better than a config file-- for example, they're vastly more discoverable. I can guarantee you that if those companies hired a GUI designer and made them non-shitty, it wouldn't demonstrate your point.

I frequently see this: "the CLI is good because [program with shitty GUI] sucks." No real surprise there, saying that a shitty GUI sucks.

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 hav