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De Icaza Responds To Stallman
ndogg writes "It's no secret that Stallman doesn't like Mono. Miguel, however, has been pretty quiet about those criticisms, until now. It seems he'll no longer be quiet. He's responded strongly to an article by Stallman that criticizes Codeplex about its aims due to its origin at Microsoft. Miguel says Stallman is fearmongering, and is missing an opportunity by his criticism."
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090927151401988
Here is an article that goes in-depth about the entire situation
He never said nor suggested that Microsoft as a whole is your ally.
"I merely happen to have a different perspective on Microsoft than he has. I know that there are great people working for the company, and I know many people inside Microsoft that are steering the company towards being a community citizen. I have blogged about this for the last few years.
At the end of the day, we both want to see free software succeed. But Richard, instead of opening new fronts to promote his causes, attacks his own allies for not being replicas of himself."
He suggested that either himself, or Microsoft, or both, was his "ally."
No. He said that Richard Stallman attacks his allies. The very next sentence of TFA reads: To him, ridiculous statements like Linus "does not believe in Freedom" are somewhat normal. He is clearly referring to Linus Torvalds as Richard Stallman's ally.
Please don't deliberately misinterpret people that you don't agree with.
I work on Mono, because I like it. If you want to learn more about my goals, you can read this old post:
http://www.mono-project.com/Mailpost:longreply
As for CodePlex: it turns out that there are two entities: CodePlex.ORG (owned by the Foundation) and CodePlex.Com (Owned by Microsoft, and has no affiliation with the foundation).
It is beyond unfortunate that the Foundation adopted the name from the hosting site. The logic apparently was "It is already a known brand". In my opinion, moving ahead with this name was a terrible decision as it is incredibly confusing, a point that I have raised with the board of directors.
The CodePlex foundation has no control over the contents of CodePlex.com.
apologist: a person who makes a defense in speech or writing of a belief, idea, etc.
That's not a personal attack.
Regards.
Yes, Stallman is a principled man. The problem with Stallman and Mono, however, is that his objections are based on fear and innuendo, not on principles or reason.
Wrong. Microsoft has offered a patent covenant that covers compatible re-implementations of .Net. If you want to make your own cut down or otherwise incompatible version of .Net - for whatever reason - then MS can still sue you. It also only covers the core .Net libraries and not all the libraries that actual real world .Net applications use.
Given those facts, it's easy to see how Mono / .Net remain incompatible with the principles of Free Software.
Nick
The Microsoft Community Promise is not good enough. See this legal analysis for details:
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/osp-gpl.html
Microsoft lawyers are good enough to produce a better document than this, they just chose not to. See this document:
http://www.samba.org/samba/PFIF/PFIF_agreement.html
for a better agreement and an analysis on why all the terms in it are needed (especially the "Patents" section).
Jeremy.