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De Icaza Responds To Stallman

Posted by timothy on from the strong-personalities dept.

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."

4 of 747 comments (clear)

  1. Stallman seems to have lost his way by jipn4 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When Stallman started the GNU project, the software he was cloning had been created by a big, litigious, evil monopoly called "AT&T". There was a good chance that they were going to shut him down for copyright and patent infringement. He took that risk, and the rest is history.

    The situation surrounding Mono is actually far less serious. Yes, Microsoft is a big, litigious, evil monopoly, but they actually have made a pretty watertight commitment to keeping those portions of .NET that Mono relies on open and free.

  2. When microsoft is involved by russotto · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Stallman's a fanatic, but on the other hand, Microsoft is Microsoft. Which is to say, it's probably difficult to be too paranoid about their intentions with respect to competition. Stallman's article isn't even particularly paranoid; it boils down to "we've seen similar groups do bad things before, so we should watch this group. Also, we disagree with some of their goals".

    BTW, Miguel, George Bush did not invent "Good vs Evil". And while I've never seen anything that approaches pure Good, there's no shortage of "sufficiently evil".

  3. Re:Well of course he's annoyed by je+ne+sais+quoi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I didn't think it affected me either until I put a new copy of debian on a machine and did an "apt-get install gnome" and found a copy of mono being installed on my machine. What I want to know is WTF was debian even thinking when they did that? It's obvious they weren't thinking very well since they back-pedaled and claimed that mono wasn't in the default install, by which they mean that it's only in the gnome metapackage and not the gnome-core or gnome-desktop. It's also equally obvious that anyone who wants to install gnome will first try apt-get install gnome rather than the non-intuitive gnome-core.

    The point is that Mono is creeping into distributions through packages like Tomboy. I think that things like Mono shouldn't be in default packages or a dialog should be asked for things which are clearly offensive to at least some significant portion of the linux community. You don't see them doing that for NVIDIA drivers, I know the licenses are different and Mono at least claims to be open-source but I guess there's a lot more people who want to avoid MS than people who want to avoid NVIDIA.

    --
    Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
  4. spending time on opportunities ? by viralMeme · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Since we only have a limited time on earth, I have decided to spend my time on earth as much as I can trying to be like the second salesman. Looking at opportunities where others see hopelessness"

    Which begs the question as to why expend so much energy in duplicating dotNET onto the Linux platform. Isn't whole the MONO effort diverting developers from developing native Linux applications?

    "The creation of the CodePlex foundation was an internal effort of people that believe in open source at Microsoft. They have been working from within the company to change it. Working at CodePlex is a great way of helping steer Microsoft in the right direction"

    What was wrong with SourceForge. If I was cynical and recalling Microsoft's past behaviour, including tthe NovoSOFT trojan .. er covenant, I would suspect this as yet another attempt to co-opt and control a technology they don't own. Why not contribute to SourceForge instead of creating and stacking their own organization. Same with the numerous Microsoft 'open source' licenses. It's very telling that GPL 3 is not one of the supported licenses on CodePlex.

    And as an 'open source' supporter I fail to understand how you would recommend something called the LinuxHater's Blog

    'If you're a freetard, but you need to run Windows at work or something, I've got an idea for a utility that will keep you true to the cause'

    'How many hours do I have to waste wading through the monument of shit known as the debian package repository?'