All GPLed Code Removed From MonoDevelop

rysiek writes "A few days ago, Miguel de Icaza wrote on his blog that the whole of MonoDevelop is now 'free' of GPL-licensed code. 'MonoDevelop code is now LGPLv2 and MIT X11 licensed. We have removed all of the GPL code, allowing addins to use Apache, MS-PL code as well as allowing proprietary add-ins to be used with MonoDevelop (like RemObject's Oxygene).'"

Comments

Does anyone really use it?

[Nursie]

I know I'm an old fashioned luddite (I code with nedit, gcc and Makefiles), but does anyone use MonoDevelop?

MS does free (but not open) versions of its dev tools already, and frankly if you're using Mono you're probably an MS guy who wants his stuff to work on linux rather than a *nix dev anyway. Aren't you?

Mono Blows (hint, where's FW 3.5)

[tjstork]

You know, if you are going to devote your life to making a C# clone on Linux, then at least quit screwing around with applications and focus on the language. I mean, come on, where's WPF? Where's WCF? Where's LINQ to SQL?

Mono, you suck.

Re:Mono Blows (hint, where's FW 3.5)

[tjstork]

Wow. Imagine, an open source project cloning the functionality of a commercial product that doesn't support the latest features of the commercial product.

Yes, but the commercial product is free as in beer, and the open source product is moving to be free as in beer only, so what's really the point, except to get locked into a clone of another technology?

I mean, if you are that into .NET, why not just use Windows?

Re:A Prelude to Charges...

[codewarren]

That makes sense only if the next step in this plan is to make it work, add the features people want, and get people to actually use it.

Eternal game of catch-up

[tepples]

By the time Mono finishes compatibility with .NET Framework 3.5, Microsoft will have finished Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. Likewise, Moonlight is perpetually a version behind Silverlight, rendering it unable to view actual web sites that use Silverlight.

Re:Good.

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Right, because Microsoft is making a profit off licensing the .NET framework. Wait, you mean they don't charge a cent for it? And C# is a better language than Java, with the Mono project providing cross-platform compatibility, so Windows users have an easier time migrating to Linux if they so choose? Clearly I should listen to random /.er and forswear all use of anything that "supports" "Microsoft products" in any way, including the OpenOffice; after all, it lets people read and write Office documents, and by doing so, indirectly enables the Microsoft hegemony.

P.S. Yes, C# being better than Java is personal opinion. I've used both, Java for two years in school and one and a half years in the workforce, C# for a little under a year in school and half a year in the workforce (plus a few years of various other languages, mostly C/C++ and, yes, Perl). For developers, the lack of rigid ideological adherence to OO dogma is quite helpful; delegates for callbacks and "pass-by-reference" for arguments instead of inane wrapper classes for both (yes, pedantic types, I know it's all pass by reference, but you know what I mean), not needing to think about auto-boxing as much (since .NET collections of primitives really are primitives, not boxed primitives), operator overloading and structs to enable the creation of relatively efficient and easy to use numeric types, etc. I think both languages have merit, and I think both languages are improved by the competition (e.g. without C#, I'm not sure Java would ever have introduced generics, since it violated the spirit of OO). But I'm not going to reject C# just because MS made it.

Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof

[KiloByte]

Alas, Mono is still a part of the default Gnome distribution, just so they can have a note taking applet which takes 189MB memory (counting libraries used by it and no other process) and takes several seconds to start on beefy hardware while the C++ port of that very same code uses 5MB and starts near-instantly.

Even worse, there are folks pushing Banshee as the default music player so there's another dependency on Mono.

The sooner we get rid of Mono installed by default, the safer we'll be from this trap.

Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof

[poetmatt]

saying GPLV3 is too strict when we know the specific issue at hand here, means that it's just that proprietary things can still be embedded in GPLV2 and can't in GPLv3. So when "too strict" means "you can't shove proprietary shit into a free and open system", that tells me that MS and the lackeys are having quite a hard time dealing with open source.

Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof

[Arker]

"Only" 10 MB? How utterly absurd. And yes I get that in context to the claim made by the GP you have a point. (Possibly the GP has binaries compiled with debug symbols, or possibly *you* already have over a hundred megs of mono libraries loaded for something else and dont realise it.)

But just wow, only 10MB for a silly little virtual notepad. That's 256 times the entire system memory on my first PC. Which was a much more accessible and "user-friendly" machine than you can buy today, with a good DE built right in. It appears computer science in the intervening time has been exclusively focused on driving hardware purchases...