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

Use java instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, now I'm even less like to use mono. Miquel is a cossack cock. Remember folks, Java is now GPL. Support free software, use java not infectious microsoft crap.

Re:Use java instead

[Pecisk]

LGPL *is* free software.

Re:Use java instead

[Anonymous Coward]

This article was about the IDE, MonoDevelop. Do you refuse to use Eclipse for Java development because Eclipse is not GPL? Or are you just too dumb to understand what the article is talking about?

Re:Use java instead

[AlexLibman]

No, it isn't. Only permissively licensed software like BSD and Apache can be called truly free.

Re:Use java instead

[nacturation]

No, it isn't. Only permissively licensed software like BSD and Apache can be called truly free.

The only "truly free" is releasing things into the public domain and relinquishing all rights you have. How can you claim something is "truly free" if you insist on maintaining copyright and insisting that others attribute the use of your code? When you attach conditions that were written by a lawyer to your license, by definition that doesn't give someone else total freedom. Unless you're talking about "freedom" with an asterisk followed by fine print at the bottom of the page.

Re:Use java instead

[AlexLibman]

I agree in part, but the main point of BSD-like licenses was to include the "no warranty" disclaimer and other things that would be completely unnecessary under a rational system of jurisprudence. I don't think anyone in history has ever been dragged to court and had to pay tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees after being accused of violating the BSD license, as is becoming a daily occurrence with GPL!

(A longer summary of my opinion on software freedom can be found here.)

Re:Use java instead

[AlexLibman]

I refuse to use Eclipse precisely because it is too close to (L)GPL in its licensing terms, which are "weak copyleft". The same applies to NetBeans as well. I simply use permissively-licensed text editors like vi or SciTE instead, and if I ever wanted a heavy Java-based IDE the first thing I'd check on is the recent permissively-licensed fork of IntelliJ IDEA (Community Edition).

Re:Use java instead

[Arker]

Correction, LGPL is a Free Software License.

However if MonoDevelop cannot be used fully and freely because of patent concerns, it's not really Free Software, even with a Free license.

Re:Use java instead

[Pseudonym]

Sigh. Not this again.

Here's the deal:

- Ad-supported software is free as in free beer (i.e. no monetary cost).
- Software under a GPL-like licence is free as in free speech (i.e. not enslaved).
- Software under a BSD-like licence is free as in free time (i.e. no strings attached).

In fact, even this is slightly inaccurate, since the BSD does require you to retain the copyright notice. Either way, the GPL use of "free" is perfectly legitimate: Freedom comes with responsibility.

Re:Use java instead

[AlexLibman]

Copyleft / GPL software is only "free as in communism" - that is not free at all. It is a viral license that uses government force to spread itself, subverting the free market in software development (which naturally leads to the most common software components becoming open source and public domain, while the best developers are still able to make money selling cutting-edge innovations), and encouraging ever-more government funding and control of yet another important industry.

Permissive licenses aren't perfect, public domain is, but I don't think anyone in history has ever been sued over forgetting to give proper credit to the downstream authors, as the BSD license requires. The main point of the BSD license was to cover the legal butts of the original authors (i.e. no warranty, traceability, etc), which would be completely unnecessary under a more rational system of jurisprudence.

Responsibility comes from the rights of other human beings, and there is no such thing as the right to enslave others, which is what GPL claims of anyone who dares to borrow its code on his or her own terms.

(More here.)

I know it's now LGPL but I couldn't resist ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thus begins the Free-Free Software movement.

Re:I know it's now LGPL but I couldn't resist ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like the Land Before Time but with less anal sex!

Re:I know it's now LGPL but I couldn't resist ...

[shutdown -p now]

Thus begins the Free-Free Software movement.

Begins? BSD guys have been trying to get rid of all GPL (including LGPL) in the base distro for a looong time - hence the planned migration to Clang (I believe GCC was the last remaining bit).

Re:I know it's now LGPL but I couldn't resist ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of them also use groff for writing man pages, but it looks like that is being replaced with the BSD-licensed mdocml.

Re:I know it's now LGPL but I couldn't resist ...

[celle]

"(I believe GCC was the last remaining bit)."

Nah, actually there's groff and a couple of other minor items(in freebsd that is). The other bsds are closer to freedom from the gpl but the compiler is the biggest snag in all of them.

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?

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[ceoyoyo]

I think it would be more likely you're a Linux/Mac developer who for some reason needs to write something for Windows. If you were a Windows developer you'd probably just use MS's tools and test with Mono.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[ubersoldat2k7]

Then I would use Java or Python or Ruby or Perl or, hell forgive me, JavaScript.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[ceoyoyo]

Absolutely. I'd use Python and Qt myself. But if you wanted to write a native app for Windows and you didn't HAVE Windows (or didn't care to be subjected to it), what would you use?

There aren't really a lot of options.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Orion Blastar]

MonoDevelop was designed to get Visual Studio Windows developers to use it to develop for Linux, Mac OS X, and other platforms that Mono exists for.

This is because high schools and colleges teach in C# and Visual BASIC instead of ANSI C++, Java, Python, and nedit with gcc and Makefiles. The programming students can keep their Visual Studio skills and still develop for Non-Windows platforms without having to learn new things very much.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[randallman]

If you're doing .NET, you're married to Microsoft.

In my eyes, the main thing mono has done is prove that .NET is not cross platform.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Ogi_UnixNut]

I've developed Windows programs on Linux using Python and WxWidgets. WXwidgets will use the underlying OS'es toolkit to actually render the GUI, so it uses Cocoa (Carbon in development) on OSX, GTK on windows and the native Windows toolkit (who'se name I don't know).

Has worked perfectly fine for me, both for developing solely for Windows from Linux, and for developing cross platform code that looks native on the three main OSes. Coupled with py2exe and py2dmg, binary distribution and installation is a breeze!

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[shutdown -p now]

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.

Even a primarily Windows shop that uses Mono as a simple way to port its .NET apps might still use MonoDevelop as a GUI debugger.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[shutdown -p now]

Absolutely. I'd use Python and Qt myself. But if you wanted to write a native app for Windows and you didn't HAVE Windows (or didn't care to be subjected to it), what would you use?

Qt. Yes, it draws the widgets itself, rather than using system ones, but it has such a good "native L&F" that it really is a moot point. The user doesn't care in the slightest how a button is implemented, so long as it looks and works the way he expects it to.

WPF also uses non-native widgets, by the way.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if I need a portable app that runs on Linux and also on Windows/Mac, I just write stuff in C++ and Qt4.

The ultimate portability.

So my question is, whats the point?

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[shutdown -p now]

wxWidgets is rather dated, though, and that's by design, making for rather awkward API. I mean, have a look at this:

"wxWidgets does not use templates (except for some advanced features that are switched off by default) since it is a notoriously unportable feature."

In 2009! Notoriously unportable, seriously? Basic template stuff (enough for generic containers, for example) has been perfectly portable since late 90s! But no, they don't want templates, which is why you get to write gems like:

class Foo { ... };
 
WX_DEFINE_ARRAY(Foo, FooArray);
 
FooArray foos;

I'll take Qt any day, thanks. It doesn't look any worse than wxWidgets in terms of "native" (even if it achieves that differently), but it's much more powerful, and the API is better. Now that both are LGPL'd, I really don't see any advantage wxWidgets might have.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Haeleth]

That's the C++ API. Which is completely and utterly irrelevant if you are developing in Python rather than C++.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[VoidEngineer]

Exactly. It's particularly useful for those of us who want to port our .Net code library away from Microsoft tools. Having worked in an MS environment for many years, I have tens of thousands of lines of code in various utilities and research projects that I've written in .Net. A few years back, I made the switch to Mac/Linux, and would like to never touch a Windows machine again, if possible. But I still want my code library available. So, this tool works perfectly for my needs. I made a wise decision many years ago to limit my develop to .Net 2.0 libraries only. Because I've exercised self-control in my coding practices, my .Net 2.0 code is now pretty much cross-platform, now that Mono has pretty much implemented the entire 2.0 specifications. And with MonoDevelop, I now have a mostly full featured-replacements for Visual Studio (I'm really only concerned with line numbering, code formatting, intellisense, refactoring, and nUnit testing in my IDE). So, as far as I'm concerned, and I can do cross-platform Mono development on Linux/Mac from here on out.

Of course, if you're trying to write .Net 3.5 or 4.0 code, there will be features not implemented yet, and it will be a pain. But it's great for 2.0 development.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[VoidEngineer]

As I was describing in a side thread, there's a problem of versioning and feature creap. Mono/.Net 2.0 is becoming a pretty solid cross-platform development environment. .Net 3.5 is a different story, since there are still API namespaces that need to be ported to Mono. But if you confine yourself to Mono/.Net 2.0, it's becoming pretty darn good.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[gbjbaanb]

Yuo may jest about Javascript, but I really think its the future. Everyone wants easily-deployable, thin-client apps (well, everyone, I mean line-of-business people) that perform as well as thick-client apps. Now we're just about, almost, getting there with HTML5, WebGL and the like, and so a good javascript implementation could provide a nice GUI to a back-end processing cloud. .NET and similar will become obsolete if the above could be shown to be workable in practical terms.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Tacvek]

If I'm a Linux/Mac guy wanting to write something for Windows, the path of least resistance is to write it in the language I am most familiar with, with a QT GUI, and cross compile it using mingw, not to develop software under .NET. While home versions of Windows are not POSIX compliant (or a close approximation thereof), the mingw team has done well enough that most POSIX programs can be ported over with relatively little difficulty. If for some reason mingw is not sufficient, then Cygwin is almost certainly sufficient.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[ceoyoyo]

"Cygwin is almost certainly sufficient"

Perhaps things have changed in the last few years, but I can just picture trying to explain to the average Windows end user how to install and use Cygwin.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[shutdown -p now]

That's the C++ API. Which is completely and utterly irrelevant if you are developing in Python rather than C++.

wxPython API has its own flaws, which are just as huge. For example, event handling via message maps, which is directly ported from the C++ API (which in turn got it from the abomination that is MFC). I mean, seriously, this isn't idiomatic Python:

ID_EXIT=110
filemenu= wx.Menu()
filemenu.Append(ID_EXIT,"Exit", "Terminate the program")
wx.EVT_MENU(self, ID_EXIT, OnExit)

A numeric "ID_EXIT" in a supposedly object-oriented framework - WTF?

Meanwhile, in PyGTK, it's all just objects as it should be, with no manually defined numeric IDs:

file = gtk.Menu()
file_exit = gtk.MenuItem("Exit")
file_exit.connect("activate", OnExit)
file.append(file_exit)

And PyQt is even better:

file = QtGui.QMenu()
file_exit = QtGui.QMenuItem("Exit")
file_exit.triggered.connect(OnExit)
file.addAction(file_exit)

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[aztracker1]

Honestly, I happen to like C# over Java. If you have to interact with native code, but want to use a managed language, it's really your best option. The semantics are similar enough to Java as it is. Also, if you are writing cross-platform code, without recompile, .Net/Mono is a much better option than Java is. Other than it was created at (the vile evil empire known as Microsoft), could you cite some examples why Python, Ruby, Perl or JavaScript would be a better language for development? I am unaware of any GUI toolkits that match the ones available for Ruby, Perl or JS, and Java doesn't match C#/.Net's native platform flexibility.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[aztracker1]

Adobe's AIR platform is actually pretty decent for this, you can develop with an HTML base, or with a Flash base. Though I'd like to see desktop Silverlight/Moonlight advance as well, I do think that more and more needs will be served by desktop widget/gadget frameworks.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

> WPF also uses non-native widgets, by the way.

So does IE. The reason dropdown boxes in forms had strange z-order problems in IE versions 7 was because that was the only truly native widget it used. It's since been fixed, and IE now draws all its own widgets.

Users really don't care about consistent look anymore and will even tolerate some inconsistency in behavior, as long as basic things like copy and paste work where they expect.

WPF still has some really crummy font rendering at small sizes tho. Compare Visual Studio 2008 which uses winforms, to the beta of Visual Studio 2010 which uses WPF. The difference is immediately obvious.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Visual Echo]

but does anyone use MonoDevelop?

It runs like crap. Click in the wrong place and it crashes.

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?

I want it to work. Period. I'm a computer guy, I don't define or limit myself to Microsoft, Linux, or embedded 68HC11A, I just want a managed language that works. Shove your bigotry.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[shutdown -p now]

WPF still has some really crummy font rendering at small sizes tho. Compare Visual Studio 2008 which uses winforms, to the beta of Visual Studio 2010 which uses WPF. The difference is immediately obvious.

I know about WPF font rendering problems, I'm the one who created the Connect ticket for it. It literally hurts my eyes to look at a WPF 3.x app with dark text on bright background (the other way around it's more or less tolerable, which is exploited by Expression Blend).

Now, though, WPF 4 has a reworked engine that improves things a lot. It didn't make it in VS2010 beta1, but it is present in beta 2 (though there had been a few more tweaks since because of some known problems).

By the way, V2008 doesn't use WinForms. Or rather it does, but only for certain parts (e.g. the TFS bits), and they definitely don't make the majority. Most of it is actually hand-coded native Win32 UI.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having worked in an MS environment for many years, I have tens of thousands of lines of code in various utilities and research projects that I've written in .Net. A few years back, I made the switch to Mac/Linux, and would like to never touch a Windows machine again, if possible. But I still want my code library available. So, this tool works perfectly for my needs.

Okay, this is far too mature for Slashdot. You need more l33tn355 about how Linux pwns and MS is the suxor.

It's good to know there are some actual professionals here.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Qt used real C++ instead of its own language variant, it would probably be one of the top on my list. But until then, I just can't stomach it, even though part of me wants to use it.

gtkmm can do it. wxWidgets can do it. Why does Qt need to pervert the language?

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[GreatBunzinni]

I second the idea that Qt kicks ass. Nonetheless, the design decision behind Qt's policy of forcing the programmers to drop the STL in favour of Qt's components such as container classes and string... Well, it sucks. It imposes on the programmer a non-standard way of doing things, it is a royal pain in the ass to integrate 3rd party components that rely on the STL and it plainly sucks to be forced to use a less mature API.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Sax Maniac]

Wha? Qt??!

You mean the toolkit that requires a goofy cfront-style precompiler and comes with their own string class? Sure, it uses templates, but it's hardly a shining star of modern C++.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[dup_account]

Um, you forgot to say "IMHO, Mono is better". It meets your needs, but not mine. So.. IMHO, mono is useless, and Java is great.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad to hear that it's not just me. As a beginning GUI programmer I really struggled with wxPython's events. And the numeric IDs seem to prevent you from generating menu items dynamically. It was better than TkInter but I think next time I'll just go with PyQt.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[shutdown -p now]

I second the idea that Qt kicks ass. Nonetheless, the design decision behind Qt's policy of forcing the programmers to drop the STL in favour of Qt's components such as container classes and string... Well, it sucks. It imposes on the programmer a non-standard way of doing things, it is a royal pain in the ass to integrate 3rd party components that rely on the STL and it plainly sucks to be forced to use a less mature API.

I wouldn't say that Qt containers are less mature than STL. STL is older, yes, but we've only started getting compliant and decently optimized implementations of it from 2000 on (it was kinda meh in both gcc 2.95 and VC6, for example).

I used to dislike that Qt approach of reinventing the wheel as well, but then I understood their approach. The thing with Qt is that it's not just an UI library, and shouldn't be treated as such - it's a dialect of C++ (signals/slots, RTTI, etc) combined with a uniformly designed class library that tries to match those seen in Java and .NET. As such, it covers all ground, including the very basics.

When you write in Qt, you write in "Qt C++", which somehow looks very reminiscent of Java - only without GC (but with smart pointers), and much, much more efficient. The ability to call other C++ libraries (including STL and Boost) should be treated as a very useful extra "interop" feature, but not something that's supposed to be relied on heavily.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[shutdown -p now]

You mean the toolkit that requires a goofy cfront-style precompiler and comes with their own string class? Sure, it uses templates, but it's hardly a shining star of modern C++.

If by "modern C++" you mean extreme template metaprogramming craziness, then sure. Qt is just pragmatic.

Meanwhile, can you point me at a good cross-platform toolkit written in idiomatic STL/Boost-style C++ that isn't ugly as hell on one or more platforms (i.e. Gtkmm is right out, as Gtk sucks on both Win32 and OS X)?

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[shutdown -p now]

Worth noting that PyQt4 is still GPL (not LGPL, like Qt4), which can make a difference for proprietary software. There's a mostly-PyQt-compatible PySide if you need LGPL (or if you prefer an "official" binding), but it's still in 0.x stage.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of what I've done is intended for a specific shop rather than the general public. But it is a really good thing to keep in mind, so thanks for the info.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[innocent_white_lamb]

(I code with nedit, gcc and Makefiles),
 
If you haven't already done so, do yourself a favour and check out geany.
 
The majority of my programming is C with ncurses, and geany is just the ticket for that kind of thing.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I want it to work. Period. I'm a computer guy, I don't define or limit myself to Microsoft, Linux, or embedded 68HC11A, I just want a managed language that works. Shove your bigotry.

I hope your menstrual cramps clear up.

GP was trying to understand who Mono is for, what its target audience is. He wasn't telling you what you should use, how big your dick is because you use it, how you should define or limit yourself, etc. If you think that's bigotry, be very grateful that you have never experienced real bigotry.

Yeah yeah, go ahead and mod me down, that's why I posted AC. I wanted to say something though because this kind of adversarial element does not improve the discussion. At least I actually said something against you. The GP did not.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[binarylarry]

Java has a much fancier and faster runtime, has better tools, has a massive choice of 3rd party libraries for *anything*, runs on more systems and hardware, has much more support across companies in the computing technology industry and it's open source. .NET has a really nice IDE in Visual Studio (almost as good as Eclipse) but it's Windows only. It also has C# which has some nice features, but unfortunately is like Java with a giant spoiler and neon lights attached to it.

Mono is a shitty knock off of .NET. It's not really compatible in the vast majority of cases, it's basically "Managed Wine." I think Mono has it's purposes, if you really need to get a .NET app working on Linux by any means, but like Wine it's really the last resort if you have no other choice.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[maxume]

You don't need to install the environment to utilize the runtime (so the application can just ship the dll).

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[pyrrhonist]

but I can just picture trying to explain to the average Windows end user how to install and use Cygwin.

He's referring to the library, not the software environment. It's just a DLL that you package with your software.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Kz]

Qt. No need for anything else.

In fact, it could be argued that Qt apps are _far_ more native than .Net

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[b4dc0d3r]

C++ WxWidgets was a niche solution for a temporary problem. It's basically a portable copy of MFC with a few extra features.

I got all excited about cross-platform GUI work, bought the book, got 3 chapters in, and all of a sudden had a huge WTF moment. Seriously, it was like looking at a painting of attractive women bathing, then you realize they are guys, and they are having sex and killing each other in the most creative ways imaginable. Wondering how I misinterpreted it at first, trying to see the original conception again, and feeling suddenly awkward about the erection is about as close of a metaphor as I can give to that moment.

With scripting languages I'm sure it's all cool and stuff, but for C++ you'd be better off holding someone's grandmother for a Linux GUI ransom. Or, if you're really super crazy, try Qt instead.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

you are right, and it pains me dearly that there is no good cross-platform toolkit that's both elegant and portable. (but gtk is ok on windows, it's just the mac os backend that sucks)

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[tildebeast]

I was forced to take a C# class for my masters I used monodevelop instead of the free products available from micro$Haft. This license failure is indicative of the coming failures in the open source community. If we don't embrace GPLv3 soon we will all be dead.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[tobiasly]

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

Why do you think it's under such active development? Open source projects that no one uses tend to die on the vine.

Personally, I am very impressed with the ASP.NET MVC framework and plan to write several new websites using it and deploy them on Linux boxes running Apache and mod_mono. I'm still using VS 2008 (running inside VirtualBox) at the moment but now that MonoDevelop is becoming more full-featured I hope to switch over completely soon.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Qt doesn't "pervert" the language, it extends it. I don't understand why people make such a big deal out of this. Also, moc gives you introspection and properties, both of which are clearly useful and not reasonably doable with templates.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Ihmhi]

A sumo wrestler on an ice cream binge is thinner than Java.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's bullshit, Qt doesn't force you to drop anything. In the Qt documentation about the container classes, it says "If you are unfamiliar with the STL, or prefer to do things the 'Qt way', you can use these classes instead of the STL classes.". Notice that it says "can", not "must" or even "should". If you prefer STL containers, by all means use them.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

QT "extends" C++?
How long until they "embrace" C++??

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[TemporalBeing]

But if you wanted to write a native app for Windows and you didn't HAVE Windows (or didn't care to be subjected to it), what would you use?

Qt. It is native on all the platforms it supports - Mac, Linux/Unix, Windows, and more.

Granted there are also versions that interact with the VM'd languages (e.g. Java, Python, etc.); but Qt itself is native to the system.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not coding the wxPython correctly. It can work almost exactly like your PyGTK example.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[osu-neko]

I was trying to drink my Pepsi when I read that. Should we be charging you with attempted murder or merely manslaughter? Can a metaphor be considered a deadly weapon? (If an algorithm can be a "munition"...)

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Abcd1234]

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?

No. Why? Because Unix developers prefer primitive tools?

C#, as a language, is really very good, and combined with the plethora of libraries available (bindings for the entire Gnome stack, among other things), makes for a very rich software stack. And MonoDevelop does an excellent job of integrating a visual forms designer (who, in their right mind, wants to build GUIs by hand these days?) with an intelligent editor (it's code completion isn't anywhere near as sophisticated as Intellisense, but close), providing a very neat package for throwing together full-blown Gnome desktop applications very quickly.

Of course, I wouldn't use that toolset for everything. When I'm hacking code for my DS, or otherwise find myself writing C/C++ on the job, I use a big xterm with GNU Screen, vim (nedit? *snicker*), and good ol make/gcc/etc. But if I want to rapidly build a desktop application for Linux, Mono and MonoDevelop is definitely one of the options on the table.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

A sumo wrestler on an ice cream binge is thinner than Java.

If I hear Java == JavaScript one more time I'm going to explode.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[aztracker1]

I don't suppose you could show how Java's runtime is either fancier, or faster than .Net's. As to better tools, I would suggest different tools, as just about everything Java has in tools support is available in .Net. Beyond this, .Net projects are less complicated out of the box than a typical Java application. In terms of 3rd party libraries, .Net probably excels here over Java in that it provides both closed and more open-source libraries than I've seen on the java side. I seriously doubt you've actually used C# on anything significant given your statements. Also, I doubt you've ever had to interface with system libraries in Java vs. C#, or you would definitely have a differing opinion, JNI is a hideous mess, and doesn't work well cross-platform.

As to mono, I would place it far above Wine in terms of application compatability. I would also say that Mono, using C# has a greater ability to actually utilize system libraries over Java.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[bill_mcgonigle]

But if you wanted to write a native app for Windows and you didn't HAVE Windows or didn't care to be subjected to it, what would you use?

If you don't hate your users you'd get a Windows machine and actually test your software. Please, it's Christmas Eve, don't make my head explode.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Foofoobar]

That perform AS WELL? You mean a half-loaded javascript or css file won't cause the entire site to get screwed up or data to load badly? See... because that's how a real app works. Also you can package all those separate files together into one loadable binary so you know whether it loaded or not (or even a JAR or WAR).

Of course it's not just javascripts fault as the browser needs to evolve as well to become an application delivery platform. Javascript was not made for that and the browser needs to evolve a bit more to become a server as well as a client.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[GameboyRMH]

Yay proprietary tech!

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[CAIMLAS]

Not really. I'm a Linux guy who's trying to figure out how to write code that will be able to run on a number of platforms without too much platform-specific rewrite. I also think a GUI should be made in the same way it's used (IE with a mouse), so...

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Sam Douglas]

Indeed. The Qt container classes are nice because they provide a consistent implementation and API. On top of that, they provide methods like QList::toStdList() to help with interop

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[GreatBunzinni]

It appears you have a very odd definition of what "not forcing" means. Qt doesn't offer support in all of Qt's classes for STL containers and/or the standard C++ string objects. You cannot write a Qt app without being forced to use Qt's QString and/or Qt's containers. The only way you may use C++'s standard components is if you bring additional bloat and complexity to the application by converting Qt's data types and containers back and forth with STL's, which quite plainly sucks in multiple ways.

But then again, if you had any experience writing apps with Qt and if you had the displeasure of having to incorporate a third party C++ component which relies on the STL you would realize that Qt does in fact forces the programmers to use Qt's containers and data structure. On the other hand, if you never had to deal with this problem then you would have no problem attempting to label that fact as bullshit.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Sam Douglas]

Qt addresses the pathetic shortcomings of C++ as an object oriented language. The meta-object compiler provides better runtime type introspection than the standard library, as well as the power to lookup classes and members by name, and dynamic instantiation.

Providing fundamental classes like QString is an important step towards writing portable, internationalisable programs. The standard C++ library provides std::string and std::wstring. QString provides transparent Unicode support, has much more functionality than C++ strings (conversion between various representations and types), is immutable so QString objects can be copied around safely, rather than as pointers etc, etc.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Hurricane78]

Frankly, C/C++ and shiny don’t belong in one sentence anyway. ^^
It’s like calling the MIR shiny. ;)

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears you have a very odd definition of what "not forcing" means. Qt doesn't offer support in all of Qt's classes for STL containers and/or the standard C++ string objects. You cannot write a Qt app without being forced to use Qt's QString and/or Qt's containers.

You lack imagination. If you don't like Qt strings, use your plain old strings in your algorithmic code, and render to the Qt string type as appropriate.

I take it you have no idea what "monadic programming" means. Think of Qt as a monad, and your architecture will follow.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like calling the MIR shiny. ;)

But the MIR was shiny. See how brightly it shone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mir_reentry_photo.jpg

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[poopdeville]

Absolutely. I'd use Python and Qt myself. But if you wanted to write a native app for Windows and you didn't HAVE Windows (or didn't care to be subjected to it), what would you use?

I'd shell out for a copy of Windows...

See, MONO is years behind .NET, and .NET is developing very quickly. When was LINQ introduced? 2007 or so? That's a fantastic tool, and the only tool I have seen like it is HaskellDB (which inspired LINQ, and was written by the same Eric Meijer)

So what are my options for high level programming? MS .NET research languages like F#, or open source (MIT/BSD) Haskell? As it stands, I am working with Linux and Haskell. Typed functional programming is too productive to ignore. Unfortunately, it seems that MS is the only provider of a modern, production quality functional programming language for "desktop/GUI" use. (Yes, there are a BUNCH of Schemes and Lisps. And they each have fewer users than Haskell or ML) Unless thousands of programmers join up and start producing high quality functional code, Microsoft is going to pull away very quickly (basically, it already has).

Sure, there's Python. I don't want to start ranting about Python. Let me just note that Python's list notation is only vaguely and tangentially related to Haskell's monad comprehension notation, and Python's list comprehension notation is a lot less useful than full blown monad comprehensions. (Despite the claims of the Python users... the whole point of a monadic computation is that you can sequence by concatenating another step. How do you sequence Python list functors? Nesting. Or unnecessary variables. Python doesn't offer a normal form for list, let alone monadic computations) Never mind that they didn't bother to write map and join as a functor on lists... The developers' attitudes are pretty bad, too. Far too arrogant considering how little they know about computation (i.e. mathematics) and its practice.

Ruby is significantly better about this kind of stuff. But is still only "cross-POSIX" (like Haskell, Python, Perl, etc) without extensions (again, like the others).

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed beta 2. The editor window is still pretty damn awful, with fuzzy fringy artifacts *everywhere* (and yes I normally have cleartype on for all other apps). The broken smart-indent and overall crashiness are also keeping me with 2008 tho.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[binarylarry]

What kind of fruity colleges are you referring to?

Practically every college on the planet teaches Java and C++....

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[GreatBunzinni]

You lack imagination. If you don't like Qt strings, use your plain old strings in your algorithmic code, and render to the Qt string type as appropriate.

You don't have a clue about what you are talknig about. You cannot use Qt without passing parameters to and receiving data from Qt's methods, which you cannot do without being forced to use Qt's data types extensively. Your imagination will only help if you depend on it to turn a blind eye and forget that you are forced to convert your data structures back and forth with Qt's types in order to keep using Qt's components.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, ask that Strostrup genius why.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Yetihehe]

It's like calling the MIR shiny.

MIR WAS once shining (when it burned in atmosphere ;) )

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[man_of_mr_e]

It could be argued that, but such an argument would be a losing proposition. .NET uses Winforms, which is a very thin layer on top of the native USER. WPF, on the other hand, is about as native as QT.

If you're arguing that QT can be used by C/C++ apps, which will be "native" rather than .NET then you don't understand .NET, it's completely native as the bytecodes are compiled before executing. It's never interpreted, at least on Windows.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[man_of_mr_e]

"Native" in this sense means "uses the OS's GUI" not "does not run in a VM". QT draws it's own widgets, not using the OS ones.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[ckaminski]

Please elaborate? I'm doing just fine with GPLv2, Apache, BSD and MIT, and to some extent the EPL...

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Ilgaz]

In regards to POSIX, scene changed even in Symbian S60 platform which is said to be one of the weirdest OS'es to date. Thanks to Symbian PIPS and possibly Qt early Symbian betas, Skype finally shipped a native, C++ client for S60 devices.

It really looks like POSIX/Qt/Cocoa have reached some new high and some trolls are doing everything to make people confused/fight over it. I am not speaking about you, I am speaking about the gang of once GNU Hero ex MS rejects trollish trojan gang.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Ilgaz]

I respect to Cygwin guys, really and I really think they open a new chapter with each release.

When Nokia shipped PIPS, a portable "mini" POSIX for Symbian and open sourced it, I thought Nokia developers/labs have finally reached to the nirvana of fantasy development which would end up no where. When Nokia labs and several companies like Skype used it to do amazing things which are otherwise too hard,impossible on S60 to this date, I ate my words.

People really wonder why no such thing happens on Windows and where are these decent apps shipping on Linux/OS X thanks to Mono framework otherwise wouldn't ship at all. If a company doesn't make their tool available for OS X while it reached 10% of Desktop share in some areas, perhaps they don't have the vision or manpower to ship it. It could be the same deal for Linux too. Perhaps that company&developer doesn't have any reason for supporting Linux or OS X, maybe they are stupid but it doesn't really happen because of lack of tools/frameworks as they keep claiming. If they get enough reasons, they could use GTK/Qt/Cocoa and ship it. They wouldn't use some hack like thing.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not Scala? You can use an ML-like fragment of Scala and still have access to a wider collection of libraries than with Haskell.

Re:Does anyone really use it?

[gatesvp]

Yes we have several installs at my office.

We run hundreds of Linux servers on EC2 and much of the original software was written in .NET. Most of our commodity servers have therefore been ported to Mono. Several of our core servers are running Windows. So we end up using Mono when we need scale (to save on licenses) and .NET on Windows for ease of implementation (like Services) on those servers that won't need to scale heavily.

At the end of the day our team uses both VS and MonoDevelop and I don't really think that either of them are going away :)

Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsoft.

[kurt555gs]

No GPL? Actually is Mono really that important any more? Most new software development is going to be on iPhone BSD, Android, and Maemo Linux. Needing legacy .net is nothing anyone cares about.

I think this shows Miguell's true pawn colors.

BURN HIM !! BURN HIM !!

[Anonymous Coward]

Burn him !!

Re:BURN HIM !! BURN HIM !!

[chrisxcr1]

Only if he floats. Quick! Someone toss him in the pond!

Re:BURN HIM !! BURN HIM !!

[7-Vodka]

Sir,

You have made a nuanced and intricate post and I find myself very much relating to your sentiments.

Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Awesome.

[Anonymous Coward]

GPL is a pain. I am in the midst of a code review to remove all GLPed code as well for that same reason. I should have realized going into my (open-source) project that GPL is one way of saying that the code is useless.

GPL is SHIT

[Anonymous Coward]

Richard Stallman smells like the GPL.

Debugger

[Spykk]

It looks like MonoDevelop finally gets a debugger. That was really the last thing tying me to Visual Studio for .net development.

Re:Debugger

[Anonymous Coward]

same here !!

Re:Debugger

[spongman]

wait, why is this funny? one of the 'i'-mods, maybe, but not funny.

Good.

[couchslug]

People who want to work for/shill for/suck up to Microsoft directly or indirectly should do that.

Those who don't support that sort of thing should work to cut them off at the knees by not using their software and discouraging others from doing so.

Re:Good.

[introspekt.i]

And people who do neither can continue to complain on Slashdot.

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:Good.

[postmortem]

I think you need to work 'little' more to understand why it is actually the other way around. And to get it why Java is more successful than C#.

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, you mean they don't charge a cent for it?

They don't have to. If something is developed with it you have ensured the users remain tied into MS cash streams. It's all about vendor lock in.

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

(yes, pedantic types, I know it's all pass by reference, but you know what I mean)

If you're talking about being pedantic, you should look up what "pass by reference" actually means. (Hint: it's not what Java has)

Re:Good.

[visualight]

.Net sucks on it's own, not because Microsoft made it. I think it's crap and I think Mono is just cross platform crap. My list of languages that suck: .Net|Mono
VisualBasic
Java
RubyonRails
All 'framework' languages that make it easy for people to crank out bloatware.

Last month I replaced 120MB of ruby dependencies with 14 bash scripts. But it seems like every time I turn around someone is presenting me with a new sack full of ax handles and asking me to alter our filesystem to support it. The current bane of my existence is an 'unsupported' gui .net app that won't run in anything except 1.49-somethingsomething.

My opinion is that how easy it is to implement your ideas is the _least_ important consideration, but so many programmers seem to think it's the only one that matters.

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

People like you, allowed Nazi Germany to take place.

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

My opinion is that how easy it is to implement your ideas is the _least_ important consideration, but so many programmers seem to think it's the only one that matters.

Well... Some of us actually get paid for this kind of thing. Employers seem happier with us when we create the same functionality in hours that must take you months. Go figure.

Re:Good.

[Logger]

You would also probably refuse a cure for cancer if it was invented by Microsoft.

Re:Good.

[xtracto]

I think you need to work 'little' more to understand why it is actually the other way around. And to get it why Java is more successful than C#.

I thought exactly the same, 1.5 years of working with a language?

Two years in the school does not count because you did not need to clean and correct your shitty program after it stops working in the production servers.

Re:Good.

[nurb432]

Right, because Microsoft is making a profit off licensing the .NET framework..

No, but they are smart enough to know if you can lock in as many people into your frameworks ( even if its just a virtual lock due to knowledge ), it only increases market share way down the road.

You have to think of the BIG picture, not what you can see if you look around your cube walls.

Re:Good.

[eigenstates]

"P.S. Yes, C# being better than Java is personal opinion."

No, it isn't. C# is better than Java in every way. Well- alright, at least the ones you carefully list. I'll add that doing things one way instead of Java's myriad of (frequently inane) implementations is very relaxing when starting out on something new or when inheriting code from someone else.

Re:Good.

[aztracker1]

I've seen crappy code in every language I've worked in... I've also seen elegant code in almost every language I've worked in... That's a pretty poor benchmark of a language. If that's your benchmark, then Python is simultaneously the best and worst language out there. Doesn't mean that I like it.

Re:Good.

[msgyrd]

A cancer treatment from Microsoft would mean that you'd have to continually buy a license to maintain use of the treatment from them or they'd cut you off and let you die. You may survive, but you're enslaved to them. Then again, that's not far off from current medical practices either.

Re:Good.

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Just for the record, I'm only counting production uses of the code. I do code in my spare time for fun, and my experience is a bit more extensive than that spent in school and work.

That said, I will admit to having *far* less experience in C#/Java compared to C/C++ and Perl. I will admit to some prejudices in favor of C# due to the support it provides for C and C++ style idioms (without the horror that is C++ compiler errors to boot). It was also quite handy for some old number theory projects, since I could implement custom numeric types with relative ease. But having worked with both C# and Java in production environments and studying language features and performance profiles on my own time, my conclusion remains that C# is a much more developer friendly language, with arguable performance benefits (most of them aren't really noticeable in most situations, though I've coded in some environments where Java's autoboxing introduced noticeable perf problems). I'm willing to accept the somewhat reduced portability; I've never coded for anything but Windows (3 years) and Linux (6 years), so for my needs, and those of quite a lot of other people, the reduced portability doesn't really enter in to the equation.

That said, I've never personally been bitten by Microsoft on a legal issue before. If Mono is ever shut down due to legal issues, I'll probably approach Microsoft the same way I approach Sony; with a cross and holy water in hand. But until that day, I'm going to be practical and when I have a choice, choose a language that makes my job easier. The irony is that right now I'm in an all Java shop, so I don't have that choice.

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

(yes, pedantic types, I know it's all pass by reference, but you know what I mean)

There's no pass by reference in Java, it's all pass by value. Yes, I'm a pedantic Coward

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

My list of languages that suck:
RubyonRails

Ruby on Rails (not "Rubyon Rails") isn't a language.

Re:Good.

[NotBorg]

How does software running on BOTH Windows and Linux create a lock-in?

Seems to me that the lock-in is a world without Mono. Then if you .NET you are locked in to a Windows only world. They are going to .NET regardless of Mono's existence. At least with Mono users aren't locked into Windows only.

Would you rather have something like where Flash comes from? A binary that runs on both but is closed up tight? Would you rather have Microsoft implement a closed .NET runtime blob that runs on Linux instead of an open source Mono?

I don't see Mono as any more evil than Wine, Cygwin, Samba, FreeDOS, or the plethora of open source programs that run on both Windows and Linux. The logical extension of "hate Mono because it provides compatibility with a Microsoft frame work" is to hate all software compatible with any Microsoft framework. You should hate Firefox, Open Office, Apache, QT, and on and on. If it runs on a MS platform it must be supporting the lock-in right?

The big picture is that Linux only is no better than Microsoft only. Interoperability between the two platforms helps both sides.

Re:Good.

[Chainsaw]

There's no pass by reference in Java, it's all pass by value. Yes, I'm a pedantic Coward

That can't be right. Passing everything by value would mean that an object modified simultaneously in two threads would get out of sync immediately. Also, a quick Google search shows that Java actually passes objects by reference. So much for pedantic cowards...

Re:Good.

[FlyingBishop]

Microsoft has been very clear that even though they're not charging for .Net at the moment, they believe that people should be paying to use Microsoft IP. Removing GPL code from anything they use is a natural first step towards that goal. Is everyone involved in Mono working towards that goal? Probably not. But it's clearly what Microsoft wants.

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

And to get it why Java is more successful than C#.

Yes ! I say the same thing. Windows is more successful than Linux. I mean 95% to 0.89%. Jesus, obviously Linux sucks. But I always get marked Flamebait... :(

Re:Good.

[tuomoks]

Whatever it's worth, I'm with you - after 40+ years coding and, kind of, some knowledge about languages. These conversations are always hilarious - computer languages and development systems come and go. You live and learn.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of Java, Mono, .NET, C#, whatever - too many (huge) systems I have fixed lately. Wouldn't blame so much the systems but the developer attitude that you don't have to think - the systems takes care of problems - and go away, please! If you want "managed" code (i.e. no memory problems, mostly) use LISP, if you want "modern", threaded, multi-processor / multi-node / etc - use Erlang. If you want OO - why not Simula, yes, OO is nothing new - Delphi is dead, heh!. Libraries - which ones, for business, try Cobol (unfortunately PL/I is mostly gone), for science, try Fortran. Interesting calculations needed now - a couple of lines APL takes care of that. Drivers - a couple of choices, assembler, C, PL/S, other special languages - or maybe doing it on microcode level? Scripting - depends - maybe Python but what's wrong with REXX, AWK, shell code, etc? Predicative systems - use Prolog. An endless list.

Now, designing / building a (last one, kind of - a couple of million lines) big "mission critical", 24x7, distributed, etc system which runs in VMS, AIX, Solaris, Linux, older HP-UX, BSD, NSK (Guardian) and Windows(!) I currently still would go with pure C - the only portable language which supports both the low and high level development. If Mono can get to that - I will change in a second - maybe we can get to z/OS and OS X also, just can't afford the development systems just now!

Microsoft is like any other company, has great people, has grown a little too fast, has managers who were great 20 years ago (in business which changes ever 6 months?) - maybe finds a way to solve the current problems, survive as IBM did and Sun didn't.

Still, .NET / Mono / Java / etc - give me a break, next great thing(!), seen too many of those, sold to corporations / management - now long gone. Does anyone really believe that the development / enhancements end here, today? That MS, IBM, Oracle, SAP, whoever is the final answer?

Re:Good.

[binarylarry]

Yeah, because the cure would probably be AIDS.

Re:Good.

[TheSunborn]

Java does pass all variables by value, but it don't pass objects AT ALL.

So how do you pass an object to a function in java you say? Well you can't do that at all(Unlike in c++), but what you can pass is a reference to the object and that reference is passed by value.

Remember: An reference is not an object(In java that is, it is actuelly in some languages), and the fact that java for security reasons don't allow direct access to objects don't mean that an reference is an object.
 

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

That can't be right.

It is right. The code below illustrates the difference.

public class PassBy {
        private static void f(String s) {
                s = "WTF? Java uses pass by reference?";
        }
        public static void main(String[] args) {
                String s = "OMG! Java uses pass by value!";
                f(s);
                System.out.println(s);
        }
}

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)

[wh1pp3t]

According to the second link in the summary, WCF and LINQ to SQL have been addressed in Mono 2.6.

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

[tjstork]

Tis not done yet.

WCF client and server, the subset exposed by Silverlight 2.0.
LINQ to SQL using DbLinq.
More complete 3.5 API coverage.

So they are missing stuff.

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

[nstlgc]

WPF and WCF have nothing to do with the C# language. If you're going to make a snide remark, at least put some effort in it. As for L2S, I heard that's coming along pretty well.

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

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Wow. Imagine, an open source project cloning the functionality of a commercial product that doesn't support the latest features of the commercial product. Given what I know of MS release cycles, it took them at least a year and half to write the 3.5 release, and they frequently were writing wrappers around functionality that either already existed, or was handed to them by the OS team. It's been two years since 3.5 released, and the Mono team has got a lot of the functionality exposed, without the advantage of OS support for many of the features. Give them a break, Rome wasn't built in a day either you know.

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

[shutdown -p now]

I can't really blame them for not doing WPF, at least, as it's a huge beast. If you read some MSDN blogs, you know that it was talked about in public as early as 2003, and that means that it was being developed for much longer than that. It's both a fairly complicated API, and a very demanding on implementation to get performance right - heck, the original WPF release had a lot of perf troubles, and even today there's still a lot of stuff that only WPF 4 will iron out).

In any case, Gtk# is actually rather neat.

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

[Waffle Iron]

I mean, come on, where's WPF? Where's WCF? Where's LINQ to SQL?

One place to look for those things would be on the desk of an examiner at the US Patent Office.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Mono is for Windows devs who think they're sticking it to "The Man" but quite clearly still suckle on Steve Balmer's teet to earn their living. Sort of like Yuppies that buy a Harley motorcycle to ride on Sundays with their ever so original tribal tattoo.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

and the open source product is moving to be free as in beer only

The LGPL may be "less free" according to the made-up definition and usage of the word "free" pushed by the FSF, but here in the real world where we don't redefine words in order to try to reshape reality, the LGPL leads to free-as-in-bear (or proprietary) no faster than does the GPL itself, or any other "free" and open source license for that matter.

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

[aztracker1]

WPF isn't a language feature, neither are WF, WCF or the enterprise libraries. They are frameworks bound on top of the platform/language. LINQ is there, also there is DbLINQ, Linq to NHibernate+ Fluent, and IIRC you can use Entity under mono, not that I plan to. If you're going to develop in a framework to deploy to non-windows servers, why would you support a database framework that only runs on windows (MS SQL Server)?

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

[aztracker1]

First off, the main portions of mono were already LGPL, still are. Also this moves the developer tool, not the underlying framework to LGPL, which is pretty free, but allows for a nicer redistribution model.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

The LGPL may be "less free" according to the made-up definition and usage of the word "free" pushed by the FSF

Please provide a link to the FSF claiming that the LGPL is "less free" than the GPL.

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

[steveha]

Please provide a link to the FSF claiming that the LGPL is "less free" than the GPL.

Are you trolling? They renamed LGPL from the "Library" GPL to the "Lesser" GPL, because they feel it is less free. It's baked right into the name that they feel it is less free.

But you asked for a link. Here you go:

Using the Lesser GPL for any particular library constitutes a retreat for free software. It means we partially abandon the attempt to defend the users' freedom, and some of the requirements to share what is built on top of GPL-covered software. In themselves, those are changes for the worse.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhySomeGPLAndNotLGPL

Just in case that wasn't clear enough for you, let me rephrase it: according to this gnu.org link, the LGPL does not protect users' freedom as well as the GPL. It does not maximize freedom as well as GPL. In short, it is less free, according to gnu.org.

Remember that GNU and FSF are all about the users' freedom. Freedom of any developer to make proprietary software is not viewed as a good thing. A license like GPL that restricts the ability of developers to make proprietary software is viewed as more free.

On the other hand, fans of the BSD license argue that it is "more free" because anyone may do anything with the software. GNU and FSF reject this idea.

steveha

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

[TibbonZero]

We developed our initial product (imVOX... http://imvox.com/ in .NET for Windows, but then we wanted to move over to OS X and Linux as well. Instead of rewriting completely in Java or C (which we didn't have the time or money for on our schedule), we thought to use Mono. Otherwise creating 3 separate code bases to maintain and debug with a small team, Mono seemed to do the trick (for now). By no means do we claim that .NET/Mono or C# is the best thing in the world- but similar to using Rails, we needed rapid application development to get a shippable product out the door in order to raise more money. We didn't have time to write it in C on 3 platforms from the first day. I think this makes sense. When someone loads us up with cash- we'll probably re-write in C++ or something, but not today.

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

[Dr_Barnowl]

fans of the BSD license argue that it is "more free" because anyone may do anything with the software

Including... making it non-free again...

Oops.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

It does not maximize freedom as well as GPL. In short, it is less free, according to gnu.org.

Where does the FSF say that not maximising freedom as well means it's less free? There are other criteria to judge a licence on other than how free it is, and the FSF thinks the LGPL is "lesser" in one of those other criteria, independent of how "free" it is.

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

[onefriedrice]

fans of the BSD license argue that it is "more free" because anyone may do anything with the software

Including... making it non-free again...

Oops.

Yeah, oops indeed. Like so many before you, you have bought into the false belief that BSD licensed code can magically become non-free in some fashion that GPL code cannot. Let's go over this again. The only one that can relicense code is the copyright holder. Even then, that will not nullify the license of code which has already been licensed and released. This is all true whether the code is BSD licensed or licensed under the GPL. You cannot take BSD, and make it non-free, as you assert. The only rights you have are what the license itself grants you. In the case of BSD code, you can use it in combination with proprietary code and even decide for yourself how to license your changes (this in contrast with the GPL), but it is impossible for a user to just take the code and say "hence forth, this is now proprietary code; thus, nobody shall use it except I."

If you still don't understand, I don't know what more I can do to help you.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the FSF is all about a communist vision of the "ecology" of Open Source making it impossible to meet the hurdle costs of developing proprietary software. Lying about this just makes you an asshole.

Case in point: The "ecology" of Free Software was threatened by proprietary applications being developed for an open source mobile phone platform, according to recent statements. For what values of "ecology of Free Software" can this be true? Oh - for no values at all EXCEPT the value where the sole point of free software is to eradicate proprietary software! Please enlighten me as to other explanations for this expression that could fit the conclusion as well, because I see none.

Calling it "Free" is like calling surveillance "Security". It is, but there is a lot more behind the word which the people who came up with it knew about when they did.

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

[tjstork]

We developed our initial product (imVOX... http://imvox.com/ [imvox.com] in .NET for Windows

What's interesting is that using a virtual machine like .NET has gained so much more acceptance for portability than when Java first took it for a spin, or USCD p-System did so many years before that.

As a practical matter, rewriting your product in C++ would seem to be foolish.

Best of luck to you.

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

[man_of_mr_e]

Actually, there was never anything wrong with Java in that regard. There were, however, two major problems with Java and it has developed a very bad reputation for desktop apps that it can't seem to shake.

The first was the Swing sucked. It was a very poorly designed GUI app, and did not run natively on any platform, while both WinForms and GTK# run natively on their respective platforms (Windows and Linux.. i'm sure there must be a Cocoa# somewhere too).

The second was that Java overpromised too much at a time when hardware resources were still way too limited. Java today is far more usable than it was in 96-2000 because hardware has grown so much since then.

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

[man_of_mr_e]

Wow. That's a shocker. So you're saying that because Microsoft used BSD networking code in the first versions of Widows NT, it made all BSD networking code no long free?

Why has nobody said anything!

I think you might need to rethink your position.

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

[tjstork]

The first was the Swing sucked.

Even worse than Swing sucking was that the Java 1.1's original GUI environment was a limited unix centric vehicle that lacked many of the basics found on Windows at that day.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Where does the FSF say that not maximising freedom as well means it's less free?

Please explain to us all how something that "does not maximise freedom" is somehow more free. How does that work?

There are other criteria to judge a licence on other than how free it is, and the FSF thinks the LGPL is "lesser" in one of those other criteria, independent of how "free" it is.

Please provide a link to support this point. Find any web page from the FSF or the GNU project that explains why they use the word "lesser" in LGPL. If "lesser" doesn't mean "less free" to them, you must be able to find a web page that says so.

I guess "abandon the attempt to defend the users' freedom" wasn't clear enough for you, and you think there is still some wiggle room on this. I don't even know why you think this or why you care.

You might want to read this, where RMS tells us to try to use GPL instead of LGPL to try to force more software to be released under a free license. I dare you to find any point in that where he considers anything at all about LGPL that is not related to freedom.

good start!

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe next they'll remove all the non-GPL code as well.

Now for business use

[Anonymous Coward]

Businesses really don't like the GPL. I'm not allowed to use any GPL stuff anywhere unless it absolutely, positively will never leave the intranet. However, many businesses love the LGPL. It doesn't restrict them. So, it still stays open source, and businesses will create plugins. I write open source software on my own time, so I appreciate open source, but if I was a manager, I wouldn't touch any of the GPLv2/3 programs/code ever.

Re:Now for business use

[Nursie]

There's a huge difference between GPL tools (which we at HUGE_CORP I work for use lots of) and GPL code/components.

We use binaries only, source could potentially lead to allegations of copying. And we make sure not to use any GPL code or components in our products so that we don't need to open them.

But all-out avoid GPL? No way. We use linux as a dev platform (amongst others) and we use all sorts of FOSS tools with a huge variety of licenses in addition to some commercial stuff.

You'd be a fool to make avoiding the GPL some sort of mandate.

Re:Now for business use

[Lumpy]

You mean the company you work for hates GPL. The last 5 I worked for, that includes fortune 100 companies like AT&T and Comcast, Loved the GPL and OSS. You should find companies that are nor run by undereducated management that is afraid of the GPL.

Re:Now for business use

[betterunixthanunix]

If using GPL software is so dangerous for business, why are so many companies running Linux in production environments? These are some of the most successful companies in the world, and they have been using Linux for a while -- where are the problems that you seem so sure would ensue from such a situation? If you remain close minded about the GPL, you will be missing out on a lot of high quality software...

Re:Now for business use

[Runaway1956]

"You'd be a fool to make avoiding the GPL some sort of mandate."

Well - there is no shortage of fools in the world. Off topic, but look at Houston. Little more than 1 in 10 voters bothered to vote. Apparently there were no issues that anyone cared enough to vote about, that either candidate bothered to address. Utter apathy, really. But - the winner has this supposed "mandate" to do all kinds of stuff. Among other things, she's gay, so she has a mandate to make Houston gay. Yeah, I know - I already mentioned that I'm off topic. But, fools and mandates go together.

Re:Now for business use

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny: the business I work for LOVEs GPL stuff. However they are an ISP.

Re:Now for business use

[Grishnakh]

I really hate Slashdot moderation. This isn't a troll, it's a perfectly valid opinion and one that I agree with. What's with all the MS shills having mod points here anyway?

The last two companies I worked for (one being Intel) were also very large, and had no problems with the GPL and OSS. Intel releases tons of GPL code, and contributes tons of code to the Linux kernel (in GPL of course). Intel is smart enough to know how to use GPL code to their advantage, and not be stupidly afraid of it. My last company (I'll start saying who that was after they're at least 2 employers behind me) also did lots of Linux kernel development.

My current company isn't as smart, unfortunately. They're starting to develop a Linux-based product, but they're pretty paranoid about the GPL too, and are looking for ways to be able to use GPLed code without contributing anything back (nice, huh?). They don't seem to understand that contributing changes back means not having to maintain your own fork, which is a PITA.

Re:Now for business use

[maxume]

Have they looked to see if there is comparable BSD code?

They can use that how they want without trampling the wishes of the authors.

Re:Now for business use

[Anpheus]

Because they often don't need to write kernel modules for Linux. But if they did, and it ever left their premises, they'd be obligated to release said code.

Re:Now for business use

[Anonymous Coward]

"Running" linux has little to do with the GPL, when I download and run a linux distro I never have to read the GPL or anything. What's dangerous is for companies to use GPL code, they avoid it for good reason.

Re:Now for business use

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they did. What's not to love about getting people to work for you for free? It's better than having your own third world country with an enslaved population.

Re:Now for business use

[bertok]

Because they often don't need to write kernel modules for Linux. But if they did, and it ever left their premises, they'd be obligated to release said code.

That's not the case, the GPL states that they can either release the source OR stop distributing it.

Re:Now for business use

[RMS Eats Toejam]

I really hate Slashdot moderation. This isn't a troll, it's a perfectly valid opinion and one that I agree with. What's with all the MS shills having mod points here anyway?

Slashdot moderation sucks because any stupid dipshit can get mod points by playing to the crowd. Because of this, it's usually the FOSS Trolls and Linux zealots that are given the ability to moderate. There are few if any shills on Slashdot. This site and the people on it aren't important enough to matter.

Re:Now for business use

[Grishnakh]

Given that it's an embedded product, I'd say no, there's no comparable product.

And they don't care about trampling the wishes of the authors. They want to use embedded Linux because it's available, has excellent hardware support, and has no per-unit license fees (just the fees for initial development, porting, etc. by the vendor). Being a typical greedy and shortsighted corporation, they want to take what they can, but not give anything back because somehow they think that'll help the competition. They don't understand the whole "community" thing (e.g. that other companies contributing code back or using this stuff aren't even in the same industry as them), or even the simple idea that if you make improvements and get them merged upstream, then you don't have to deal with all the trouble of maintaining a separate fork.

Re:Now for business use

[Grishnakh]

Where the hell have you been? It's usually the Windows/Microsoft zealots that get the ability to moderate. Any time someone says something critical of MS on here, no matter how true, they get moderated "Troll". There's TONS of shills on Slashdot; hell, MS probably pays people to shill on here.

The thing that really sucks is that you aren't allowed to have an opinion on a topic, and also moderate other posts. As soon as you post your own opinion, then your moderations disappear for that entire article. That's the entire reason why I never bother to moderate. As soon as I use a mod point somewhere, I find something I want to respond to, and my moderation vaporizes. So why bother? I'm not going to waste my time reason articles I have zero interest in (like most gaming articles) just to use up my mod points.

And you don't get mod points by "playing to the crowd". You get mod points simply by having an account, and having a little longevity. That's it. Any fool can get mod points.

Re:Now for business use

[Anpheus]

What a terrific business opportunity...

I can't imagine why more businesses don't develop and sell Linux kernel modules.

Re:Now for business use

[vakuona]

Using GPL software is not a problem. It's developing software that is based on GPL software where companies run into trouble at time.

Re:Now for business use

[Anonymous Coward]

Any time someone says something critical of MS on here, no matter how true, they get moderated "Troll".

Yawn. Prove it. This site is extremely well known for being fiercely anti-MS to the point of being trollish. Or maybe *YOU* are the Linux zealot making you blind to the anti-ms bias.

There's TONS of shills on Slashdot; hell, MS probably pays people to shill on here.

That tin foil hat is on too tight. MS has thousands of paid print and other media journalists licking their feet and can influence world media in 2 seconds, and you think they're going to moderate comments on a website? Haha... You kids are so cute...

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/7/22/

Now that I've done my bidding, I better go to the borg and collect my cash...

Re:Now for business use

[Anonymous Coward]

Because most business using Linux are not writing Linux OS code, you idiot! They don't run the risk of being sued due to a sloppy programmer mistake and having to release all their code to their competitors.

Which isn't at all what this article is about, anyway. Way to miss the point betterunixthanunix.

Re:Now for business use

[man_of_mr_e]

That's because Intel is in the business of selling hardware, not software (though they do sell some.. it's just an additional business model). Releasing GPL code sells more hardware, so it's in their best interest. Show me a company in which it's software is part of it's core business and almost all of them will be very GPL phobic. Perhaps one of the biggest exceptions is Google, but even they are VERY careful not to release any of their core code with GPL requirements.

Is this the closing of Mono?

[GreatBunzinni]

Does this sign the closing of the Mono project? And can anyone tell me, since this fundamentalist stance against the GPL and the alleged impending patent sword hovering over the Mono users' heads, what exactly is there to attract people to adopt it as their developing platform?

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[morgan_greywolf]

what exactly is there to attract people to adopt it as their developing platform?

Commercial-friendly licenses tend to make businesses more likely to contribute code to the open source community. See Darwin and Apache for examples.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[introspekt.i]

There are plenty of other FOSS licenses that aren't the GPL...a lot of them are, in fact, less restrictive than the GPL when it comes to the use of other licenses in the same suite. Not that I really have a lot of personal experience with it, but I do know there are a lot of businesses (and government) out there that won't even touch GPL (proper, not LGPL) software for the licensing ramifications if they were to extend it, etc.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[DMiax]

It is still LGPL, there are plenty of libraries like that including Qt and Gtk and no one bitches about them being less free. I would never use Mono (Qt is so much better in every way), but please do not spread misinformation about software licenses. This licensing choice is perfectly good for Mono as it is for other projects.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[AntiDragon]

Actually, this.

LGPL is not "closed" - you still have to release the source code if you distribute software containing LGPL components. But what version of the LGPL are we taking about here? Since it's very easy to combine or cripple the LGPL'd parts so that they either rely on propritary or patent encumbered components in a way that can't be acheived with a full GPL product. Does the LGPL v3 protect against Tivoisation in the same manner intended by the GPL3? (Yes, I could go read the license but...it's long...and I'm tired..and others already have done so!).

By the way, I'm not commenting about the suitability or preference of a particular licence - I'd just like to know what the implications are in this case.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[GreatBunzinni]

Not that I really have a lot of personal experience with it, but I do know there are a lot of businesses (and government) out there that won't even touch GPL (proper, not LGPL) software for the licensing ramifications if they were to extend it, etc.

Could you please provide an example of those lots of businesses and governments that "won't even touch the GPL" due to licensing ramifications?

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[GreatBunzinni]

My main concern isn't Mono's license by itself but the objective behind GPL purge. It is stated in the article that the reason behind it is to, and I quote:

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

So the Mono people are intentionally opening the doors to allow closed-source components to be a part, possibly even a fundamental part, of the whole Mono platform. I don't know how exactly is it possible to maintain a platform open when you, as the platform's gatekeeper, are intentionally embracing proprietary components.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

Darwin's Apple's project, and they're pretty much the only entity "contributing" to it. I don't believe there's any base of either non-commercial or commercial entities contributing to Darwin, indeed I believe the Windows kernel, which is closed source, has a larger base of contributors (because Microsoft occasionally goes out and commissions third parties to write bits and pieces, such as many of the device drivers.)

Apache has, indeed, attracted a fair amount of third party support, but it seems to be largely in a minority of non-GPL projects to do so.

The BSD operating systems have very few commercial developers involved.

On the other hand, WebKit, Mozilla/Firefox, the Linux kernel itself, GNU, GNOME, and to a lesser extent KDE, are all GPL'd or mostly GPL'd, and have substantial third party support and most of the big names associated with Apache, such as Sun and IBM, have also contributed substantially to one or more of the projects I just named.

So if the GPL is not "commercial friendly", then it would appear the point is wrong.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[GreatBunzinni]

And by "mono platform" I mean "mono development platform". They are not the same thing.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

``LGPL is not "closed" - you still have to release the source code if you distribute software containing LGPL components. ''

This may be what you were trying to say, but you only have to release the source code *of the LGPL components*, and any changes you make to them directly. Your software that uses it does not have to have its source released. That is very much the point of the LGPL as opposed to the GPL.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a Fortune 500 (top 50 actually) company and somewhere within the company certain embedded devices are produced. While there is potential for GPL stuff, it is *only* through a supplier and NOT as a primary component of our software, and usually the supplier provides a dual-license. We go through quite a great deal of scrutiny to avoid anything GPL and usually prefer Apache or BSD licensed software. ... While I am not insisting this is the norm, it seems pretty common understanding with our suppliers that this is a serious issue.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[canajin56]

Do you think everything in your Linux distribution is GPL? Because the libraries are all LGPL, that way you can write things that link them, but aren't GPL themselves! And gee, I wonder what in Linux is X11 licensed? Surely not Xfree86 I hope, that would be so fundamentalist anti-GPL it would be sickening! Here is why the GUI has to be GPL: The FSF maintains that loading a plugin is the same as statically linking it. So, you write a nifty program. You release it under GPL. But you cross license the plugin API, GPL and LGPL and MIT X11, maybe throw Mozilla in there too, I don't care. You might think you're safe, but you're wrong. It doesn't matter if you never see a copy of the GPL, never use a single character of GPL code. GNU maintains you are nevertheless bound by the GPL, if you write a plugin intended to be loaded by a GPL'd program. Sure, in this case, they didn't have to go to full-on LGPL, they could have made it GPL with plugin loading exemptions. But I'd imagine they were so threatened by GPL zealots they they ran screaming as fast as they could. After reading the GNU FAQ, I feel quite threatened by the FSF and GNU guys. I've never read an FAQ that treats the reader with such contempt and hatred...they make it clear that if you DO put that plugin loading exemption in, you're no longer welcome in the Free World, and no right thinking, freedom valuing individual will ever associate with you for the rest of your life. I can only imagine how threatening GNU and the FSF are in personal correspondence, given the seething hate in their FAQs! I don't blame anybody for abandoning the GPL after trying to deal with them. All for the high crime of wanting to allow people to make X11 licensed plugins for your program.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[jonbryce]

No it doesn't. The LGPL allows you to combine the program with non-free / non-opensource code, and that bit could be where the Tivoised component is.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[AntiDragon]

Yes, that was my intention - sorry if it wasn't clear!

My concern is less that the code base will vanish or be hidden - to do so would be a violation of the license. More so that it is rendered useless due to reliance on patented and closed or otherwise encumbered components. Something GPLv3 is supposed to prevent but my knowledge of how this extends to LGPL licensed code is lacking.

Not that I'm personally concerned - I would never write c# code unless I'm specifically targeting windows machines. It's not worth the hassle worrying about Mono and patents in such cases. Otherwise I stick with native code and libraries I know I can use on multiple platforms.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[AntiDragon]

Meh, mistakes again - I mean "target the CLR", not "write c# code" (as other languages can be used).

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[morgan_greywolf]

Mozilla Firefox is dual-licensed, not GPL. WebKit is LGPL, GNOME is mostly LGPL as well. KDE is a motley mix of licenses.

X.org, OpenSSH, OpenLDAP, going on...

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently worked for a client that wouldn't even touch LGPL just on the off chance that some lawyer might figure out a different interpretation of the license than what it currently accepted today. I can't name the client because of NDA, but suffice it to say that everyone would know the name (and it wasn't MS).

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I really have a lot of personal experience with it, but I do know there are a lot of businesses (and government) out there that won't even touch GPL (proper, not LGPL) software for the licensing ramifications if they were to extend it, etc.

Could you please provide an example of those lots of businesses and governments that "won't even touch the GPL" due to licensing ramifications?

I won't name our company, but let's put it this way:

We won't deploy our product on Linux because we've done some custom kernel modules. On Solaris we don't have to worry about whether or not that makes our code GPL or not.

And even bigger: we can get support without some zealot ranting about using a "TAINTED" kernel because we had the temerity to use a non-GPL kernel module! Oh, the HORROR!!!!

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[HiThere]

If that's your "even bigger", then I can't take your worries very seriously. I could even suggest that you might BUY some support, and not need to worry about someone berating you.

My suspicion is that your worries are either other than what you admit, or that you aren't serious. Astro-turfer and troll are two possibilities that I considered...and I haven't ruled them out, but ....

Taking you at your word, what you're saying is that your employer is both cheap and paranoid. It doesn't want to pay for value, and it is afraid that someone will say nasty things to or about it. I admit that there are such companies, but usually they are already in decline. I'd say it's time to look for another job.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[thetoadwarrior]

I don't think the issue is the licence as such but the fact it revolves around a closed source company's language and a company that does not want Linux to succeed. Had it started at lgpl then it probably wouldn't have been an issue. But it appears like they're slowly closing it up because they started on gpl and went to lgpl. What's next after that? Should we care? Maybe not but then maybe we should as MS' philosophy is inherently different from the open source philosophy.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[HiThere]

That's true, but the reason that I noticed in the article was to allow for closed components to be included. One doesn't need to close the main structure if all of the distributed components become closed. (To be fair, this wasn't indicated as the reason. I just don't trust Mono. Or Miguel. Or anything he says. I neither use nor install Mono, so if you believe that you can give moderate trust to anything I say in it's favour.)

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this sign the closing of the Mono project?

No, why would it?

And can anyone tell me, since this fundamentalist stance against the GPL

How about you tell me why having it under GPL will attract the developers being targeted here, who are obviously not the GPL fundie types. Keeping it under GPL only serves to cater to the foss devs who won't touch anything that isn't GPL'ed already, who constantly chastise both Miguel and Mono. Why bother catering to them anymore? Those who're interested can contribute to dotGNU - except noone does, because despite the 'omgomgomg not gpl' attitude, none of the people comp[laining either give two shits or even contribute to or even use mono, or monodebelop to begin with.

After that whole Gnote fiasco, and 'blah blah blah mono is evil, blah blah mono-trap (just like the java trap, right? Right?)" bollocks, this much should have been expected.

alleged impending patent sword hovering over the Mono users' heads, what exactly is there to attract people to adopt it as their developing platform?

What alleged patent sword? Haven't you heard of the (legally binding) community promise? Of course, even if there were no (legally binding) community promise, that doesn't stop anyone from developing or using Wine (which has potential infringement written all over it), does it?

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

A vague comment from an AC regarding an unnamed, and therefore non-existing, company doesn't cut it as evidence of that fictitious "oh the GPL is evil" conspiracy.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[Dzonatas]

> Does this sign the closing of the Mono project?

No. It's means that instead of once where you had to buy a special license to embed the Mono compiler, you now only need to use the LGPL rights to link to it.

If you are not interested into embedded Mono/.Net platform, then you are probably are not interested in this change.

For businesses like Second Life that use an embedded Mono system to compile their server-side scripts for their simulators, it is a big thing.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[ajs]

Does this sign the closing of the Mono project? And can anyone tell me, since this fundamentalist stance against the GPL...

The GPL isn't suitable for libraries due to its requirement that all library consumers be GPL. It's not a fundamentalist stance, and at one point, even RMS agreed with this point (hence his introduction of the LGPL). It was only with the growth of GPLed software that the FSF decided that they no longer liked that idea. As long as they were the little fish in the pond, playing nice with everyone else's licensing terms seemed like a good idea...

Now, I like the GPL. I've used it many times. But to suggest that moving from the GPL to the LGPL (essentially just dropping the "you can't use this with your code if your code isn't GPLed") would make source code more "closed" is absurd. It's, in fact, a more open and permissive license.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[NotBorg]

How is it any different then letting Doom 3 run on Linux? Would you rather the Licensing be so restrictive that Doom never happened on Linux?

Add-ins are evil but whole applications aren't? Seriously. I didn't see revolts in the streets of FLOSS Land when Doom was released for Linux but when Mono opens the door for the same possibility of running closed source programs that a Linux system already has... all hell breaks loose.

What the hell is the difference?

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

Much of governments' procurement procedures and restrictions are public information. For example, look at the GoA's Seniors and Community Supports 2009 strategic/business plan with respect to who may supply IT infrastructure and under what circumstances. Also note that public tenders and RFPs tend to avoid generating third-party liabilities (of which GPL is only a simple example in a rich IT environment).

/Not the OP but anonymous for a reason.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[Magic5Ball]

Shh! Don't discuss broader strategic business needs, objectives and strategies in front of the IT grunts. That's like talking about hygiene and intercourse with WoW players.

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[harlows_monkeys]

Does this sign the closing of the Mono project? And can anyone tell me, since this fundamentalist stance against the GPL[...]

What the heck are you talking about? First of all, the headline, summary, and cited article all make it clear this is about the license for MonoDevelop, not the license for Mono, so you are starting off massively confused.

Second, what fundamentalist stance against GPL? MonoDevelop is an IDE, with plugin support. It makes sense to avoid making it GPL, so that plug-in authors have the maximal flexibility in their choice of license. This too is clear from the summary and article. This is how other major open source IDEs are licensed. Do you think Eclipse, for example, shows that IBM has a fundamentalist stance against the GPL?

Re:Is this the closing of Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's the end of FOSS. My experience with Windows programmers is that there are two groups: One is the C programmer who tries to reinvent everything. AES256, give them a weekend and their have their own encryption method. And, because they are a C programmer, they automatically know how to program any language that uses that syntax. These are the Java programmers that complain about the requirement to use classes in java.

The second type of Windows programmer waits for Microsoft to release something they can use. These are the majority of Windows programmers. Either they're afraid to use something not Microsoft or don't understand FOSS. They lack the ability to research options because with Microsoft, they've never had to . Webserver:IIS. Database: SQL Server. Web application server: IIS. Spring.NET, nAnt, are nice, but not needed and will be over looked.

With Mono, these will be the majority of Linux programmers (if they can get past using file permissions). When Mono can't run something they need to run, Microsoft support will say to run it on Windows. It will run on Windows and the reputation of Linux, not Mono, will suffer.

So while there's not much for an existing Linux programmer or a java programmer, there's plenty for .NET programmers and those businesses mistakenly thinking that Mono will save them from buying Windows licenses.

Mono is the end of FOSS not because it's not FOSS. It's because it re-enforces the MS ways of thinking about software. It's my opinion that we're truly near the end of a beautiful time in software development.

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

[morgan_greywolf]

So you're saying you think that most new software development will be for mobile-only OSes? Mobile apps may be okay for lots and lots of things, but I don't think that mobile apps will ever completely replace the traditional desktop applications. If anything, I see home-based computing moving in the direction of more and more LAN integration and more and better multimedia capability, with the hottest toys these days being media servers, wireless networking, faster broadband connectivity and more and more personal communications, including voice, video, IM, teleconferencing, etc.

The corporate network as it stands today will remain mostly the same, but with everything converging more towards service-oriented architectures, virtualization and cloud computing with dynamic, demand sensitive services and networks.

I think it's funny

[gregarican]

Reading all of these comments and then seeing them modded as Troll or as Flamebait. When actually the comments are pretty much correct. Who really uses Mono? After all, isn't it loosely based on .NET version 1.1 still? What's the point?

For Windows-based development you can fire up Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 Express edition without paying a dime and those are based on .NET 2.0 or 3.x, correct?

Unless Mono has upped the ante and has actually moved beyond 2003-era frameworks I don't see its relevance...

Re:I think it's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up

Re:I think it's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

They are up to 3, and have a lot of 3.5 finished, but why let facts get in the way

Re:I think it's funny

[rubycodez]

you mean their experimental subproject "olive"? uh, some people might not want to run developmental crap on production systems

Re:I think it's funny

[Josh04]

Reading all of these comments and then seeing them modded as Troll or as Flamebait. When actually the comments are pretty much correct. Who really uses Linux? After all, isn't it loosely based on MINIX version 1.1 still? What's the point?

For Unix-based development you can fire up vim or emacs without paying a dime and those are based on the Hurd, correct?

Unless Linux has upped the ante and has actually moved beyond 1991-era frameworks I don't see its relevance...

Ah, I see what you're saying!

Re:I think it's funny

[miguel]

Various pieces from "olive" graduated into main Mono in the past year, including WCF, LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML and WindowsBase (they are all in Mono 2.6)

The missing pieces (Workflow Foundation and Presentation Foundation) are not part of our plan.

Re:I think it's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Great. I wish I knew what the hell you just said. Get back to me when I can run XNA apps in mono. Cheers.

Re:I think it's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck you miguel

Re:I think it's funny

[gregarican]

I just downloaded the VMWare image for Mono running on OpenSUSE and will give it a test drive come January. It has been a few years since I checked in on Mono and if they are only perhaps one .NET version behind that might be worth a look. Checking their website I see they have methods to open up Visual Studio solution files and convert them to Mono and other neat bells and whistles that I wasn't aware of awhile back...

Re:I think it's funny

[eigenstates]

I know don't feed the trolls, but I just wanted to pass along a Happy Holidays to this one. Sheesh.

Miguel, I have the choice of running VS 2008 (full version) in VMware or running Mono to do my work. The VMWare route is a pig on resources and is basically unusable for everything but the simplest of changed. I am very much enjoying using Mono. Yes, I am /actually using Mono/ where it seems most comments up to this point are not- with their referencing older builds and so on. You know I actually use that AS3 plugin from time to time as well. Mono has come a long way since I fist tried and admittedly abandoned it.

I really appreciate the work.

Re:I think it's funny

[thetoadwarrior]

I will plead ignorance but is their equivalent of version 3 stable or still experimental, in development, etc? That makes a huge difference to businesses.

Re:I think it's funny

[miguel]

Very happy to hear that!

I can only hope we will continue to improve Mono and MonoDevelop.

Re:I think it's funny

[eigenstates]

And I promise I will check my comments for typos a bit more carefully. changed=changes, fist=first.

Re:I think it's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

WPF is a huge part of .NET on the desktop. How can it not be part of your plan.

I'll stick with Java, thanks.

Re:I think it's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you don't mind my questions, and I hope you answer them eventually (though I understand it is the holidays, so take your time)

I am not particularly politicized about MS or open source. I prefer functional programming languages and like my highly customized computing environments. And am very interested in using LINQ (specifically because I have used HaskellDB, which is great but limited). What are my options on Linux? From what you said, it sounds that Mono is an option. Are there any powerful, strongly typed functional languages that target CLR? (F# is an option, I guess. Anything else?) Although I guess this is outside your expertise, have you heard anything about a CLR Haskell or Scheme implementation? Would that work with Mono? Can you explain the current scope of the Mono project to a developer who hasn't really touched MS code or documentation or news for the last 10 years?

I suppose I could just RTFGoogle, but it's easier and more informative for all if I just ask somebody who knows more than I do.

Re:I think it's funny

[oldhack]

Hey, Migugel,

I don't like Mono, and the guys here (maybe including me at times?) dump on you heap of abuse, justified or not.

But I do think it's pretty cool you still pop in here and post comments and replies on your projects.

Re:I think it's funny

[LateArthurDent]

The missing pieces (Workflow Foundation and Presentation Foundation) are not part of our plan.

Why not?

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

[AlexBirch]

To be fair, OpenOffice.org isn't GPL, yet that's the text editor / presentation software I use.
Are you going to stop that as well?
You'd be surprised at how many corporations are going with Sharepoint, it's the silent Apache HTTPD killer and yes, it uses .NET. That said, I've never heard of anyone using it with Mono.
.NET and C# are pretty amazing technologies, especially with LINQ and Lambda expresssions, couple that with IronPython and you have a cool system.

A Prelude to Charges...

[tjstork]

By removing GPL code, the Mono team has laid the groundwork for a closed source, commercial implementation. You watch. Mono is going to become a product, something that will be an instant-cripple for any Linux distribution that comes to rely on it.

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.

Re:A Prelude to Charges...

[wh1pp3t]

I don't think this would affect the major, commercially supported distros, such as RHEL -- their adoption to the latest/greatest in packages lags quite a bit (with good reason). Mono would have to become way more relevant in every aspect of the server and desktop. I just don't see that happening (and if it does, Novel and RedHat will have none of it).

Regarding the Linux users and enthusiasts, they will cut Mono off in a heartbeat. It's a very dynamic group and I suspect the developers will find a workaround or rebuild with other tools.

Re:A Prelude to Charges...

[greed]

The LGPL code that remains can't be closed. But it still isn't the blanket get-out-of-open-source-free card that a lot of people think it is.

For example, libraries based on LGPL libraries remain LGPL and therefore open source. (LGPL 2.1 #2.)

Applications must use a pluggable library system (such as shared objects with a dynamic or runtime linker), or provide re-linkable binaries, otherwise the application must be open source. (LGPL 2.1 #6. Failing to qualify for an exception means you go back to the other requirements in the license.) BTW, C++ with templates makes qualifying under this section pretty much impossible, as the templates must appear as source in the translation unit that references them. (Or your library only provides fully-instantiated templates of pre-defined types, which kind of defeats the point.)

Remember, the GNU licenses are about the end-user getting freedom to modify the code they receive, and not the developer/vendor having rights.

Re:A Prelude to Charges...

[wh1pp3t]

I don't think this would affect the major, commercially supported distros, such as RHEL -- their adoption to the latest/greatest in packages lags quite a bit (with good reason). Mono would have to become way more relevant in every aspect of the server and desktop. I just don't see that happening (and if it does, Novel and RedHat will have none of it).

Regarding the Linux users and enthusiasts, they will cut Mono off in a heartbeat. It's a very dynamic group and I suspect the developers will find a workaround or rebuild with other tools.

replying to my own crap reply.

Didn't dawn on me, the relationship between Novel and Mono project. My previous comment is null/void

Re:A Prelude to Charges...

[DMiax]

They will simply not package the closed source version, ship the last open source one and deprecate the use of Mono for the future. Remember: there is no lock-in with Free Software. It cannot happen, period.

Re:A Prelude to Charges...

[Anonymous Coward]

By removing the last of the GPL code (inherited from forked SharpDevelop) from the IDE: MonoDevelop, it is now possible for people to write commercial/non-GPL plugins for MonoDevelop, just like the article says.

This puts it on equal ground with Eclipse, except MonoDevelop is LGPL which is GPL compatible, and Eclipse has their own license which is not GPL compatible.

This has nothing to do with Mono itself, which has always been LGPL.

Re:A Prelude to Charges...

[Runaway1956]

"My previous comment is null/void"

Maybe not, though. Novell is not really representative of the entire Linux and/or FOSS community. Your first comment is right - most of the community will work around and obsolete MS' work. It won't matter much that Novell provides an island for MS to piddle around on. In fact - MS' piddling may scare off some of Novell's best developers. Only time can tell - I'm just seeing possibilities here, not predicting.

Re:A Prelude to Charges...

[eigenstates]

Why would any distro put itself in that position? And wouldn't the non-GPL nature of the project alone prevent that?

Re:A Prelude to Charges...

[aztracker1]

This is only regarding MonoDevelop, Mono itself was already LGPL. The reason for this change is to be able to include non-GPL based plugins to the toolchain. Or perhaps you could name an IDE that is as, or more functional that is GPL (not LGPL) licensed? Most IDEs are licensed in such a way to allow for plugins under other licenses.

Re:A Prelude to Charges...

[MasterOfMagic]

Plus, when you redistribute, you're free to re-license under the GPL. So if this gets someone's panties in a twist, fix a few bugs and fork under the GPL. Clearly, if you're complaining about the license, you can do a better job so this should be trivial for you.

Re:A Prelude to Charges...

[Dr_Barnowl]

They already have commercial variants, it's multi-licensed for people who don't like the existing licensing profile.

I didn't see anyone saying the same things about MySQL.. well, not until Oracle bought it.

This makes sense

[Norsefire]

The GPL is great for standalone applications but if you want to allow developers to make addons you really have to rethink it. Yes, it ensures that any addon made for the application will be free software however you have to consider the tradeoff; GPL it: everything is GLP'd, some companies/people won't develop or release addons; Other license: non-freesoftware addons may be developed, companies/people will have no reason now to release their software but it may not be open.

So it depends on what you value more; having the software but maybe not the freedom, or not having the software.

Obviously Stallman would rather the software was never created if it wasn't open, so the GPL wins for him there.

Personally I prefer the Artistic License 2.0; all the freedom and protection of the GPL without the virality.

Re:This makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

The GPL is great for standalone applications but if you want to allow developers to make addons you really have to rethink it. Yes, it ensures that any addon made for the application will be free software however you have to consider the tradeoff; GPL it: everything is GLP'd, some companies/people won't develop or release addons;

Anybody who wants to write a non-free (as in speech) add-on for free (as in speech) software has failed to divine the reasoning for selecting the GNU GPL as the license for the original piece of software.

GPL software is shared in the community under terms that ensure equality for all end-users.
If somebody doesn't want to share, nobody is forcing them to do so.
However, we don't play this "I'll share but only under my terms" game; where said terms are slanted in favor of one party over another. (Usually slanted in favor of the person who wants to "share" with us.)

Richard Stallman

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Santa, please mod this comment -1 Troll so it will say "Richard Stallman (Score:-1, Troll)" at the top.

Thank you, AC

Re:Richard Stallman

[Anonymous Coward]

You're welcome.

Re:Richard Stallman

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ

Re:Richard Stallman

[Anonymous Coward]

He DOES exist!

False dichotomy

[Nursie]

And can we lose the 10 year old whining about the GPL being "viral" now please. If you don't like the license you don't have to use the code.

Without the GPL a lot of stuff would never have been opened. It still would have been written but the community would be poorer (look at linksys firmware, for instance). Maybe you would have a few less plugins, but at the cost of allowing your code to be used by commercial interests without them playing ball and releasing source back to their users.

Re:False dichotomy

[Aladrin]

And yet, you continue to whine about it. Like it or not, it -is- viral. And these people -have- chosen not to use it, just like you suggest. And here you are whining about them actually taking the very same action you recommend.

The fact that many projects wouldn't exist without GPL has absolutely nothing to do with this project. It would exist either way.

Re:False dichotomy

[Nursie]

What? Where did you see me whine about their decision?

Go on, point it out. I'm waiting.

*cough* *strawman argument* *cough*

Re:False dichotomy

[Anonymous Coward]

Your complete original post sounded like whining to me. After all, whining is a tone and that's the tone I got from your post.

Re:False dichotomy

[RMingin]

Actually, Nursie was whining about Norsefire's whining about the GPL being viral. So the chain of whine starts with Norsefire, and you're the grand-whiner.

Just FYI.

Re:False dichotomy

[thetoadwarrior]

Unless we start getting governments to enforce some sort of standard which means customers can return software or sue companies for releasing shit then the best thing for software is for it to be open so anyone can see it and fix it.

Part of me thinks that computer languages are languages like no other and one should be able to see it and use other people's work, at the very least for inspiration. Like you can do with any other language.

Another part of me thinks that true freedom means having the choice to close your code if you want because seeing the code isn't required to use your product.

But again too often companies can effectively release beta shit and be paid hundreds per licence to use it. So what we really need, imo, is standards that stop that. You can argue that, unlike a car, you can't die from bad code but your life can effectively be ruined when your privacy is compromised.

So how about striving for openness and higher standards in quality? If we get at least one of those we should be fine.

The exception should be data. Your data should *never* be stored in a format that only one or two programs can read. It's your data and if the company goes under or just moves on to another product, you're fucked. That shouldn't be allowed.

Re:False dichotomy

[innocent_white_lamb]

It's your data and if the company goes under or just moves on to another product, you're fucked. That shouldn't be allowed.
 
I don't see how that could possibly be enforced or even made a factor in many cases.
 
My neighbour asks me to write a small application to handle data for his small business and gives me a case of beer. The small business grows bigger, I keep working on the program and get more cases of beer; not wanting the beer supply to stop I don't give him the source code for the program. At what point does this informal "beer project" become not allowed under your terms, and how could I be forced to hand anything over at all, considering that we never had an actual contract or anything more formal than an over-the-fence backyard conversation about the specifications.

Re:False dichotomy

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing is viral about the GPL. It only encourages you to contribute if you distribute the GPL code that you use. If you don't want to contribute, then go write your own from scratch and try to distribute that.

Re:False dichotomy

[wall0159]

It's not viral, it's inherited. The decendents of GPL code are GPL.

Re:False dichotomy

[bky1701]

Let me settle this, then.

The GPL isn't viral. Don't like it? Don't use it. If you do not understand this, you are either a shill or a moron. Sorry, but that is just how it is.

GPL is not "useless"

[Corson]

As a software developer, if you want to showcase your intelligence then you release the code under a license that allows people to examine the code but not repackage and sell it (e.g., the GPL). If you want to commercialize your intelligence then you release your software under a commercial license. Anything in-between is a trade-off: free marketing for the bigger fish and small bites for the rest. Managed code will always depend on the latest .Net/Mono update.

Re:GPL is not "useless"

[Nursie]

Commercial interests can do the repackaging and selling thing with GPL software. They just have to play ball by opening their stuff up too.

Re:GPL is not "useless"

[Anonymous Coward]

And in doing so allow other people with 0 investment to sell the software they worked on, cutting into their revenues. Successful commercials software under a GPL license, such as it is, makes its money off of support and gives the product away. Can you imagine Adobe open sourcing Photoshop and changing from a sales based revenue stream to a support based revenue stream?

Re:GPL is not "useless"

[Nursie]

Given the number of people on the internet that have photoshop without any sort of license at all, one has to wonder if it would make much difference...

And in doing so allow other people with 0 investment to sell the software they worked on...

Which is exactly what they would be doing with the hypothetical GPL component we're imagining them to have included. It swings both ways.

(BTW, no I don't think that GPL works everywhere, for everything. It suits some business models and not others)

Re:GPL is not "useless"

[Corson]

I agree. BTW, it's funny how the open-source evangelists evaluate posts... Anyway, the idea is that, if IT businesses are reluctant to embrace the GPL then there must be a reason. If your business model is to sell software then you probably don't want to open-source it. But again, I think the GPL has an important role to play in the IT landscape as it ensures that some code is shared at little or no cost. That is how the Homebrew started and all.

Re:GPL is not "useless"

[fyngyrz]

Well, no. Homebrew started with PD; a model where anyone can do anything with the design, or code. GPL is far more restrictive.

I still use the PD model. I'd rather my code was used by anyone who found it convenient, and I have no love for lawyers whatsoever, my entire goal in life is to avoid them completely.

Re:GPL is not "useless"

[aztracker1]

Bear in mind they are changing to LGPL, which means if they redistribute with code changes, they have to release those code changes. This changes allows for similar redistribution models to those we see with Eclipse, which many of the people bashing this happen to use. Which is quite ironic.

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

[Mad Merlin]

You'd be surprised at how many corporations are going with Sharepoint, it's the silent Apache HTTPD killer...

I hate to break it to you, but Sharepoint isn't an HTTP server.

Sorry, Miguel

[seebs]

Bill's still happily married. I really don't think this is working.

Re:Sorry, Miguel

[Michael135]

A bold move nevertheless. And I wonder like you, if there are some non-technical reasons for this.

Re:Sorry, Miguel

[rubycodez]

Miguel never sees Bill's wife being Bill's butt-lick. Hopefully this crap gets thrown out of open source OS distributions, we don't need to be trying to play catch-up every time Microsoft developers have a brain fart

Re:Sorry, Miguel

[gbarules2999]

What about Ballmer? I hear he's single.

Re:Sorry, Miguel

[seebs]

The entire POINT of C# is the same as every other API MS has ever pushed: MS's real dominance isn't operating systems, but APIs. C# exists because WINE was starting to be a credible platform on which to run Win32 apps. Mono exists to try to draw developers into using the MS API, so they can then get screwed when MS suddenly and incompatibly updates it, and be obliged to migrate to the original MS tools (which only target Windows).

I honestly can't imagine there's anything BUT non-technical reasons for Mono to exist. It appears to be a considered and focused attempt to undermine free (as in speech) development platforms. Nothing that has happened has changed my mind on this.

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

[backwardMechanic]

OpenOffice.org is your TEXT EDITOR? Oh boy.

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

[tepples]

You'd be surprised at how many corporations are going with Sharepoint, it's the silent Apache HTTPD killer...

I hate to break it to you, but Sharepoint isn't an HTTP server.

It appearsAlexBirch's point missed you: SharePoint Server replaces several uses of HTTP servers such as IIS, Lighttpd, and Apache. The idea is to switch the intranet from web apps to SharePoint and reserve the web servers for customer-facing sites.

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

[jellomizer]

Yes the world is centered around client side applications...

Mono strength is for portability across server side applications. The problem is not Mono, it is the fact the GPLv3 is too strict. It is not necessarily any point is bad but all of them together makes it too strict.

The GPL is an attempt to push an Ideal, not necessarily good policy...

I wouldn't be surprised as knowledge about open source increases that more and more pressure to not be GPL will come up.

"Free" is relative.

[RingDev]

The "free" portion of open source licenses varies. Some licences provide more freedoms to the original developer and less to down stream developers. Some provide more to down stream providers, but less to implimenters. Some provide more freedom to those that impliment, but less to the authors.

Going from GPL to LGPL doesn't mean Mono is any less "free" it just means that there has been a tiny change in who it is that experience the greatest "freedom".

Then again, this is /. the article talks about a license change for a Linux implimentation of a MS technology. To prevent myself from getting modded -1 troll for not insulting Microsoft, I'll add: "rable rable rable! M$ tuk r jorbs!"

-Rick

Re:"Free" is relative.

[MightyMartian]

Frankly I could care less. The Mono guys can do anything they like. I wouldn't touch Mono with a ten foot pole, for two reasons. First of all, I see no point to using it. Second of all, I wouldn't trust Microsoft with a nickel, let alone anything I was developing.

Re:"Free" is relative.

[aztracker1]

Hope you aren't using any kind of network storage that uses SAMBA then.

Re:"Free" is relative.

[Anonymous Coward]

How much less could you care?

Re:"Free" is relative.

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly I could care less

couldn't

Frankly, I couldn't care less.

sigh

[StripedCow]

wake me up when mono is ms-patent-free

Re:sigh

[selven]

Don't go into a deep hibernation just yet

Re:sigh

[Abcd1234]

Wake me up when you demonstrate it's not (I've issued this challenge many times, and no one's managed to achieve it).

Hint: Patents are published 18 months after filing, and a patent must be filed on an invention within a year of publication, otherwise the inventor forfeits the right to patent the invention. Furthermore, patents can only be submarined if the inventor forfeits the right to file the patent overseas, something I highly doubt MS is willing to do. As such, if parts of Mono were covered by patent, we'd almost certainly know about it by now (certainly there are enough anti-Mono trolls that *someone* should've been able to come up with such a patent by now).

So was Tiger....

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, married...

Miguel doesnt mind being road beef for when Bill is on the tour with Monsanto.

You dont understand anyways: Miguel loves him. Really, really, really loves him.

Re:So was Tiger....

[thetoadwarrior]

But Tiger cheated on his mistresses too. Does Miguel really want to be treated like a porn queen who gets no respect? It would be better to be ignored by Tiger and have nothing to do with him. Even his mistresses feel that way so Miguel should too!

Stinky Europeans

[Anonymous Coward]

Europeans stink. They stink stink stink. Stinky stinky stink. Smelly euro-trash Euros.

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

[John Hasler]

> ...it is the fact the GPLv3 is too strict.

GPLv2 still exists and is still used (the Linux kernel, for example).

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

[AlexBirch]

You'd be surprised at how many corporations are going with Sharepoint, it's the silent Apache HTTPD killer...

I hate to break it to you, but Sharepoint isn't an HTTP server.

Have you got SharePoint to work with Apache's HTTPD Server? You probably just use IIS and Windows Server 200X instead of using Linux and Apache HTTPD. Just go to Dice and look for SharePoint jobs, there are tons of them and there's no way to migrate away from it easily.

Define "use"

[tepples]

I'm not allowed to use any GPL stuff anywhere unless it absolutely, positively will never leave the intranet.

If you run a publicly accessible web site on a LAMP server, the only GPL programs involved are Linux and MySQL, and no copy of Linux or MySQL leaves your server. If you run a web site, only two kinds of programs are ever "distributed" (GPLv2) or "conveyed" (GPLv3) to the public: 1. in-page scripts written in JavaScript, ActionScript, or Java, and 2. software packages explicitly offered for download.

Re:Define "use"

[michaelhood]

I'm not allowed to use any GPL stuff anywhere unless it absolutely, positively will never leave the intranet.

If you run a publicly accessible web site on a LAMP server, the only GPL programs involved are Linux and MySQL, and no copy of Linux or MySQL leaves your server. If you run a web site, only two kinds of programs are ever "distributed" (GPLv2) or "conveyed" (GPLv3) to the public: 1. in-page scripts written in JavaScript, ActionScript, or Java, and 2. software packages explicitly offered for download.

As far as I understand, MySQL AB doesn't (or once did not) agree with your understanding.

http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/198707

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

[fyrie]

Many popular iPhone games use Mono to some degree because of the Unity 3D engine. http://unity3d.com/company/news/unity-iphone-momentum-press.html

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:Eternal game of catch-up

[Anonymous Coward]

Mono is pretty useful for mobile devices, since Microsoft hasn't exactly set the world on fire with WinMo. For desktop apps, it doesn't have a whole lot of reason to exist, no.

(cute, after that "set the world on fire" bit, my captcha is "cremated")

Re:Eternal game of catch-up

[aztracker1]

The fact that it is behind the MS implementation doesn't make it less of a platform to develop Linux apps on. If I write an app that runs under Linux with Mono today, all the MS changes in the world won't change that. As to Moonlight, I would agree there to an extent, since many doing Silverlight development give no regard to Moonlight compatability, and the streaming libraries from MS for Moonlight's use don't include the DRM necessary to work on most actual sites.

Re:Eternal game of catch-up

[miguel]

As the other poster said, the fact that we do not have 1:1 parity has never been a problem.

Some other technologies that are subsets and are wildly successful:

* Android's Java is not a 1:1 mapping to Java either, and that has not prevented it from being successful.
* iPhoneOS is not MacOS 1:1, and yet, it is incredibly successful.
* Chrome the browser, does not have every feature of Firefox, that did not stop it either.
* JBoss is a subset of the full J2EE stack, and for years it has been wildly successful.
* Linux for years was not even POSIX compliant, and yet, many of us jumped on it, and it became wildly successful.

In Mono we implement what makes sense, and what people are actually using in day to day applications, we do this using metrics that we obtain from our Mono Migration Analysis that helps us identify which APIs are used, by how many applications and we have collected this data from some 10,000 applications:

http://go-mono.com/momareports/

Call this the data-driven prioritization of development.

Mono was born as a technology to bring the best that .NET had to offer to Linux, this was initially the c# language and the core libraries. As time went by, Mono evolved in two directions:

(a) Organica growth: as the Mono community grew, we identify missing features, we envisioned better ways of doing something and created tools, APIs, languages and extensions that mattered to us. In this category you can find things like Gtk#, Taglib#, Cairo#, Cecil, Mono.Options, Mono.Security, Mono.Data, Mono.Math, Mono.Management, Mono's C# REPL, Mono's SIMD extensions, Mono's large array support. Mono's dynamic JIT extensions, Mono's static compiler and much more.

For instance, today, more than 350 applications on the AppStore and 10 of the top 100 apps in there are built using Mono.

(b) Better compatibility with .NET: this is a simpler process than coming up with our own APIs. The .NET APIs are documented, there are thousands of applications to test the implementation against, the community is fed directly from the largest middleware stack in the world, so it made sense for us to implement these pieces.

Is it correct that we do not have a full implementation of .NET, there are a few reasons for this, now with numerals:

(i) Some APIs are Windows specific, and makes no sense to bring to Linux, in particular things like System.Management which is a thin wrapper around WMI. Our advise: replace that code with Linux and MacOS specific code and use one or the other at runtime.

(ii) Some APIs are too larger for us to take with our current community. This includes things like WPF and Workflow. If someone steps up, we will embrace them, but until that happens, we are focused on improving the other areas that have more users and that we have more requests to implement. Additionally, the WPF "lite" is a killer stack (also known as Silverlight).

(iii) Focus, we do not want to spread ourselves too thin.

As for .NET 4.0: we are not too far from having the core be 4.0 compliant, it is a nice upgrade to the solid 3.5 release. For instance, our C# compiler is already a full C# 4.0 compiler, and we already provide features that Microsoft wont offer until 5.0 (embeddable, reusable compiler, see C# REPL).

Moonlight is behind Silverlight, but I am not driven by despair, I am driven by the world of possibility. If I were driven by despair, I would not have written a single line of code.

If Silverlight never succeeds, then who cares how behind Moonlight is. But if Silverlight succeeds, and Linux users want to access that content, but the feature is either broken, not implemented or missing in Moonlight, those users will be in a position to contribute the code, and everyone wins.

Re:Eternal game of catch-up

[Blakey Rat]

Better to stick with Java which gains new features, to be generous, at a glacial pace. Right?

Re:Eternal game of catch-up

[christurkel]

Those three web sites that require Silverlight must be very important to you.

Re:Eternal game of catch-up

[Anonymous Coward]

The subset examples you gave are largely those which people have reason to specifically target. Any issues with a missing mapping of functionality is easily worked around for the specific cases they are used. Mono however, is decidedly not targeted by the majority of .NET developers, and any missing functionality it displays will hinder uptake or conversions.

Re:Eternal game of catch-up

[Anonymous Coward]

(b) Better compatibility with .NET: this is a simpler process than coming up with our own APIs.

So all you want to do is copy and be MS's code monkey, shame on you.

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

[Again]

OpenOffice.org is your TEXT EDITOR? Oh boy.

Well at least he can do his own custom syntax highlighting without messing around in the "Preferences".

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Rumor is that he tried and failed.

Am I confused about the GPL?

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I understand the GPL is simply a license for those that choose to use it (in particular have and/or examine the source code of a particular product). Is there any reason why the copyright holder can't negotiate a seperate license with a private company that would not bind them to all the restrictions of the GPL?

I'm confused by the idea that a license would restrict the issuer, as I was under the impression that it was about defining terms to the issuee.

Removing the GPL code.

[miguel]

We removed the GPL code in MonoDevelop for a couple of reasons:

(a) to allow it to become a platform that third-party plugin and add-in developers can target.
(b) to allow us to consume open source code that would otherwise conflict with the GPL (MS-PL licensed code, Apache licensed code, and original BSD licensed code).

Notice that (a) is the norm for Eclipse and Visual Studio, and that the ecosystem of third party plugins relies on this, both Eclipse and Visual Studio would be severely limited if they limited the plugins to be all GPL licensed. As I explained on the blog post, there are current users that need to run their non-GPL code inside the IDE.

We want more third party developers to target MonoDevelop, and we want these third parties to consider MonoDevelop a platform that they can target without forcing a license on them. Similar to how the Linux operating system can run code licensed under any license.

The second reason is just a practical one. In the .NET open source ecosystem there are plenty of libraries and tools available under the MS-PL, Old and New BSD and Apache 2 licenses and we want to be in a position to use those libraries without rewriting it. We already do, and it has saved us a lot of time.

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[Anonymous Coward]

The holier than thou community can always fork MonoDevelop into GplDevelop and force everyone to use GPL.

While they are at it, they should fork Eclipse into GplEclipse

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Work you do is great. It upsets me that people dislike your work since it is so closely linked to Microsoft. You are a Hero.

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[pak9rabid]

Mod parent up...

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[ThatsNotPudding]

You are such a horrible person.

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[canajin56]

The Lazarus project handled (a) by saying "We view the GPL as only applying to plugins if they're installed, so you can write non-GPL plugins as long as you distribute them separately". The FSF disagrees and probably wants to burn them at the stake, but without FSF code in Lazarus, all their screams are just empty threats and calls for boycotts, like that would convince those of us already crazy enough to be using object pascal. And man, all the zealots screaming for your head, I sure hope they don't represent the GNU community as a whole. Though from reading all the contempt and vitriol in the GNU FAQ, I have a sinking suspicion that they do, unfortunately. I didn't know the GNU guys hated Apache and Mozilla and BSD so damn hard! It seems just absurd to think that the FSF really thinks that, if you write a .so against an MIT licensed API, you're still bound by the GPL, just because a GPL program loads libraries written against that API. Total madness.

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[Anonymous Coward]

We removed the GPL code in MonoDevelop for a couple of reasons:

(a) to allow it to become a platform that third-party plugin and add-in developers can target.

Bullshit. By your logic, it's impossible to load proprietary binary modules in the GPLed Linux kernel. Linus specifically said he believes that kernel modules using only a limited, "public" subset of the kernel interfaces can sometimes be non-derived works, thus allowing some binary-only drivers and other LKMs that are not licensed under the GPL.

So you contend that the GPL won't allow proprietary plugins in a comparatively tiny project like MonoDevelop (and presumably that you couldn't possibly explicitly grant permission allowing them), but anyone with an Nvidia graphics card can run the closed source drivers under Linux.

Yeah.

Dude, seriously. Just give us the real reasons and let the chips fall where they may. Don't insult us with trivially refuted explanations and expect everyone to dance away happily amidst rainbows and unicorns.

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[cheesybagel]

So you will "fix" the licensing problem by making changes so it will use a quagmire of different product licenses. That's just awesome. How is the MS-PL license any "better" than GPL, since redistribution is only permitted under the MS-PL? Oh right. Because Microsoft wrote the license.

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not agree with what was done, but it is your project, and you do what ever you want. You doing what you want with your software is what I support. Please keeping doing what you want to do, this is part of the nature of freedom of truly free and open source software.

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[aztracker1]

Actually you are mistaken about redistribution of MS-PL... MS-PL is similar to a BSD license with a nuclear (patent) deterrent clause.

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[MasterOfMagic]

Actually, they're just using the LGPL. If that bothers you, declare your copy to be GPL and follow the restrictions of the GPL, according to the LGPL:

3. You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public
License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library. To do
this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so
that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2,
instead of to this License. (If a newer version than version 2 of the
ordinary GNU General Public License has appeared, then you can specify
that version instead if you wish.) Do not make any other change in
these notices.

    Once this change is made in a given copy, it is irreversible for
that copy, so the ordinary GNU General Public License applies to all
subsequent copies and derivative works made from that copy.

    This option is useful when you wish to copy part of the code of
the Library into a program that is not a library.

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[OrangeTide]

You're thinking of Ms-RL which is much like GPL. The Ms-PL is more like BSD with a poison pill for patent litigation. (license ends if file a claim against a contributor)

In many ways I like the Ms-RL better than GPL, it's shorter and clearer. Even though I'm a total anti-MS person, they did write a more elegant license. (why can't their operating systems be so simple?)

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[Anonymous Coward]

Faggot

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[FreelanceWizard]

Linus is not a lawyer, and his statements should not be taken as legal advice.

Licensing is entirely a legal issue, not a technical one, and the whole "when does linking and in what manner cause a module to be considered a derived work" question is an unsettled legal one (i.e., it has not been tested in court with regards to the GPL). nVidia's binary driver issue hasn't yet been tested because no one who has standing has been interested in suing over it. A lack of legal action doesn't necessarily mean that no legal action is possible. At any rate, Stallman and others seem to fall on the side that any kernel module is a derived work, which is why there's Linux-libre.

"Trivially refuted," indeed.

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[drinkypoo]

The second reason is just a practical one. In the .NET open source ecosystem there are plenty of libraries and tools available under the MS-PL, Old and New BSD and Apache 2 licenses and we want to be in a position to use those libraries without rewriting it. We already do, and it has saved us a lot of time.

They're both practical reasons. I admire your honesty in general, though. The whole point of the GPL is to be benevolently viral. But hey, LGPL is a hell of a lot better than closed source. Thanks for doing anything.

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[KyleJ61782]

There is no way that a court would require a plugin that merely uses a published interface to be released as open source. Consider the following situation:

1) A GPLed project releases documentation describing functions that must be exported from a shared library in order for it to be a plugin.
2) Some other author decides to write a closed-source shared library that exports said functions.
3) In order to use the shared library, the GPLed product must initiate a shared library load and map the closed-source library into its address space.

Nowhere in the above situation does the closed-source project link to the GPLed code, except when the GPLed code specifically initiates the interaction. Just because GPLed code interacts with closed-source code doesn't mean that the closed-source code must be open sourced--especially when the dynamic linking is performed by the GPLed code.

Furthermore, consider a situation where there is a generic plugin interface that works for two different software packages: one closed-source and the other a GPLed. If a court says in the above situation that the plugin must be GPLed, what happens in this one? Does the logic extend to this situation?

In my mind, it ultimately depends upon who is initiating the linking. If a developer links with GPLed code (dynamically or statically), the code that developer writes must be open sourced. But any code that a GPLed project links to cannot force code that it links to to become open sourced, otherwise entire software packages could be forced to become open sourced when they did nothing except write some software that a GPL software developer wanted to use.

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[Anonymous Coward]

"to allow us to consume open source code"

You really should chose your words a little more carefully, given your position...

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[QuantumG]

go fuck yourself miguel.

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[Anonymous Coward]

Freeject tears nourish me!

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mate you are a M$ bitch...who has no morals...you sold yr soul to the devil. By your actions you are putting a lot of open source software & ideals at risk. You are exposing a lot of peoples hard work to corporate greed.

Live with it.

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[miguel]

Perhaps you need to read the GPL FAQ:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins

Re:Removing the GPL code.

[chrb]

The GPL covers distribution. A court would not order source code to be opened - it would order distribution of the derivative work to cease. In your example, infringement would occur when somebody took the closed source plugin and GPL licensed code and distributed them together, thus forming a derivative work. A user combining the two manually with no distribution would not violate the GPL.

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

[krelian]

You'd be surprised at how many corporations are going with Sharepoint, it's the silent Apache HTTPD killer

How does sharepoint compete with a web server? Isn't IIS the Microsoft competition to Apache?

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

[tokul]

That said, I've never heard of anyone using it with Mono.

Beer is very good and healthy drink. I've never heard of anyone drinking it from wine glasses.

Other licenses

[Idiot with a gun]

Okay, so I know there are other open source licenses. And some of them are quite good. But that's not the point. The point is that they've suddenly declared an ideological issue with the GPL, and thrown away (probably) good code.

This is the sort of in fighting that hurts open source a lot. Although admittedly, I do not believe that MonoDevelop is a good program. It hardly provides anything beyond a context aware editor. The Mono projects I looked at (Gnome Do and its plugins specifically) had long since abandoned MonoDevelop for their project management, and merely used it as an editor (if even). I personally had nothing but problems with its project files being constantly broken. We will see how this will go over, but overall I think this will hurt the growth of the MonoDevelop project.

Re:Other licenses

[aztracker1]

It's more likely they changed their licenses on code they already had from GPL to LGPL, and/or got releases for those parties involved.

MonoDevelop?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I've got to wonder if these developers' time would be better spent getting Visual Studio to work under Wine. Since they've pulled all the GPL code out of MonoDevelop, it's obvious they're pragmatic more than anything else.

Re:MonoDevelop?

[aztracker1]

I'd honestly like it a lot if they could get the full MS .Net runtime as it stands running under WINE.

Whining little babies.

[hackus]

You know I get sort of sick of hearing about how the GPL should be more business friendly.

The internet was basically built on the GPL, and most of the code that makes it go was built using the GPL.

Don't like what the GPL has done or has to offer?

Why don't you try and imagine a internet only built for the highest paid players for a moment?

Yeah I sort of though so, so stop your whining corporate America and just be HAPPY most of us GPL authors don't organize and actually make you play by your own rules.

For one thing, making you pay for all of our code you are secretly using for free. Slightly hypocritical, yeah, but that is how business is. It is only business if you can rip someone off in a "unresticted" manner.

That is completely OK.

I for one have had enough of the whining about the GPL and how restrictive it is.

It seems to me, its only restrictions is you can't rip people off.

-Hack

Re:Whining little babies.

[canajin56]

Mr. Hack, you better stop using Linux then. It contains non-GPL code. It contains plenty of stuff that LGPL, or X11 licensed, two things that, judging by your fevered screams of injustice, you think are absolute unmitigated evil. Nowhere did they WHINE about how restrictive it is. GNU or the FSF or whoever told them, look, even though your plugin API isn't GPL, anybody who uses it is bound by the GPL (wut) so they "abandoned" the GPL. People like you want to force everybody to use the GPL, or ELSE. Guess what, freedom isn't freedom without the right to say "no." They said no, we value freedom, so we want to allow our users to write Mozilla licensed plugins, if they like that license better. HOW EVIL OF THEM.

Re:Whining little babies.

[Anonymous Coward]

The GPL was first written in 1989. The precursor to GPL was first used between 1985 and 1987 for GNU Emacs, Debugger, and Compiler Collection. ARPANET predates that by more than a decade. Perhaps the same movement and/or people were involved, but the Internet was not built on the GPL.

Re:Whining little babies.

[shutdown -p now]

The internet was basically built on the GPL, and most of the code that makes it go was built using the GPL.

It is? You mean BIND? er... sendmail? Apache? Solaris? BSDs?

Maybe PHP then? Perl? Java?

Hmm...

stop your whining corporate America and just be HAPPY most of us GPL authors don't organize and actually make you play by your own rules.

If "GPL authors" were to do so, then they would stop to be "GPL authors", wouldn't they?

Or do you mean enforcing the license? If so, then FSF does that already (and a good thing they do, too).

Re:Whining little babies.

[rhavenn]

Sorry, if you want to be picky about it then I would say the internet was built on a combination of the BSD, MIT and Apache licenses. The GPL is just the cream that floats to the top.

Re:Whining little babies.

[poet]

Actually you are wrong.

The foundation of the populist Internet is:

NCSA/Apache.
Perl
Sendmail

Which has morphed into:

Apache
PHP
Java
Perl
Python
Postfix

None of which are PHP.

The closest you can get in your argument is that GCC is GPL but even that falls down because the fact that GCC is GPL is irrelevant. It is glibc that matters and it is LGPL.

The Internet was built on a foundation of interoperability. Which means open and closed source.

Re:Whining little babies.

[stickystyle]

The internet was basically built on the GPL, and most of the code that makes it go was built using the GPL.

eh?

• Apache; Apache license
• BIND; BSD license
• ISC dhcpd; ISC license
• sendmail; sendmail open source license
• TCP/IP; not sure, but definitly not GPL

Re:Whining little babies.

[Anonymous Coward]

FOSS =/= GPL

Many services running on the internet are FOSS, but not GPL. The Internet was built on research and development that wasn't all that open to start out. It now runs on mostly open protocols and services. If you really believe the Internet was built on GPL, you should really look at the licenses for a lot of the software running it, which are a lot newer than the concepts that went into building the Internet.

As open as the GPL is, it is highly restrictive, and is very unfriendly to business.

Re:Whining little babies.

[cheesybagel]

Actually Java is GPLed now. Perl is multi-licensed one of the licenses being the GPL.

Re:Whining little babies.

[dghcasp]

The internet was basically built on the GPL, and most of the code that makes it go was built using the GPL

You mean built on things like TCP/IP (BSD 4-clause) and Unix (ATT License) that enabled communication between networks?

Or like sendmail (BSD Licensed) that facilitated adoption of user@example.com email addresses, instead of the dominant mixed!bang!and!right%associative!email addresses and the X.400 C=US;A=IBMX400;P=EMAIL;G=firstname;S=lastname;O=engineering;OU=email;OU=internet-connectivity style of addresses?

Or like Usenet (various parts under various BSD licenses) that facilitated the exchange of information, software, and porn before the web even existed? The one that Linus posted his early Linux sources to?

Or like FTP (BSD license, and/or ATT License) that allowed archiving and known-distribution-points of software way before google made it easy to find things?

Or like web browsers (all derived, more or less from NCSA Mosaic) which was never open-source, but required paying license fees?

Or like web servers, like Apache, which had (has) a license that isn't GPL compatable?

Can you even name any important GPL software (other than emacs) that is in wide use, is important, and is non-derivitive of something already existing under a BSD or proprietatry license?

gcc: derivitive. Every company around provided c compilers.

linux: derivitive. Ever hear of Unix?

Re:Whining little babies.

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, I know you meant "none of which are GPL". It's still funny to read it as PHP is not PHP... which it probably isn't. It's mostly C, right? It's still funny.

Re:Whining little babies.

[Anonymous Coward]

You and Stallmanretard can sit a cry all you want - that doesn't change the fact that open source (let alone "Free Software" holy-be-thou-nameth) is a miserable failure on the desktop.

Re:Whining little babies.

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that most of the major components of the internet are not GPL, right? The primary DNS implementation, BIND, uses the BSD license, as does DHCP. Apache uses it's own license. Perl is dual-licensed as GPL and Artistic License. Python uses it's own license. PHP uses it's own license. Java is GPL now, but before 2006, it wasn't.

So please, enlighten me on how "The internet was basically built on the GPL, and most of the code that makes it go was built using the GPL." Unless you mean that most of it was compiled using GCC.

The GPL has it's place, to be sure. It is a perfectly fine license for software that should be distributed for free. For a business, using a license where someone can take your code and push you out of the market would be a foolhardy mistake. Coding for "the greater good" is a noble endeavor, but it doesn't pay the bills.

Re:Whining little babies.

[shutdown -p now]

GP's claim was that "The internet was basically built on the GPL". Perl didn't become GPL until version 3.0 in 1989. Java didn't become GPL until, what, 2006? The Internet was built long before that time.

Re:Whining little babies.

[grotgrot]

The internet was basically built on the GPL, and most of the code that makes it go was built using the GPL.

Exactly which planet are you referring to, because it isn't this one. GPL v1 is from 1989. Depending on exactly what you want to count as "The Internet" you can put the start date as early as 1969 or as late as 1983. Commercialization and ISPs arrived in 1988 in the US. Cisco provided many of the routers used (started 1984). BSD was the main OS used for TCP/IP development and research. BBN had the "reference implementation". Every single one of these things predates the GPL. The BSD TCP/IP stack was ported to many other platforms, including Windows. One thing is categorically certain - the Internet was not built on the GPL. If anything it was built on BSD licensed software.

For one thing, making you pay for all of our code you are secretly using for free.

The GPL is not and has never been about price. It is about freedom to share, modify and use. You can charge whatever you want. You can even charge people a small reasonable fee to get the source code. It also depends on copyright law. Someone "secretly using" anyone's code without permission is violating copyright.

I for one have had enough of the whining about the GPL and how restrictive it is.

The GPL is restrictive because you cannot change the terms under which the code can be redistributed. It also applies to the whole program. For example if you add one line of GPL code to a 20 million line program then the whole program has to become GPL compatible. Note I use the GPL for most of my stuff and consider that the cost if you want to use my code. But it certainly is more restrictive. There is the LGPL which mitigates this but its use is discouraged.

It seems to me, its only restrictions is you can't rip people off.

"Ripping people off" is usually a financial thing. Google have built a multi-billion dollar empire using lots of other people's GPL code (eg Linux kernel) and have not paid them. The GPL allows you to use GPL code within a company and providing you do not distribute outside of the company you can use code as you see fit, so the original author gets "ripped off".

Your view of the GPL is just plain wrong. It is about freedom and the restrictions are largely that you have to provide the same freedoms on the code you receive to others if you pass the code or derivatives on to others.

Re:Whining little babies.

[cheesybagel]

The Internet wasn't built on GPL, but the Internet as we know it today was. Corporations like Google wouldn't exist if it wasn't for GPLed software.

Re:Whining little babies.

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, GNU Emacs itself isn't the original. That ran under ITS, where no formal licensing existed. A port was popular on Multics as well, where it was proprietarily licensed, just like the OS itself. Modern GNU Emacs mostly reflects the behaviour of Lisp Machines, which were also proprietary.

However, without the GPL, the internet would not be as open today as it is, because in many cases these replacement products have been so superior as to make people switch to them. Linux has replaced many, many forms of commercial Unix in many, many roles, and so it's not unreasonable to say that while the Internet may not have been built on GPL software, it's very dependent on it today.

Re:Whining little babies.

[shutdown -p now]

What GPL'd software did Google use to build itself, apart from Linux? And if Linux wasn't there, explain how would they be any worse off with e.g. FreeBSD.

Re:Whining little babies.

[aztracker1]

How do you consider the internet being built on GPL? Apache isn't GPL licensed, neither is/was FreeBSD. IIRC the vast majority of internet servers up until the later 90's was FreeBSD with Apache.

Re:Whining little babies.

[MasterOfMagic]

I love you.

Re:Whining little babies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's whining? What are you talking about? Not the article. How is this rant even modded up?

Re:Whining little babies.

[onefriedrice]

Can you even name any important GPL software (other than emacs)

As an aside, Vim beats emacs on the license front anyway. In my book, charityware is considerably more endearing and noble than an All-Your-Source-Are-Belong-To-Us license.

Re:Whining little babies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Emacs is derivative of other text editors.

Re:Whining little babies.

[Alcemenes]

I would expect the pedantic police will be out in force to correct your usage of the word "derivitive" but otherwise your point is well made. Personnally, I don't think the problem with the GPL is the license itself. I use it occassionally even though I prefer the less complicated BSD-style licenses. My problem are the legions of Stalmanistas who attack anyone who criticizes the GPL. These same people like to point out how using software licensed any other way makes you a slave to the developer yet they drive cars made by someone else, wear clothes produced by someone else, and often eat food that is prepared by someone else. Using their arguments they are just as much of a slave to the manufacturing and service industries as computer users are to software companies. The fact of the matter is, we are all a "slave" to something. We all enjoy having our choice but some seem to forget one very important choice; if you don't like something, then don't use it. You have that choice too. And please don't argue with me because I didn't make the same choice as you. I realize that is part of human nature, but there are bigger and more important things in life.

Re:Whining little babies.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wasting your time, you can't change religious beliefs with facts.

Re:Whining little babies.

[Anonymous Coward]

more like a floater you find in a public toilet.

Re:Whining little babies.

[Anonymous Coward]

can you name anything under the BSD licence that is not derivative? TCP/IP? derivative of previous communications standards... sendmail? derivative of previous mail agents.
usenet? is usenet BSD? what? something is wrong here...

Don't claim that nothing original comes under the GPL. GPL Software is as original as all software; i.e. borrows the best and improves the rest.

Please don't fan the flames, both licences have their uses.

Re:Whining little babies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Awww. The little boy thinks hes all grown up now. You are too cute, kid.

Whose a good boy? Whose a good boy? You are !

Here's a cookie !

Re:Whining little babies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't fan the flames, both licences have their uses.

Perfectly correct. GPL is for people who think too highly of their code, whereas BSD is for people who just want to spread their code and hopefully create a better world.

Re:Whining little babies.

[hackus]

First of all, the internet I am talking about is the one corporate people are complaining about.

I would remind everyone here, that the corporate internet that is in use today, didn't actually become useful till around 1996. The Internet I would argue didn't actually come into existence, and was still mainly "DarpaNET" until LINUX came onto the scene.

I think the reason is because of Linux OS Kernel.

LINUX is a OS kernel, it is not all of the driver packages that come with it, many of which as pointed out here are not GPL'ed.

Lastly, lots of applications have been pointed out here that are not GPL which form the plumbing of the corporate internet in which I speak of, tis true.

However, I would like to make a counter point: corporate America makes all of those "different" licenses "go" through the use of the LINUX OS kernel.
(Which, congratulations RedHat on another outstanding year, may it continue!)

I would also like all of you to think about WHY a GPL'ed kernel excelled, and positively beat the pants off of BSD using a supposedly "free-er" license with fewer "restrictions". Not just from a technology perspective, but through also the understanding of how to make money building software.

I would also like to ask everyone to think about why companies continue to steal GPL code, when BSD style licensed alternatives clearly exist.

(Most recent Microsoft cases and "gadget" makers etc which I am sure all of you are aware of as slashdot readers in the recent weeks postings.)

-Hack

Re:Whining little babies.

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet was basically built on the GPL, and most of the code that makes it go was built using the GPL.

Ah, okay-- so you really are saying that "a lot of Linux servers were connected to the Internet" means the same thing as "the internet was basically built on the GPL."

Great, glad we sorted that out.

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

[AlexBirch]

That said, I've never heard of anyone using it with Mono.

Beer is very good and healthy drink. I've never heard of anyone drinking it from wine glasses.

You should come by my place when I need to wash the dishes, I have even been known to drink beer from a bowl ;-)

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

[selven]

Yeah, that's a pretty decent text editor. I prefer MS Paint.

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

[srh2o]

I keep hearing these kind of arguments but reality shows us that contrary to these claims that use of GPL code is growing. The fact is that companies are used to licensing code and complying with the GPL is trivial compared with many of the other licensing steps that the average company has to comply with.

no more GPL for MS shills

[shareme]

Now we know the real reason why MDI agents were attempting to get Gnome to vote to cede from GNU/FSF..

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

[Anonymous Coward]

That's almost like using emacs.

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

[shutdown -p now]

It's not a rumor.

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

[jonbryce]

Sharepoint is an application that runs on IIS. IIS is what is replacing Apache here. Sharepoint replaces some of the content management systems you might run on Apache, whatever they might be.

They got their priorities mixed

[CxDoo]

If mono develops last thing to do is trifle with whether it was GPLd or not.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be surprised as Microsoft's investment in astroturfing increases that more and more pressure to not be GPL will come up.

Everybody knows De Icaza is a MS shill.

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

[ircmaxell]

I don't buy that. One of the biggest gripes that I have with the GPL (and I have released a fair amount of code under it) is that it promotes compliance through ignorance. Let me explain:

So long as whatever you do is released GPL, you're fine (well, under 99% of the cases anyway). If you want to release under any other license, determining if it's allowable is a nightmare. Try to interface a non-gpl plugin with an application. There's no "easy" answer as to if you can do that. Every lawyer will say something different. There's no legal precedent with regards to how non-gpl code can interact with gpl code. So the "easy" way to comply is to just license your code GPL... Sure, there are black and white compliance cases, but the vast majority that I've looked at are well in the gray area. Can you dynamically link a non-GPL lib into a GPL program? Can you dynamically link a GPL lib into a non-GPL program? What about statically? More importantly, WHY? Now, explain that to a judge who has no technical background.

Again, I'm not arguing with the ideals of the GPL, I'm arguing the ambiguity when it comes to interfacing with non-GPL code (At least from discussions and conversations I've had with lawyers and other prominent developers)...

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

[lgarner]

No one has said that SharePoint is a web server. The question is this: Once you've decided to replace your existing web app with SharePoint, will you continue to use Apache as the underlying HTTP server?

No? Then that's one Apache server "killed". Not that I care, it's all about using the best tool for the job. And it probably won't have a significant impact on the overall use of Apache vs. IIS. But that's the point that was being made.

AGREED !!

[Anonymous Coward]

What's a debuffer?I gotz ta noze !!

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

[gbjbaanb]

Yes, I am surprised at how many corporations are going with Sharepoint, yet its such a pile of w*** almost *everyone* at our corp thinks its pants (there are a few corporate yes-men lackeys who 'think' its good). Nobody can find anything on it, even adding search simply means we get thousands of hits for simple terms.

I can't understand why its spreading like an unfortunate rash at a sex party. Maybe the bosses will realise how bad it is and can it after it stops being used for a few months, but its always hanging in there, someone will post a document to it and suddenly its back to being a essential tool in everyday use.

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

[SnarfQuest]

How do you know he isn't working for them already? Maybe this event is just the first step towards using the Microsoft license. It would make sense, because I'm sure Microsoft would like to get a working version of .NET to compete with everyone else.

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

[manifoldronin]

It appearsAlexBirch's point missed you: SharePoint Server replaces several uses of HTTP servers such as IIS, Lighttpd, and Apache. The idea is to switch the intranet from web apps to SharePoint and reserve the web servers for customer-facing sites.

So does wiki, but then I don't see anybody claim wiki being "the silent Apache HTTPD killer."

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

[tepples]

Sharepoint is an application that runs on IIS. IIS is what is replacing Apache here.

I stand corrected.

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

[xtracto]

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.

So, at last Novel achieved the real objective of .NET? - to be a complete replacement of the Java technology! - even Microsoft could not do that! bah!

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

[jimicus]

Have you got SharePoint to work with Apache's HTTPD Server? You probably just use IIS and Windows Server 200X instead of using Linux and Apache HTTPD. Just go to Dice and look for SharePoint jobs, there are tons of them and there's no way to migrate away from it easily.

There's no easy way to migrate away from most database-driven web applications.

The big difference about Sharepoint - and to be fair it's an inspirational move on Microsoft's part - is the sheer depth to which sharepoint winds up integrated in a company - not just as an application platform but as a document management system. Not only do you need Microsoft's product to read any documents stored on Sharepoint (pushing aside OO.o's ability to open Office documents, if you want near-100% compatibility you have little choice), you need their product to even bring up an interface to the documents.

Remember the old internal memos that talked about "de-commiditising protocols"? That's basically what they've done - they've de-commoditised SMB file shares by obsoleting them in many companies.

Hey Miguel

[gr8_phk]

Fuck you.

No, just... no.

[HalAtWork]

The last thing we need is a new "platform", and targeting one platform exclusively is a bad idea. You also don't need to use MonoDevelop to choose your own license. This seems both superfluous and like a bad idea.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? SharePoint _is_ a web app. SharePoint / SharePoint Server run within IIS.

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

[aztracker1]

*sigh* they moved to LGPL, which means you can distribute it with a better compatibility with other non-GPL plugins (those Apache, MPL, BSD or other licenses). If you modify the source, it still falls under GPL rules, it merely allows for bundled distribution with non-GPL code. It's all open-source and the main package is simply LGPL, or are you saying you don't use/reference any LGPL libraries in your code. Also, I'd presume that you don't use any Gnome or GTK libraries either.

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

[Radhruin]

And get rid of Do? I don't think so. You can pry Do and docky from my cold, dead hands!

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

[OrangeTide]

If only OpenOffice was as good at editing TEXT as vim or emacs.

Q: My Python program won't run. I typed in my program in OpenOffice and renamed it foo.py...

If this is a problem for you, read the LGPL

[Anonymous Coward]

Quote the LGPL:

3. You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public
License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library. To do
this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so
that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2,
instead of to this License. (If a newer version than version 2 of the
ordinary GNU General Public License has appeared, then you can specify
that version instead if you wish.) Do not make any other change in
these notices.

    Once this change is made in a given copy, it is irreversible for
that copy, so the ordinary GNU General Public License applies to all
subsequent copies and derivative works made from that copy.

    This option is useful when you wish to copy part of the code of
the Library into a program that is not a library.

So here's your solution if this bothers you - fork Mono and apply the GPL or shut the fuck up about the license.

I just love it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I just love watching all you open-source zealots attack each other. Miguel de Icaza has forgotten more about software than most of you will ever learn. But you feel justified in attacking the work he is doing, all because it has the stench of the hated Microsoft about it. And all without any regard to the real value of de Icaza's work.

And Microsoft -- Microsoft that you just love to hate, you little fan boy -- has also done far more good than any of you will ever do, for software engineering and for real people, not just zealots.

So go on. Froth at the mouth. Attack each other. I'm a Microsoft employee, have been for years, and I just fucking LOVE it.

Re:I just love it.

[mevets]

Totally right about MicroSoft.

Without the Redmond Retard Factory pumping away at full steam, there would be very little software development work left. Thanks to their prodigious output, the gravy train should keep chugging another 20 years. More if .NET ever takes off.

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

[KiloByte]

And get rid of Do?

If you want program X, install it. No one says you should be unable to. Any package manager used today will automatically pull all the dependencies -- Mono in this case.

What I'm opposed to, is having this especially wasteful framework in the default install.

And Mono is in no way different from Wine. Heck, it is _less_ integrated -- with binfmt_misc you can have win32 .exes executed transparently, not so much with Mono -- if you look into /usr/bin/, you'll see wrappers that execute Mono on the program in question -- with an .exe extension!

Mono is nothing more than a .NET _emulator_ -- and an incomplete one, too.

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

[dup_account]

Nice FUD. What is allowable/not-allowable has all been hashed out. Just do a google (interesting, it things google is miss-spelled) search.

The only people who are still wondering are those who either want to FUD, or those who think they can get around GPL, and steal the code, but just doing X,Y, and Z.

It is so sad...

[dup_account]

It's sad that the headline here is about removing GPL code. Got a grudge against it?

Re:It is so sad...

[onefriedrice]

It's sad that the headline here is about removing GPL code. Got a grudge against it?

Why is it sad? The code isn't closing, it's just now licensed under different (arguably freer) licenses. Unless you're RMS or one of his disciples who believes that all code must be GPL or it's not truly free, I don't see why this should make anyone sad. Free code is free code, and contrary to somewhat popular belief, the GPL does not make free code more free than it is.

Secondly, there are several reasons why a project might want to migrate away from GPL code, and none of those reasons have to have anything to do with having a grudge against the GPL. From a practical standpoint, avoiding the GPL also avoids many headaches related to source code and license mixing; this is especially important for a product which implements plug-ins since the legality of plugging some differently-licensed extensions into a GPL product is still uncertain. The GPL itself causes incompatibilities with certain licenses, so an easy way to avoid those types of problems is to avoid the GPL entirely.

Re:It is so sad...

[jonaskoelker]

Why is it sad? The code isn't closing, it's just now licensed under different (arguably freer) licenses. Unless you're RMS or one of his disciples who believes that all code must be GPL or it's not truly free

It's also an arguably less free license. And rational people who don't take everything RMS says as dogma without questioning it** might find GPL to be the "most free"* license.

* There is no "most free". The phrase "License X is the most free" means "License X provides and/or protects the freedoms I like". Personal preference.

Some people want the software they use to be free and don't care much about redistributing (changed versions of) that software with no strings attached. Other people care more about being free to redistribute (changed) software and not so much about the freedom(s) of their users.

Which license you find most free might tell you which one you care most about (or the other way around).

** I want to see Free Software and the GNU project succeed. But I think about RMS; for someone who spends a lot of time talking about how free software is a social good, he talks surprisingly little about how the licensing requirements influence how much (useful) software there is to use. [Economists probably like to say that the allocation mechanism (free markets vs. lotteries vs. first-come-first-serve) influence how much stuff there is to allocate. A similar thing goes on for software].

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

[bcrowell]

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.

Hmm...I tried to verify the statement about the 189 MB and failed, but maybe I'm just using the wrong method. I did a free -m, loaded tomboy, and then did another free -m. The result was only a 10 MB change in the amount of free memory.

It's true that tomboy is slow-loading on my (relatively fast) hardware. It's also true that it uses quite a bit of disk space. I did apt-get remove tomboy f-spot libmono* && apt-get autoremove && apt-get autoclean, and that freed up 64 Mb of disk space. If you're looking at, e.g., how much you can fit on a CD-based linux distro, 64 Mb is a heck of a lot to dedicate to something that's only needed for the sake of one applet.

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

[Radhruin]

Actually, Mono is completely different from Wine, and not even Wine is an emulator. It's a native implementation of the CLR and other .NET tools that run on Linux/BSD/etc. If you want to compare it to something, compare it to the JDK.

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

[Teancum]

The only real problem with re-licensing is if you are playing fast and loose with 3rd party components that are used in the creation of the said application. For that there isn't an easy solution, as any 3rd party components or libraries that use the GPL (not the LGPL) pretty much "force" the entire application to become GPL and also in turn force legally the exclusion of all other components of other licenses. That is a significant problem.

The situation here with MonoDevelop is precisely the sort of situation with incompatable 3rd party plug-in licenses, where some of the libraries "automatically" included in a base-level application (aka "Hello World") were also GPL'd libraries that included this viral license issue. Essentially, the only license you could use for any application created on MonoDevelop was the GPL. With the LGPL as the gold standard now, what this implies is that developers who use the base-line MonoDevelop environment can now deploy application under any license that they choose, including a completely custom license that they have drafted on their own (with hopefully the input from an intelligent lawyer familiar with writing such a license).

The lack of legal precedence? Actually, there is some legal precedence with GPL'd code in the judicial system, and other similar licensing disputes with 3rd party software that depending on "no legal precedent" as an excuse doesn't hold water. The GPL is also pretty clear in terms of the legal requirements, unlike most licenses like the Microsoft developer's EULA for their software development tools. At least the GPL was designed to be understood by mere mortals.

Can you link a Microsoft or a proprietary IBM software library into your GPL'd application? Perhaps, but it isn't the technologically ignorant judge you have to worry about here. It is the lawyers for Microsoft or IBM that you would have to worry about instead, and wondering if the application you have written using that library might be the target of attack. Let's say you create this uber cool video game that brings in millions of dollars to you and your buddies, but through the kindness of your heart you have made this awesome game with a GPL'd license for distribution (yes, you can still sell GPL'd software for money). It turns out that the Microsoft library that somebody on you team decided to include has a "no-free software" exclusion term, and Microsoft in turn decides to get a legal injunction to shut down distribution of this software because of the distribution of their library, a crucial software component of this game, is included. You as the developer would be powerless to stop Microsoft, especially as you would lack the money to fight these lawyers on their "home turf". IBM would be just as bad or even worse, as there is a reason why the IBM intellectual property team has been called "The Nazgul".

Linking GPL'd software to a non-GPL'd application? That depends on your personal ethics and how far the group of usually volunteers are willing to take to protecting their GPL'd code. I'm glad that now MonoDevelop gives you the moral comfort that you don't have to make the decision to tell other software developers to "take a hike" and ignore licensing issues like this.

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

[Magic5Ball]

SharePoint and "wiki" are different scopes of things.

Wikis are a class of content management system, some of which (like MediaWiki) can run on Apache httpd, others of which do not. SharePoint is an implementation of a CMS can be configured to provide the common set of wiki functions, and thus could replace a wiki in $CMS running on $brand httpd.

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

[steveha]

Alas, Mono is still a part of the default Gnome distribution, just so they can have a note taking applet

Oh, "just" so they can have a single applet? It couldn't possibly be because they think it is a generally useful way to develop applications, such as F-Stop and Banshee?

Mono may or may not be a good idea, but you are framing your argument in an intellectually dishonest way here. That note-taking applet ("Tomboy") may be the only thing in standard GNOME that needs Mono right now, but I'm pretty sure that there will be others.

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

See? Then it won't just be Tomboy, there will be other things using Mono.

I haven't tried C#, but a lot of people seem to like it. If having C# means I get more free software to play with, I'm in favor of that.

The major argument I have seen against Mono is "Microsoft is just waiting and they will assert patent claims!!" In that case, the only thing that they can do is force people to stop using C# and Mono. In which case, all the Mono apps will be pulled or re-written. And at that point, you would have what you seem to want: no more Mono in GNOME.

That is the worst-case scenario. And I don't see it as being bad enough to try to keep people from using Mono. If people want to use Mono to write free software, that's fine with me.

I'm curious: now that Java is becoming fully free, would you support re-writing Tomboy and F-Stop and the others in Java? That way, instead of being bloated and slow C# applications, they could be bloated and slow Java applications. Would you be happier?

In my day job, I write wicked fast C code (small memory footprint, too). When I write software on my own for fun, it tends to be Python, which is even slower than C#. Do you have a problem with Python too?

steveha

Great!

[Improv]

I would love to see Miguel and Mono taken as distant from the GNU projects as possible. Next step is for us to contain and eventually cure instances of Mono in the wild.

Re:Great!

[fat_mike]

I think you meant your last sentence to say "I'm taking MY ball and going home."

Pecunia non olet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you going to reject Windows because M$ made it?

If not, why not use Windows and be completely happy?

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

[Magic5Ball]

My most emergent gripe with GPL is that it seems like a non-starter for modern public dataflow implementations. To what extent is an interactive public Internet applet an API, a system library, an interactive application, or other? To what extent would the generated code which runs on the client app be characterised as source code, object code or program output?

Both GPL2 and GPL3 reference to program linking in terms of the classic von Neumann architecture (GPL3 seems to go out of its way to refer to code which runs on a single machine), with little reference to where computing was headed, and where it is today. If I release an app which depends on a combination of Internet applets, generated code, non-compiled micro-format libraries, executable data, and some mechanism to choose from providers of such potentially free or non-free options at run-time, I would anticipate some difficulty in determining how such a thing would fit into the elaborate universe defined by GPL, whereas it would not seem exceptional BSD/MIT licenses.

Since when Troll?

[gbutler69]

Where is this a daily occurrence? Who is being dragged into court (without first being provided with the option to follow the license)?

Re:Since when Troll?

[AlexLibman]

An obedient slave knows not of the whip...

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

[b4dc0d3r]

Sharepoint is a webserver and portal, so you don't have to write code (unless you want to, to get around some retarded limitation inherent in Sharepoint, which you will have to do at some point anyway).

You can set up a portal, link with AD credentials, include plugin "web parts" to do specific functionality, all kinds of stuff without having the first clue what a web server is.

That's why it's Apache killer. It also kills the servers, the users, the users' files, the admin's overall quality of life, and darkens the sky for blocks around. But those are clearly listed as features.

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...

Here we go again

[SpoodyGoon]

Oh no Microsoft is out to get us all... blah blah bla anyone who looks at Microsoft or .NET is evil blah blah blah... these are the people who are the Rush Limbaugh of the software world. Next thing you know we'll be hearing about Linux death squads. Mono is here and it is not going to go away no matter how hard you complain, I can prove my point by showing that Ubuntu while not my personal favorite OS is continueing to use Mono and has no plans to stop. If you don't want to use Mono that's fine no problem, but please don't use Mono quietly there are software developers trying to work.

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

[MichaelSmith]

I installed mediawiki at my workplace and management were horrified. They don't want it. They want to control the information. Not just anybody with access to the LAN.

Remove Tomboy (Miguelboy); install GNOTE

[Dystopian Rebel]

http://live.gnome.org/Gnote

Re:Remove Tomboy (Miguelboy); install GNOTE

[man_of_mr_e]

Except, of course, for the fact that GNotes author has been basically AWOL for months, and no real new development has occured in ages... He recently passed ownership to someone else who hasn't done much other than some new translations.

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

[harlows_monkeys]

Quite a few top iPhone games are written using Mono.

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

[Arker]

Open Office is NOT a text editor, nor does it contain one. ^_^

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

[Com2Kid]

Having worked at a company that used file shares to store documents, and where people would download a document to their local machine, edit it, go on vacation, and others had to wait until that person came back from vacation to get the latest revision, well, Sharepoint is an improvment. :)

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

[bcrowell]

"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.)

Sure 10 MB is absurd, but it's a lot less absurd than the claimed 189 MB. I don't think I had any mono libs loaded without knowing it. I was actually testing this under fluxbox, not gnome. When I deleted all the mono libraries using apt, the only other app that showed up as having a dependency on them was f-spot, and I didn't have f-spot loaded when I did the memory test. If the GGP had binaries compiled with debugging symbols, then that would mean that the GGP's 189 MB figure was basically wrong, because the point of his post was that he didn't think tomboy should be included in a default install of gnome.

I think the most likely possibilities are (1) that there's something wrong with the method I used to measure memory use, or (2) the 189 MB figure the GGP quoted was for an earlier release of tomboy/mono, and they've made it somewhat less insanely bloated since then.

Another thing to keep in mind is that although the GGP is complaining about tomboy's presence in a default install of Gnome, what's probably more relevant is what's present in a default install of popular desktop linux distributions. Ubuntu has decided to switch from including GIMP in a default install to including f-spot instead, and f-spot requires mono. And guess what the reasons were for switching from GIMP to f-spot? It was because GIMP too hard to use, took up too much space on a CD, and was too slow to start up. In other words, the concerns about bloat and performance that the GGP raised may actually be good reasons to have mono included on a default install.

For me, the really good reason to remove mono and mono-dependent apps from my machine is that I'm concerned about whether mono can really survive as open-source software, so I don't want to hitch my wagon to some app without realizing that it's dependent on mono.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

So does wiki

"Wiki" is not a proper noun.

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

[KiloByte]

Do you have a problem with Python too?

No, since Python is over an order of magnitude less bloated than C#. Being a bit slower at number crunching doesn't mean it can't be more efficient at doing other things.

Obviously the wrong license

[Splintercat]

Should have gone with the WTFPL.

(Actually I am curious as to what a large project under WTFPL would look like.)

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

[spintriae]

For what? 3D graphics?

Distribution within an organization

[tepples]

The key point from what you linked: "and you don't give the other dept the source code (so it falls outside the gpl license)". But the license's authors have defined "distribution" to exclude propagating a work within an organization. Besides, even if it did count as distribution, we could still comply. On our Linux boxes, we get our copies of MySQL from mirrors of Canonical's Ubuntu repository, and we have the option to check the "source" box in Software Sources if need be. We also run MySQL on an internal Windows server, and we have the option to download source packages whenever we update the Windows binary package.

In what country?

[tepples]

But if Silverlight succeeds, and Linux users want to access that content, but the feature is either broken, not implemented or missing in Moonlight, those users will be in a position to contribute the code, and everyone wins.

In what country? As aztracker1 wrote, one feature commonly used by Silverlight sites that is missing from Moonlight is the ability to view videos subject to digital restrictions management. In the United States, only the owner of copyright in a work subject to DRM has the right to make or authorize players for that work (17 USC 1201; Universal v. Reimerdes).

And what users? Most individuals who don't know how to code aren't willing to donate a sum that makes up a significant fraction of what it would cost to just buy a copy of Windows to run in VirtualBox.

There's always lock in.

[tjstork]

Remember: there is no lock-in with Free Software. It cannot happen, period.

There's always lock in with even free software. Let's someone pulled the plug on the license for some piece of GPL software that you relied on for your product. Yes, you could continue with that fork as it was, but, the original team that owned the original code and moved on in non-free mode would have the advantage of the brand name, the development process and infrastructure, and above all, the expertise and vision.

Let's say Linus said, "eek, I'm now going to charge a tax on the Linux kernel..." What would I do? There would be some percentage of people that would sigh about the terrible world and then pay the tax.

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

[modmans2ndcoming]

hmmm
maybe you are using it wrong!!

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

[Arker]

Well I cant test it because I dont have mono (thankfully!) I mention debug symbols because I have seen that - some developers have more resources than they know what to do with and assume everyone else does too. I tend to stick to Slackware because Patrick has never done anything like that (at least that I have noticed) and doesnt ship GNOME (which can be a big hassle to get rid of with other distros.)

However, I have another explanation for you after searching the old memory banks. Free isnt very useful because of the way the kernel allocates memory. If you unload that program and check free again, I dont think you'll see the 10 megs back. And even if free tells you you have no free memory, you may still be able to load another program, even a relatively large one. IIRC this all has to do with dynamic cache sizes - the kernel will let the cache grow to consume all or almost all free memory, then take pages back out of it on demand when a program needs space. When a program releases the memory, it just gets marked available for caching again. So I am *guessing* that what happened was the program took considerably more than 10 megs, however most of that was allocated out of a bank formerly marked for caching (but not actually in use for such, of course) so you dont see the difference when you check with free.

Mono is still dead, Jim

[broward]

Mono is still dead, just as I predicted in 2006 and re-iterated in 2009.

http://realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme/?entry=he_s_still_dead_jim

Dead.
DOA.

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

[poopdeville]

What is the "w-word"?

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

[poopdeville]

There's no significant difference between emulation and implementation of an abstract construct...

True colors are starting to show...finally!

[rec9140]

miguel msfanoboi at heart that you are!

Your TRUE COLORS ARE FINALLY STARTING TO SHOW!

Well, you will be glad to know I'VE LONG AGO REMOVED AND BANNED YOUR DISEASED software from my systems.

I personally do NOT hire:

any one with ms or .net, or vb, or c#, or asp experience. Its the kiss of death! bye bye!

And since I set the IT Hiring policy, your not getting in the door either.

All the ms weenies at my place of employment before I got there know their days are NUMBERED! The herd is thinned constantly with GNU compliant employees (ALL PUNS INTENDED bad or otherwise! :) )

I personally do NOT use:

any thing thats tainted with your diseased software. I specifically ban such implementations including WINE!

I make sure that I take steps to remove and prevent the installation of your dieseased software.

Your actions and your employers actions have put them on the:

1) Unauthorized Vendor list - so Novel and SUSE are BANNED including but not limited to OpenSUSE and SLES.
2) Unauthorized Software list - meaning you can be TERMINATED ON THE SPOT for use and installation of software on this list.

Your geek and nerd memberships are hereby REVOKED IMMEDIATELY, and I would be very careful about any stray penquins you run accross, as the Tuxinator is out there! And YOUR THE TARGET!

There is a reason I switched to Linux, and its to AVOID ALL THINGS ms and ms related that includes c#, asp, .net, vb, win os, and any thing else they are involved in. I don't want their crap on my systems, personal or work.

To i4i: CONGRATS! ! ! ! Spend the money well! DIE ms DIE DIE! DIE!

Re:True colors are starting to show...finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is everything all right? Did you forget to take your meds today?

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

[Radhruin]

If that's how you want to define emulator, then you might as well call glibc a C emulator.

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

[poopdeville]

I'd call it an interpreter, but I don't disagree...

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

[binarylarry]

Actually, you're COMPLETELY WRONG.

Wine is an clean room reimplementation of the Win32 apis and userland.

Mono is a clean room reimplementation of the .NET apis and userland. .NET is essentially Win32+1.

Neither are very compatible and both have questionable legal status.

So really, Wine is probably the closest project currently existing in FLOSSland to Mono.

Cheers to the idiot mods who modded your post informative.

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

[MK_CSGuy]

MS Paint is nice, but my personal favorite is adobe illustrator.
Nothing like vector based code!

Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

So, for users to have the freedom to do what they wanted, they had to strip it of the code that is licensed under a "free" license. Maybe, one day, others will also see how restrictive the GPL really is.

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

[Richard_at_work]

I'm afraid that almost everything you have said in your post regarding SharePoint is wrong - yes, SharePoint does enjoy integration with the Microsoft Office suites, but if you do not have Word or Excel 2003 onward installed, you will simply get offered the file for download when you click on it. And thats ignoring the fact that you are not limited to the Office file formats - you can even store OpenOffice documents in SharePoint Document Libraries without any hassle at all. Also, SharePoint 2007 works pretty damn well in Firefox (no, some of the advanced page editing features do not work that well, but you can work Lists and Document Libraries fine with Firefox).

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

[jimicus]

I rather think we may be talking at cross purposes. I know full well you can browse a sharepoint repository in Firefox, and you can download/upload documents (rather than rely on the integration with Office).

The point I'm driving at is that Microsoft are (IMO) trying to push their customers into using the Office integration features to essentially obsolete a simple SMB fileshare and replace it with a Sharepoint server - thus making migration from a Microsoft platform that much harder.

Miguel DOES work for Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea the other day I saw this shit auto-load on a Linux box I was building and it really pissed me off.

Maybe I don't want anything written in .NET or C# on my machine. My question is why in the first place. Like you said there are a lot of better languages for Linux/UNIIX world to write in. Python, Pearl, Java, C, C+ the list goes on without including .NET and C#.

And here we go with the "Branding" ploy used by MS and others. "Got to have TOMBOY!" No you need a "note-taking applet" there are plenty of others written in other languages. The one I use in KDE whatever it is called works great and I doubt it is written in .NET. Its like people think they need "Word" to write a letter. No you need a Word Processing Application. I don't "need" Banshee. I need a Music Player and SongBird, XMMS, Amarok (others) all work just fine.

Some argue that so you can develop .NET Windows applications on Linux. Why would anyone want to when Visual Studio (which doesn't run on Linux) really is the best tool to use for this. Yes I have worked with .NET code in the past but what I did was developed on a Windows box. Kind of silly developing on a system not meant to run the code you are working.

Mono is nothing more than a crack to allow Microsoft a way to slip into the Linux/UNIX world. Miguel and Mono is like one of the maggots a Bore Fly leaves under you skin. Soon it will become infected and start to rot away from the inside.

I happily left Windows World a long time ago and have never looked back. One reason was crappy insecure code and I don't want it now. If some want Mono fine load it up but please don't be putting this shit on my Linux box by default.

Keep writing wicked fast C code or Python!

Idea #110: No Mono by default in Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/110/

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

[man_of_mr_e]

So let me ask you a question. Do you really think software vendors should be prohibited from adding features to their products that interact with each other? Or just Microsoft should be prohibited?

Sharepoint and office work together very well, and MS publishes the interface to allow this (which OOo utilizes). Everyone says Microsoft "holds back technology", but it seems that it's the Microsoft haters that want to continually hold back technology simply because it's Microsoft doing it.

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

[man_of_mr_e]

10MB is peanuts today. Have you looked at how much memory most apps in Linux use? While Tomboy may be a "silly little virtual notepad", it's a bit more than that.. it has a lot of functionality, not to mention has a very polished UI. graphics take up a lot of memory. It also has spell checking, search capabilities, plug-in architecture (with several plug-ins), etc.. all that takes memory.

By the way, GNote, the Tomboy replacement written in C, takes up more memory by my calculations.. 18MB.

LEAVE MIGUEL ALONE!

[kimb]

And how fucking dare anyone out there make fun of Miguel after all he has been through!

He never received a degree, he was dissed by Microsoft. He founded at least two fucked-up projects, his hero turned out to be ***gulp*** a user, a cheater, and now he's going through a license change battle. All you people care about is ***ew, ugh*** freedom and not making money off of software. HE'S A HUMAN!

What you don't realize is that Miguel is making you all so much more interoperable and all you do is write a bunch of crap about him.

He hasn't blogged how awesome Microsoft is in days. His project was called Gnome for a reason because all you people want is GNU GNU GNU GNU GNU!! LEAVE HIM ALONE...

You're lucky he even coded for you BASTARDS! LEAVE MIGUEL ALONE! ... Please.

***wipes tears***

Richard Stallman talked about freedom and said software should be free no matter what. ***gulp*** Speaking of freedom, when is it freedom-loving to publicly bash (no pun intended) someone who is going through a hard time. LEAVE MIGUEL ALOHONE! PUHlehase...

Leave Miguel de Icaza alone right NOW! I mean it! Anyone who has a problem with him, you deal with Balmer, because he's not well right now.

***cries a river*** ***gulp***

Leave him alone...

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree totally. Sharepoint is poison, it not only gets in the way of C# development but it invents new and exciting ways for things to break.
Add to that snail like speed and that it gets in the way of efficient content management.
Finally sky high licensing make sure you have to be totally brain dead to take this route.

ShitPoint is the perfect example of why non IT educated people should not make technical IT decisions

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

[uninformedLuddite]

You are amateurs. I use Havok

Why bother with Mono develop while you got VM?

[Ilgaz]

From real, pro developers I know... If they really really need to write something for Windows platform, they fire up a virtual machine, boot into windows and use platform's own de facto standard IDE which seems to be Visual Studio. If they are into "deep stuff", they basically run boot camp for a real windows.

I also fail to find one, single tool from pros or amateurs which is meaningful, doesn't replicate an established application which is available to OS X or Linux thanks to Mono.

My views would change for example, if MS used Mono Framework to ship Silverlight 2 on OS X. No, they started it from beginning and dropped PowerPC support while on it.

I can use unmodified sources to build KDE 4 "native" on OS X, tools actually works and I can even send bug reports to developers of complex apps. That is what I understand from multi platform development. Vuze/Azureus can run as unmodified too, it is a Java app. The "extra" stuff is in native binary yes but it would be stupid/needless show off to code a HD Video decoder in Java even if it would be possible.

One question

[Ilgaz]

You seem to be a developer and I want to ask a single question. You heard about GNU Step right? It is directly related to OpenStep/NeXTStep and the rule of thumb is, if you start coding with it, it is possible to release same exact thing to Linux/OS X. It is not a theory, there is a decent mail application which actually works, used by people.

So, tell me why wouldn't a developer use their GNUStep and ship same thing on both OS X and Linux/FreeBSD? Wouldn't it be cool?

You know the reason right? Cocoa is ages ahead of it, OS X gives some decent, professionally coded and maintained extra frameworks, supported by Apple (try filing a gnustep bug to apple) and actually works.

"it is coming", "it is shipped soon", "it wasn't needed for 99% of apps"... These are the things you will always hear at Mono camp. They claim some insane thing like, MS, would EVER let some "open source crap OS with open source crap framework" (wanna bet they don't call it internally?) beat their own native OS and framework. If you aren't naive or actually paid by MS, please read some IT history. This is not the first time MS uses that clown to divide open source scene.

Double edged sword

[Ilgaz]

While it manages to create a 450+ comment fight on Slashdot between open source users/developers (that is what MS wants), it also validates that rms is not some tinfoil hat fanatic and "open source" and "free" (as in speech) are in fact, can be really different terms.

It may have given some wake up call to anti GPL camp showing what they are actually serving to.

That is some big IMHO btw.

You can't fire me, I quit!

[Ilgaz]

Could it be "I am resigning before you can fire me" ?

I really don't think FSF/GNU and even large portion of Gnome users/developers aren't happy with what their once poster child has become. I started to check for mono dependencies in tools I install to OS X myself and as a Mac user, I am not really a "everything should be open" fanatic. I can't imagine what would actual Linux users and companies choosing Linux would think to be bound by some "promise" rather than something like gtk2 or linux itself.

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

[PmaxII]

I uses Calc.exe... but I can only write funny words like : boobies...

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

[selven]

Use a real calculator, you 17008.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I use MonoDevelop for the mac to develop for the iPhone. Its a very good experience.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet, the same GUI program written in Python is larger than the equivalent program in C# (PyGtk vs Gtk#).

Hurrah for baseless claims.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Sharepoint is an application that runs on IIS. IIS is what is replacing Apache here. Sharepoint replaces some of the content management systems you might run on Apache, whatever they might be.

Sharepoint is a big steaming pile of garbage. It is a dreadful piece of software. IIS is not a very good web server either. Sounds like your outfit is run by people that know nothing about web servers, content management packages or software in general.

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

[Richard_at_work]

Except that SharePoint library items are accessible via SMB (\\site-collection-name\site-name\library-name\) and web services, making migration (including full meta data) as easy as anything else.