Banshee, Mono May Be Dropped From Ubuntu Default

itwbennett writes "The Banshee music application, and Mono, the open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, on which Banshee is dependent, may be excluded from the next release of Ubuntu. In 'a blog entry titled Bansheegeddon,' Banshee and Mono developer Joseph Michael Shields says the reasons given for the change are that Banshee is 'not well maintained' and 'porting music store to GTK3 is blocked on banshee ported to GTK3.' Other reasons mentioned but not in the session logs are complaints that it doesn't work on ARM. Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon pointed out in a blog post that the decision to drop Banshee, Mono or other apps that are dependent on Mono has not been finalized. But the blogosphere is lit up with speculation that this is a deliberate move to exclude Mono because of its emulation of Microsoft .NET."

Comments

Re:Did we start liking Mono, and I missed it?

[Tr3vin]

It is awesome and much better than Java! Think of the great note taking and music apps you can write! Don't worry, Microsoft will never block its development because they said so. You can always trust a large company when they say something in a non-binding manner.

Re:Good thing, too

[pwizard2]

I've been using Clementine for awhile now. It's still a bit rough around the edges (no podcast support) but it looks and works just like the old Amarok 1.4 did. (I always hated Amarok2... I kept old KDElibs around just so I could run 1.4 as long as possible) I forget if Clementine is a complete rewrite or a port of 1.4 to Qt4 libs.

Besides, who needs Mono when you can write cross-platform apps with Qt? Stuff like automatic garbage collection isn't enough to get me using .NET, not when Qt is pretty good about cleaning up after itself at the QObject level. Sure, you may have to do some manual GC here and there, but its nowhere near as bad as vanilla C++ is.

Great! Depending on Mono is a mistake

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Mono has its uses - it could help people remove .Net dependencies from their software packages.

But for new software packages, choosing a Microsoft technology is a mistake. Microsoft calls free software an enemy - "cancer" to be "extinguished", so building on their technologies is folly, especially when there are lots of non-Microsoft languages and frameworks that we can use. The problems of software patents are only getting worse, so we need to prepare for the future by applying some caution today.

I hope this is indeed the real reason for taking Mono-dependent software out of Ubuntu.

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Mono