Richard Stallman Says No To Mono 1008
twitter writes "There's been a lot of fuss about mono lately. After SCO and MS suing over FAT patents, you would think avoiding anything MS would be a matter of common sense. RMS now steps into the fray to warn against a serious mistake: 'Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use. .... This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. ... [writing and using applications in mono] is taking a gratuitous risk.'" Update: 06/27 20:22 GMT by T : Read on below for one Mono-eschewing attempt at getting the (excellent) Tomboy's functionality, via a similar program called Gnote. Update: 06/27 21:07 GMT by T: On the other side of the coin, reader im_thatoneguy writes "Jo Shields, a Mono Developer, has published an article on 'Why Mono Doesn't Suck,' why it is not a threat to FOSS, why it is desirable to developers and why it should be included in Ubuntu by default."
LastGuyonEarth writes "Gnote was started on April 2009 by Gnome developer Hubert Figuiere, known also for his work on Abiword. The goal of Gnote is to provide a Free Software implementation of Tomboy that doesn't rely on Mono. The ultimate goal is to replace Tomboy in an effort to make Gnome and GNU/Linux distributions non-dependant on Novell's implementation of Microsoft's .NET platform. For our testing purposes, I installed Gnote 0.5.1 on Ubuntu Jaunty through a personal PPA, but I would love to see it officially packaged in the near future."
easy solution (Score:5, Funny)
rename it to GNU/Mono
Stallman also says no to web browsing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stallman also says no to web browsing (Score:5, Informative)
Stallman also says no to web browsing.
No he doesn't. As the linked post says, he doesn't browse the web for PERSONAL REASONS. That's a completely different thing than advocating against using software that is patent bait.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Personal reasons" = he's a kook.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:He doesn't really count for much (Score:5, Insightful)
As for part one - yuk! You people in cold climates should wash more often and it won't happen.
Just FYI, I live in Washington State, and I don't have toe cheese, neither does anybody I know. The point that there's something *on* his foot to pull off in the first place is the opening act of the nasty; the part where he eats it is actually the encore performance.
I can understand that - he's "eating his own dogfood"
Eating dogfood would be substantially less disgusting. ;) (Yes, I know the phrase.)
Exchange is definitely the worst email server in production on any platform
I hope you're making use of hyperbole and don't genuinely believe that. Exchange is certainly not the best, but it's nowhere even close to the worst. Hell, it's arguably better than its direct competitor-- Lotus Domino-- and that's all that really matters. (It certainly uses less bandwidth than Domino.)
The real genius of Exchange isn't the server; the server's an implementation detail and nobody really cares, except hard-core geeks. The real genius is the client software, which is quite simply excellent. To the end-user, the UI of an application *is* the application. (Thus: Outlook *is* Exchange, Lotus Notes *is* Domino.) I think if more open source developers realized that simple rule, open source could be vastly more popular.
(although full backups are actually possible now so it has improved) so the email portion is easily replaced on the same or lesser hardware, but it's a matter of finding out what other portions the users require since it does a lot of other stuff.
That "lot of other stuff" is the reason it's deployed.
I disagree with the attitude to the CLI - that is the one thing that has made large linux deployments possible since you can run the same command or script on as many machines as you want.
You could do this on an older Mac using AppleScript, for example, and never leaving the GUI. Unless you find some weird way of defining AppleScript as a "CLI" (which would be a huge stretch), you can do this particular without ever leaving the GUI.
Also note that Windows designed the Registry specifically to address your problem... again without requiring a CLI. You can deploy a registry entry to thousands of machines, and they'll do your bidding.
It might make large Linux deployments more pleasant, but that's only because Linux has no other technology designed for that purpose. It's definitely "possible" to do, other OSes have already done it.
The main offender newbies hit is X windows configuration but there are now a few decent graphical ways to sort that out and you ALWAYS need a text based way to configure video so you can do something about it when the video settings are wrong.
Yah, but all you need is a "Safe Mode" (to copy a term from Windows) that boots the GUI into a resolution that's guaranteed to work on every piece of video hardware. You don't need to be able to set every single parameter from a CLI, and your OS should protect you from picking un-display-able settings in the first place. And, needless-to-say, it shouldn't crash so often as to make this a consideration.
Consider something like "powerdesk" or the multi-page nvidia or ati GUIs for video settings on MS Windows and you'll see how incredibly hard it is to have a GUI for something that only has a fraction of the options that X windows has
Yeah, but those are shitty GUIs. And even those shitty GUIs are better than a config file-- for example, they're vastly more discoverable. I can guarantee you that if those companies hired a GUI designer and made them non-shitty, it wouldn't demonstrate your point.
I frequently see this: "the CLI is good because [program with shitty GUI] sucks." No real surprise there, saying that a shitty GUI sucks.
Personally I just copy the working nvidia dual head file to a new machine each time instead of the hunting through a maze of twisty config options that you would hav
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Your analogy fails.
if i said i didn't believe in blood transfusions, would that color your impression of any medical ethics opinions i might have?
The equivalent of what RMS said would be: "I don't take blood transfusions for personal reasons"
- maybe he doesn't take them because he's concerned about getting a blood born disease (virus), maybe he's got allergies that most doctors aren't even aware of (celebrity status), etc.
lets be intellectually honest here: anyone who doesn't browse the web is completely out of touch with the main thrust of anything and everything computer related in the last 15 years
Honest? Just because the guy doesn't take the well-worn path he's out of touch? You always have been an intellectual conformist.
In fact, as he wrote, he does use the web, his browser just has a mail interface in
Re:that mail interface sounds pretty cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Using a web browser is not a prerequisite for being an authority on programming, let alone an authority on IP policy implications. What specific information is he missing out on by not using a web browser that gives you a reason to question his knowledge? Your little analogy about engines is laughably pathetic, unless you really mean to question the software experience of the guy who wrote emacs...
In my experience, the real experts frequently don't have time or interest in mucking around with the latest flavor of the month technology because they're too busy thinking about real issues.
Re:that mail interface sounds pretty cool (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Does he even know who Knuth is? Or that entire generation is?
I am sure Steve Jobs and even retired Bill Gates doesn't have time to browse the junk he browses (and calls web) for hours.
Re:that mail interface sounds pretty cool (Score:4, Informative)
Knuth doesn't use personal email. His secretary prints out email addressed to taocp@[university address] so he can reply in writing. He doesn't communicate via email because he doesn't want to be so in touch with the world, not because he thinks email is a bad thing. Hell he barely communicates via post. His point in restricting communication is a personal one because he seems to value his time for research and his interests.
Knuth versus Email [stanford.edu] [stanford.edu]
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
I'm not sure why Stallman doesn't like to use the internet, but it seems like he is more interested in the moral use of software and doesn't use it because I think he personally sees server side code as muddled with regards to the GPL (just my conjecture there). Knuth just likes his privacy. The two are totally different even if they are both for personal reasons. Pretty much all of our reasons for doing things are personal.
Re:but it does point to a mind out of touch (Score:5, Informative)
He still browses the web - he just does it via a method that works:
Other people also use other means to "browse" the web that don't involve conventional interactions with a web browser. Programs like JAWS [freedomscientific.com] (a screen reader for the blind) and blinux [counterpunch.org] don't meet your metaphor for accesing the web - BFD, get over it.
Also, computing is much more than just the web. For many researchers, email is a LOT more convenient, and more important, than the web ever will be.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Tomboy has nothing to do with web-related technologies. Now that we've cleared THAT up, will you take him seriously?
He's not a saint, but sometimes he gets it right. Mono is one of those times - a lot of us have been saying it's a mistake - even those of us who use the web via multiple browsers!
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He does not personally partake of them because he doesn't have the time. He still participates in discussions about the technology, and was a visionary on the subject of standards (which greatly affect the web, in case you haven't noticed) probably since you were in diapers.
He also doesn't belive in "root" (Score:3, Informative)
Who owns which power? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you do not like the mean bad old boss or I.T. department mendling on the systems you use at work then buy your own computer.
Sorry RMS but work is not freedom. Its just a paycheck as you no longer own your time in exchange for money to live.
If you are in charge of a system where other people at work need access to it and you are *paid* to keep it up then what are you supposed to do? Restrictions at work make sense as they are not being paid to play with their computers but to work.
I think you can tell RMS is out of touch with reality. Administrators need complete control in order to lower TCO and keep productivity. I want the file server to just work in the office where is my power to enforce this?
He also says no to... (Score:3, Funny)
FSF threatens corporate $$$? Cue the Ad Hominem... (Score:5, Insightful)
The man basically made a lot of the internet and the modern computing experience possible. His foundation is responsible for some of the most vital, widely used, and essential software in use today.
And yet whenever he opens his mouth, cue the ad hominem attacks. They come hard and fast. Ignore what he said. Just question his character - change the subject, pick apart some wacky thing from his life. That should settle the matter.
Do you only converse with people who are absolutely normal, totally conventional, and who never make any mistakes in anything they have ever said? Because that's the only way you can bring this stuff up and be intellectually consistent.
And what's worse, this is not the ESPN forums. We're supposed to be nerds here. The man can't be weird and still be right?
Re:FSF threatens corporate $$$? Cue the Ad Hominem (Score:4, Informative)
Oh you lovable scamp. Indeed he did not invent the internet - which is why I did not say he did.
And I didn't say you said he did. See, that works both ways.
I was making a point, not claiming you made one.
You can't go 5 seconds on the net without hitting free software.
True, but irrelevant. BSD is also free, and they don't like the GPL much.
Emacs? Screw Emacs! What would the world be like with GCC? Without glibc? What about if Perl just disappeared?
What does RMS have to do with Perl?
Before GCC existed (or rather, before it became popular) there were other free compilers. There was a BSD C compiler also. Granted, GCC won out, but if it wasn't around, something else would have replaced it.
What would the world be like if we didn't have the collaboration that happens in free software projects?
Free software existed long before the GPL was created, and there's a ton of it that is not GPL'd.
But all this is beside the point. You made it out that RMS was basically responsible for the internet existing or functioning. The fact of the matter is that the internet doesn't run on Linux, it runs largely on BSD based products (Cisco, *BSD's, etc..) Most Web sites run on Linux, but that's not the internet itself.
Yes, RMS is responsible for a lot, but I don't for one second believe that it was impossible for that to happen without him.
Re:Stallman also says no to web browsing (Score:5, Informative)
Daemon simply means demon in mythology so I would bet in his eyes the term is interchangeable, it is in mine.
Um, no, this is pretty much the exact opposite of the truth. In modern usage they've become nearly synonymous, but in mythology "daemon" refers to the ancient Greek beings that are really more closely analogous with "angels" in modern usage. Daemons are intermediaries between men and the gods, including everything from minor divinities down to ghosts of dead heroes. Of particular interest was the "agathos daemon", which is rather like a Greek "guardian angel".
Re:Stallman also says no to web browsing (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it appears that you're both right to a certain extent. From the Oxford American Dictionary:
daemon (also daimon)
noun
1 (in ancient Greek belief) a divinity or supernatural being of a nature between gods and humans.
an inner or attendant spirit or inspiring force.
2 archaic spelling of demon.
Re:Stallman also says no to web browsing (Score:5, Informative)
"da(e)mon" is a Greek word, which was spelled delta-alpha-iota-mu-omega-nu. It was borrowed into Latin with the spelling "daemon". Around 200 B.C.E. the diphthong spelled "ae" came to be pronounced as [e:], both in native Latin words and in loans from Greek. This change in pronunciation was only gradually reflected in Latin spelling, which was conservative (just like English still spells "knight" with the no-longer pronounced "k".) The result is that when borrowed into English you can get spellings both with and without the "a". The same is true of words like "arch(a)eology".
Re:easy solution (Score:4, Interesting)
RMS has always had a case of monomania [wikipedia.org].
MS not M$ (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:MS not M$ (Score:4, Informative)
You're right.
I didn't catch that in the original submission; thanks for seeing it.
timothy
Re:MS not M$ (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't catch that in the original submission; thanks for seeing it.
Good job. The word "Twitter" should have been a sign to look for trouble. You've been here how long?
You might have had a point if twitter [slashdot.org] hadn't created that username about eight years before Twitter [twitter.com] appeared.
Re:MS not M$ (Score:5, Insightful)
Since I seem to have been unjustly voted overrated I'll back up my assertion with a quote from CmdrTaco himself:
http://www.cyberarmy.net/library/article/994 [cyberarmy.net]
Ok, perhaps that quote doesn't perfectly illustrate a pro linux and anti microsoft bias. If you need anymore comfirmation though I suggest you look no farther than slashdot's "borg Gates" image they use for any microsoft related story. For better or worse, slashdot does have a bias and anyone thinking otherwise is quite foolish.
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I suggest you look no farther than slashdot's "borg Gates" image they use for any microsoft related story. For better or worse, slashdot does have a bias and anyone thinking otherwise is quite foolish.
Bias I can live with.
But the Borg icon and the stained glass Window are simply flamebait from the nineties - and by now looking rather gray around the temples.
If Star Trek can reboot the franchise to restore some of it's integrity, perhaps it's time for Slashot to do the same.
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I am biased toward gravity as well. I probably have more support for my negative bias toward Microsoft than I have support for my belief in gravity.
Stallmans just mad because (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft, I said NO! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's absurd that Stallman has to actually issue this warning considering Microsoft's history of behavior not only with competition but with their business associates as well. Anyone who has been both alive and conscious these past twenty-five years knows forming any sort of relationship with Microsoft, either directly or indirectly, customer or partner, is just asking for a raping.
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Re:Microsoft, I said NO! (Score:5, Informative)
Ask Spyglass, the company from which MS "licensed" what became MSIE, whether they felt raped when MS started giving away MSIE thus rendering the royalties to Spyglass $0.00 (plus the minumum quarterly fee)...
Maybe as a customer you haven't had anything to rape you for aside from license fees for products. If you were a developer / business partner, I suspect you would say differently.
Re:Microsoft, I said NO! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if you've ever had to make a business decision (as opposed to armchair quarterback), you'd know that "bad" is sometimes a relative term.
If the choice is (a) sign a deal or (b) compete against the company that owns the platform your software have to work on, the scales are tilted towards signing the deal.
Now you can argue it's Microsoft's right to use its platform control this way. It's a position worth discussing. But you shouldn't sneak that position under the "bad business deal" banner.
Re:Microsoft, I said NO! (Score:5, Informative)
Rape doesn't simply mean forced sexual intercourse. As a verb... well...
Verb
Infinitive
to rape
Third person singular
rapes
Simple past
raped
Past participle
raped
Present participle
raping
to rape (third-person singular simple present rapes, present participle raping, simple past and past participle raped)
1. To force sexual intercourse or other sexual activity upon another person, without their consent.
2. To abuse an object in an extreme manner.
The loggers raped the virgin forest
3. (slang) To dominate in a contest.
My experienced opponent will rape me at chess.
I'd say they have abused their dominance in the tech world to the extreme more than once.
Re:Microsoft, I said NO! (Score:4, Insightful)
20 years? How many examples do you want:
- illegally burying Lotus 123, and replacing it with an inferior product
- illegally killing stacker, and replacing it with the inferior doublespace
- buying winternals, and burying one of the most promising security tools for XP I'd ever seen
- illegally forcing their browser onto the market, creating some of the biggest security headaches IT admins have ever seen
- changing file formats with every release for no reason other than to force companies to upgrade Office
I'm a big user of Microsoft software, but I'm under no illusions as to their business practices, motivations, or horrendous track record when it comes to security and interoperability.
Re:Microsoft, I said NO! (Score:4, Informative)
Most of those are bogus:
Microsoft didn't bury Lotus 123, Lotus shot themselves in the foot, then the head, and then the foot again. They then proceeded to walk off a cliff. They bet on OS/2 (which failed), and delivered a product for windows extremely late, that was buggy and not even close to what excel was delivering. They then attempted to do a rewrite for years that they never delivered, and then finally produced lotus symphony which was crap. Not until 1998 when they released SmartSuite 9.0 did they have anything that came close to competing with Excel. To say Microsoft killed lotus 1-2-3 is a joke. They killed themselves -- repeatedly.
Stacker? Stacker was simply a one trick pony that couldn't deliver a second product, and unfortunately their first product only had a short lifetime. Developing a product that only worked on MS-DOS 6.0 when windows was just taking off only left them a very short window. Their second product ReachOut wasn't accepted very well, especially when there were other products already on the market that did that, and more (pcAnywhere, etc). In the end, they walked away with both a good chunk of money, their own software sales, AND $5.50 for each and every copy of MS-DOS 6.0 that was sold. That's a pretty sweet deal considering it was also $25 million PER EMPLOYEE.
Winternals is still updated regularly.
The rest is your opinion, which I don't share. I appreciate my HTTP explorer built into my OS, just like I appreciate my FTP explorer, FAT/NTFS explorer, network exporer, picture viewer, sound/music player, calculator, and simplistic notepad, paint, and a graphical UI. Only those people with an axe to grind or a software suite to push think otherwise. These things are in almost every OS built today, and have been for a very long time (before Microsoft).
Re:Microsoft, I said NO! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a ridiculous claim. I've seen Apple's source code for earlier versions of MacOS. It was written in Pascal. Windows was written in C. There's no way they could have used it. They could have based Windows on it, but then Windows would be substantially similar to MacOS at a low level... it's not. It's not even close. They both suck, but they suck in totally different ways.
Re:Microsoft, I said NO! (Score:5, Funny)
Are you sure you're not suffering from stockholm syndrome?
The fantasist (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you sure you're not suffering from stockholm syndrome?
Microsoft offers a bundle of products and services which have become the de facto global standard for office work.
That solves many problems for your employer.
He can open an office anywhere south of the Arctic Circle - an office of any size - with perfect confidence that an MS Office solution will scale to his needs and that local recruitment and training will present no particular difficulty.
It is rather typical of the geek to focus on something l
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Microsoft offers a bundle of products and services which have become the de facto global standard for office work.
That solves many problems for your employer.
No, it doesn't. It might, if the file formats weren't changed on each version solely to fuck all of their customers.
He can open an office anywhere south of the Arctic Circle - an office of any size - with perfect confidence that an MS Office solution will scale to his needs and that local recruitment and training will present no particular difficulty.
Only if the version he's using is the same as the version used in all of the other locations. Otherwise, he gets on the upgrade treadmill, and *everybody* gets fucked.
It is rather typical of the geek to focus on something like the "openness" of a file format - and miss the significance of The Ribbon.
Au contraire, it's rather typical of the MS shill/apologist to invent scenarios that don't actually happen in an attempt to claim that MS is a good solution.
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> Funny, we've been a customer of Microsoft's for 20 years and have yet to experience this "raping" you speak of.
Everything is fine if you're in lock-step with Microsoft's business plans. But try getting out from underneath Microsoft's thumb, and you'll start to understand.
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So, can you remember the leaked documents named ''Halloween'' something?
Remember the weak point of Linux as reported? Easy to divide politically. Icaza and gang really serves this purpose well.
I wonder if there will be one heroic developer with time to waste in hand will convert Tom Tom whatever that trojan is to GTK (remember GTK Icaza?) and Qt. In fact, while wasting time, I would use GNUStep and release same code on Windows, OS X and Linux. That would show what multi platform and open means to people spe
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That's the point. He doesn't "have to." Every techie (possibly except him, though I doubt it) understood this years ago. By saying this now, though, he gets attention.
Apparently not EVERY techie else it wouldn't have been included into Debian in the first place.
He's saying it now because they are doing it NOW. Not because he is an attention whore.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No matter how you like to soften, it is the view of freedom, open source and it has been for ages.
It is anarchy, anti big corporation, some sense of communism, fanaticism. Don't let corporate monkeys like Icaza or Novell fool you.
A half ass fake C application and a clone of a clone of a framework has no place in Debian. It is not what Debian is. In fact, if this is the new policy of Debian, they should change the distro's name and allow people who understands what GNU/Linux is use the name.
If it was any oth
Re:Microsoft, I said NO! (Score:4, Insightful)
That is a very shallow analysis. If I recall correctly Microsoft successfully sued TomTom for violating FAT patents in the Linux kernel on their devices. Furthermore, yes, if Microsoft took a litigious stance on .Net, then Mono would just get rid of the offending code. Thereby, breaking every single program written that depends on that feature. And M$ (yes M$) could do that over and over again, effectively killing the ecosystem on anything besides Linux. Stallman is 100% correct in his opinion here. Mono is good to run shit written in .Net. But don't rely on it as a platform in a free ecosystem. It is unadvisable in the long run.
Re:Microsoft, I said NO! (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, Microsoft did NOT successfully sue TomTom for violating FAT patents on their devices.
Microsoft threatened to sue TomTom, and TomTom decided to settle out of court.
This was after TomTom threaten Microsoft with patent infringements on Microsoft Streets. Microsoft even said that they usually don't enforce the FAT patents, but felt compelled to do so in this case as a defensive measure.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Windows developers are at 3.5 SP! level, beta people are already checking version 4. What is Mono at? 2? Without very important windows forms right?
Wrong [mono-project.com]: "Support for Windows Forms 2.0 is complete. At this point, we are largely just fixing bugs and polishing our code."
I've written WinForms apps in Visual Studio that ran on Mono with no changes, and that was over a year ago. This month I've been doing command-line apps, and of course they work just fine on Mono as well.
Mono also supports many individual features of C# 3 and .NET 3.
Manged Code (Score:3, Interesting)
Just say no.
I've been writing some winforms applications and all I've got to say is "no". As a long time Qt programmer, I found winforms initially familiar, but it's got a lot of quirks that drive me nuts.
I'll stick with Qt on C++ thank you very much.
Yes to Mono! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yes to Mono! (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes to Mono! (Score:5, Informative)
Do you remember WISE? Windows Interface Source Environment. A program that purportedly allowed developers to write software to Windows APIs and run the resulting programs on Macintosh and UNIX systems. It was issued in 1994. By 1996 Microsoft had captured a large share of the corporate market and has proceeded to the next step: Microsoft has extended the Windows API without copying its changes to the WISE program. This meant that developers could no longer smoothly port applications to UNIX and
Macintosh. In public, however, Microsoft continued to lead developers into believing that this software was still fully cross-platform. In 1997, Bill Gates noted in an internal email that those developers who wrote applications for the then-available software without realizing that it would not port all APIs to UNIX and Macintosh were "just fucked."
MS is smart enough not to do this (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:MS is smart enough not to do this (Score:5, Insightful)
Add to that the fact the M$ published the spec under a recognized standards body and that was the point at which the zealot's heads began to swell until the point of explosion.
That "publishing under a recognized standards body" didn't stop RAMBUS from trying to pull a fast one. It all depends how Microsoft presented the specification that determines what they can and cannot do in court to cripple use of Mono. Most of the recognized standards bodies have required that the contributor(s) grant licenses to use the ideas described by the standard. The licenses do not have to be royalty-free, just "reasonable" and uniform. Most licenses have a fixed payment per use, which means that "free" is not an option.
Re:MS is smart enough not to do this (Score:4, Informative)
Could you come up with real specific examples? Because all I see, year after year, is Mono progressing.
Mono still has no WPF, and no present plans to implement it in foreseeable future.
Summary for those who didn't read it (Score:3, Insightful)
In short:
In otherwords, I'm confused. Does he like C# or not? If he doesn't, why does the FSF have their own .NET implementation? What makes theirs so special?
Re:Summary for those who didn't read it (Score:5, Informative)
Feel free to disagree with him, but I thought the distinction between the C# implementation and the act of writing apps in C# makes a lot of sense.
Confused (Score:4, Insightful)
Mono is a cleanroom implementation of the CLR as specified by EMCA and .Net libraries, right? What exactly do you risk by using it?
Re:Confused (Score:5, Informative)
Mono is a cleanroom implementation of the CLR as specified by EMCA and .Net libraries, right? What exactly do you risk by using it?
Submarine patents for one. Investment of effort into technologies where MS can break compatibility for two. Buying into standards MS has too much influence on is simply asking for them to use that influence to hurt you at a later date. After the 20th or 30th such instance you'd think people would learn to be a little less shortsighted.
Re:Confused (Score:5, Insightful)
As non-american (your senseless patents don't apply), I'll re-ask the question again.
Don't be absurd. Just because software patents don't apply in a given country doesn't mean they can't cripple Linux development in that country. Do you really think forking Linux and having all the countries that currently enforce software patents and all the companies that do business in that country developing one fork and the rest developing a different fork would not be a crippling blow to Linux? I don't care where you live, if all the Linux developers in the US are stopped from using the Linux after it started to include Mono and have to go back and rewrite all the subsequent application built upon it in 5 years time, that will hurt all Linux users around the world and significantly slow progress.
You also failed to address my point about intentionally incompatible versions of standards. Since you're posting AC you're probably a troll. Get an account or make less trollish posts if you want further replies from me.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you do not understand the motivations behind free software you’re more than welcome to keep using closed software, but you cannot criticize the free software community for trying to survive.
Microsoft has already applied for patents on the
Re:Confused (Score:5, Informative)
Being owned in court by Microsoft due to patent infringement.
Or more likely, losing customers because mid development cycle Microsoft starts threatening to sue companies using Mono, as it infringes their patents.
They've rattled this sabre before.
Isn't this antithetical to GNU in general? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Isn't this antithetical to GNU in general? (Score:5, Informative)
No, Richard Stallman was always very concerned with NOT violating patents. For instance gzip was developed especially to avoid a patent clash over compress, the commercial compression utility shipped with UNIX.
Pot calling the kettle black (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How is this a troll? C and UNIX were both developed by an even bigger, eviler company than MS could ever hope to be.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> GNU and GCC are just as much open source implementations of proprietary technology...
A couple of important differences.
1. The patents have long since expired on the core ideas in UNIX. we are rapidly approaching the point where Linux has existed longer than a US patent is allowed to exist and BSD embodies almost all of the user visible APIs and goes back even longer.
2. C is an ANSI Standard that again is older than any patent could threaten from. C++ is more recent but was developed by real standar
People don't seem to be "getting" his point... (Score:5, Informative)
Love him or hate him, but at least listen to what he is actually saying.
All he is saying is that Microsoft has already publicly claimed [cnn.com] that Linux violates a couple hundred MS patents. Recently, Microsoft invoked the Linux angle in a patent suit [cnet.com] it filed against Tom Tom.
Therefore, he says, it should be obvious to all that MS intends to enforce its patents. So, the more one uses software based on MS technologies, the more likely it is that you may be impacted by a suit in the future. He calls this a "gratuitous" risk.
Or, in his words:
The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.
Not true. (Score:4, Informative)
> "Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation..."
Mono is not included in the Debian "default installation". It is merely pulled in by one of the several "tasks" that the user may (or may not) choose to select. The Debian "default installation" -- all pacakges of "standard" or higher priority -- does not even include X.
For *Tomboy*? (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, hell. Isn't anyone concerned that this is all for Tomboy, an app which is frequently so sluggish as to be completely unusable? Remind me why we're not all simply using Gnote?
Hey Miguel (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm calling you out. Right now.
We know you're on Slashdot, so don't be a coward.
Tell us how you know that Mono doesn't infringe on Microsoft's patents. Tell us how Moonlight doesn't infringe on Microsoft patents. Clear this stuff up.
Unless you and Novell answer this, without weasel words Mono and Moonlight and everything else you contribute to GNU/Linux based on Microsoft tech will be suspect.
Thanks.
--
BMO
The real damage of Mono (Score:4, Insightful)
Any competent and well-informed programmer knows that the openness of C#/.NET is a total sham. Sure the core is open, but there's so many Windows-only extensions that it's virtually impossible to make cross-platform apps. Plus the fact that the Mono implementation is always waay behind Microsoft's.
But MS has been very clever. They know that it's only technical people who can see this; the rest will just get the subliminal message that ".NET is now also cross-platform, just as Java".
This is the real damage of Mono. Its existence provides the right excuse for PHB and clueless tech decision-makers to sway the decision towards .NET instead
of Java, because, "hey, Microsoft is also cross-platform now".
The dotGNU strategy (Score:3, Informative)
For those of you saying that RMS is being hypocritical with the Portable.Net project, you should read this first:
Don't get caught in .NET [gnu.org]
With all the RMS-bashing that slashdot has turned into lately, you'd wonder what the point is in providing arguments for your position.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:"M$" (Score:5, Funny)
I $trongly di$courage the u$e of '$' when writing Micro$oft. A$ parent $ay$, it
i$ a childi$h behavior which make$ look like that Micro$oft unique purpo$e i$
to make $. Thi$ i$ totally fal$e becau$e we all know Micro$oft want$ to build
a better digital world where maliciou$ $oftware doe$ not exi$t.
Plea$e $top u$ing '$',
thank you.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No. I am not "four years old". Are you?
I've been around long enough to remember MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, the original Windows NT and all of the
application associated malware that Microsoft has subjected us to over the years. I have also been around long
enough to be aware of the whole OEM strongarm thing, the shenanigan with DR-DOS,the back stabbing of IBM over
OS/2, Microsoft "cutting off Netscape's air supply", Linux being a cancer and TomTom being sued over VFAT.
Been around longer than 4 years.
Used
Re:"M$" (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So you're unable to get your point across by spelling words properly?
That part would be the childish thing about this, anyway.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ahh :) Thanks for clarifying. Now I don't have to wonder how he missed that MS is bad :)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"M$" (Score:5, Insightful)
It pisses off Microsofties, who, being narcissistic freaks, can't stand being reminded that millions of intelligent people hate them, their software and their company with a passion.
I think it has more to do with wanting to see article descriptions that make an attempt at remaining neutral. Using "M$" is as charged and biased as saying "Linsux" or "crApple," and undermines the article post, making what would normally be a news post into an opinion editorial.
Many people want to make their own decisions, and not be told what to think of things before even investigating them. Isn't that kind of spirit how things like the OSS movement started, anyway--not being told what or how to do things, but doing them for themselves?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How about even using a "portable" language defined and controlled by Microsoft? Sure, if you only care about Windows, use C#. But Microsoft has a long history of jerking around standards that it controls to make them impossible for competitors to adopt.
The standardized version of the C# language is not controlled by Microsoft. It's, you know, standardized. If you're paranoid about MS pulling the rug out from under you in the future, then stick to the ECMA standard, and don't use the latest whiz-bang C# 4.0 features until and unless those become standardized too.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You mean like APPL€?
Re:contradiction (Score:5, Informative)
what amazes me is that RMS is saying at the same time that it is good to have a C# implementation, but warns against writing apps in it...
Except that's not what he said. He said it's good to have an implementation but bad to include that implementation and applications that reply upon it in GnuLinux distros and components. It's akin to saying that it is good to have support for FAT filesystems in Linux, but stupid to include a FAT partition by default when installing Linux along with applications that only work on FAT.
... if not outright imbecile, that's at least a very stupid position
Not everything you don't comprehend is stupid. Sometimes, you're just a little bit stupid instead, and so misinterpret the words of others in stupid ways.
Re:Sorry RMS: Linux != GNU... (Score:4, Insightful)
IS the goal to create a useful system or a pure system?
I define useful as something that doesn't contain legal entanglements.
Re:Sorry RMS: Linux != GNU... (Score:4, Insightful)
> IS the goal to create a useful system or a pure system?
Until now Debian has been clearly in the pure camp. Debian, moe RMS Pure than RMS over the GNU FDL. Debian, endless wanking over whether firmware blobs have to get yanked for two major releases. And so on. Now suddenly they are taking the Novell "Mono is just another managed code environment licensed under the GPL, nothing to fear here" position. when everyone else DOES see something to fear even if they ship Mono/Tomboy. Fedora is planning on tossing Mono out of the standard install and RH has never shipped it in RHEL because their lawyers are uneasy.
In the end, if the system isn't fairly Pure it isn't ultimately going to be useful. Patents exist, FUD attacks work.
Basically the only sensible way to treat C# is like Win32. It is OK to import Windows applications using Mono or Wine but basing core parts of the Free World on such apps is unwise. If for no other reason than basing our application stack on APIs controlled by people who want to destroy us is about as wise as the Western world basing our economy on oil imported from the Middle East. An argument can be made that we have little choice regarding oil but we most certainly do regarding Mono as we didn't creep into a dependency over decades we are being asked to walk into this trap with our eyes wide open.
Re:Java? (Score:5, Interesting)
Licensing wise, Mono and Java are fine. However, the patent arsenal for Java has been approved for use by anyone. Microsoft has not done the same with .NET.
Thus, using Mono you are in a very real situation involving IP litigation. With Java, Sun has publicly pledged anyone can use Java, so they'd be hard pressed to sue you for using it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Read the OP. The words are his; I adapted them to point out his dubious stance of criticizing Stallman for calling mono evil and pushing an agenda, while he himself calls the GPL evil and even says that more software should be in the public domain.
I'm not "for the GPL" or "against the GPL"; if I ever release source code it will probably be GPL'd (or BSD'd if I deem more appropriate), but I'm not denying anybody the choice. The OP on the other hand seems to think that developers shouldn't have the right to c
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For once RMS has actually been too brief, and has left reasoning totally out of this brief memo.
Mono is still irrelevant (Score:3, Interesting)
Thank God since nobody except some little fan gang of that guy cares about Mono enough to rely on it.
Of course, if the real evil plan of getting it included like a trojan on a respected, definition of open source Linux distro like Debian works, things may change...
Funny is, people not caring enough to figure Mono is nowhere near to be replacement/alternative to real Microsoft .NET. There isn't a single important application which exists both on Windows and Linux thanks to Mono. Oh some music player maybe? W
Desktop yes ... server no (Score:3, Informative)
Java has the problem of doing things its own way in its own environment. For example no cleartype fonts for X make netbeans painful and horrible looking running it on Linux. No integrated KDE or gnome support because of swing and other issues make it hard to write easy code. Also overiding objects with the super statement is difficult ... at least for me with doing g and paint.
Anyway database access, debuggers, and threading make it scale well on a server. It runs well from a 1 to a 32 cpu system.
Also googl
Re:.NET is an Open Standard (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever looked into why the Microsoft Office 2007 RTM had its PDF writer as an add-on rather than integrated into Word like it was in the Office 2007 betas?
"Microsoft's general counsel told the WSJ that Adobe has threatened legal action unless Microsoft agrees to charge for the PDF support patch, a step it refuses to take."
While Adobe can't lash out against PDF documents, it can against software that creates PDF documents!
Incidentally, the actual MS Office add-on is still free, but the above quote was from 2006.
Re:RMS == bonkers!? (Score:5, Insightful)
C# is important to the discussion because Tomboy, the application Debian decided it must have, is written in C#.
GNU does not have to provide any alternative to .NET. Java is free software and Sun has released all necessary patents. .NET is a copycat of Java. It is better than Java at some things, worse at others, but both are evolving. Java is not encumbered, so why the hell should free software use patent encumbered .NET?
Stallman does not see free software implementations of .NET as a problem since they provide interoperability with non-free software written for other platforms. He just claims free software should not be constrained by such limitations, and I for one agree with him.
Re:RMS == bonkers!? (Score:5, Informative)
http://web.archive.org/web/20030424174805/http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-sscli/msg00218.html [archive.org]
No - just well-informed and cautious. Some people seem to trust that patent holders won't in future want to leverage patents covering tech. that could, invitingly, become deeply embedded in competing products. Others are more cynical / have read the patent strategy manuals and think that that sort of trust is naïvely optimistic. :)
Quite the reverse.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I wish some knowledgeable folks would weigh in how possible it would actually be for MS to do this for C# in particular. (Do they already hold relevant patents?)
I do not know about C# in particular, but about .NET, yes, they hold relevant patents [msversus.org].
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Is there a licensing concern using the C# language, or any of the compiler technology? Specifically, are there any software patents that could be leveraged against the open source community for using the C# implementation that could result in a massive court action? I do not know the details of any agreements (if they exist) but knowing Microsoft's stance on OSS, there is certainly potential for future abuse. Something along the lines of "Use of C# on any non-Microsoft platform is henceforth prohibited."
Since C# and CLI are ECMA standards, Microsoft is obligated to offer any such patents under reasonable and non-discriminatory licenses. That would rule out banning the use of C# on non-MS platforms. They've also gone further and said that any licensing would be royalty-free.
That said... the idea that patents covering these technologies even exist seems to be a myth. I've never seen any actual patents referenced in any of these Mono threads, only scary hype about the possibility that they might exist undetec