I just want to throw my size 10 and a half boot in on the whole Mono controversy.
First one link that some may have not seen
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx.
The community promise is legally binding. All that it contains is a promise that you can do whatever the hell you like with anything under it. If you sue Microsoft for anything you wont have a leg to stand on because they own the patent and they dont “sudo apt-get autoremove mono-common” claim anything for use of the patent. Its quite simple, use mono if you want if you don’t “sudo apt-get autoremove mono-common”.
F-Spot and Tomboy are already in Ubuntu and there isnt too many programs like them. F-Spot is just a simple picture editing, an import program and its good apart from a few bugs but nothings perfect. I dont really use Tomboy. I use Banshee as my default media player and I find it quite good too because I hate having to use two different programs simply. Its not a bad media player though missing some functionality but its new enough so that will come with time. Its a step towards having something along the same lines as ITunes or Windows Media player.
We should judge programs on how good they are and not what technology they are built using. So no more of this mono hating its been beaten to death. If there was a patent question I would be against it but its not so I say why not?
The main argument against it is that its Microsoft technology so its bad, well Mono is free software it just is a compatibility thing. Businesses find it hard if they have in house software written using C# or other Microsoft technologies and Mono allows them to switch. Argument 2 is that its helping promote Microsoft technology and it kinda does but silverlight isnt used too much outside of the Microsoft sites and there is no real reason to use it with all the other technologies available. So adding moonlight functionality is similar to supporting MP3s and WMA media formats in my opinion but we can enable it by default if we wish. It just allows us to access the sites and that is a good thing. I dont see the patent question as an issue any more so I dont accept it as an argument.
So its controversial but we have to accept it end the debate and if you have a problem make a better program to replace the Mono ones and ask for it to be included instead if you want.
We should be embracing good software because Free Software is about FREEDOM so we shouldnt have such a barrier to anything free and Mono is (Its under GPL).
Barriers are what the proprietary world uses.
Regards
Shane_Fagan
what is your thoughts on qt being rejected from gnome?
Please read more stuff on the subject, like http://mono-nono.com/2009/07/08/this-doesnt-fix-everything/ before posting.
I’m not going to make any decisions about the community promise for the time being but I can recommend reading this SFLC article – http://is.gd/1yVCY
@Dougie
Open Specification Promise != Community Promise.
“We should judge programs on how good they are and not what technology they are built using.”
By that logic Amarok and K3b should be defaults in ubuntu instead of Banshee and Brasero …
What do you mean “Open Mind”? Those that agree with you? So those that don’t agree with you have a “Closed Mind”? That’s a pretty closed minded opinion hiding between the lines.
What do you mean with “very biased stuff”? Most developers who agree that Microsoft’s promise is valid, binding and compatible with the GPL are:
Microsoft employees
Novell employees
Mono developers
Mono based application developers.
Is this what you implicitly mean by “not(very biased stuff)”?
Food for though:
If you have a very big and powerful company which has done many actions that hurt us, which at this moment is still doing (for instance lobbying for software patent legalization in Europe), you shouldn’t feel strong suspicion when they make an apparent act of benevolence, and which is dividing the community?
Ever heard of divide and conquer?
Silverlight is rather more important than you make out… the primary alternative (and market leader in that segment) is Adobe Flash, which is extremely closed and proprietary and their own implementation’s quality on Linux (and other platforms, actually), leaves a great deal to be desired. Moonlight shows great promise as a way to get that kind of rich content through a much more open system (Silverlight has been fairly open from the start).
Of course, what would be still better is the use of HTML5 and related technologies under the newest crop of decent browsers, which can do a lot of that kind of thing with no need for any pesky plugins.
“Businesses find it hard if they have in house software written using C# or other Microsoft technologies and Mono allows them to switch.”
That would make Mono something like Wine 2.0: always trying to catch up with implementation bugs and design problems that Microsoft introduced, and never fully compatible with the API abuses that the customers can think of (and those customers then blame Mono and the free desktops if their software doesn’t run correctly under Mono).
Oh, man, your statement is so wrong: “We should judge programs on how good they are and not what technology they are built using.”
Many have warned against this absurd approach, and unfortunately it seems that the whole “Open Source” community doesn’t give a damm about real freedom. And not learning from previous mistakes (e.g. TomTom, SCO, OOXML, and other). First mono. Then what… isn’t Novell opening the path to Microsoft for imposing Silverlight? Oh, I’m feeling flashed again…
Shanefagan,
Agreed!
I always try to keep a little humor in there, even when I am making a rant posting.
I think most of us just want Linux to be a success, even if we don’t always agree on how to achieve that (or even what “success” means!)
You seem to be missing one important point: the community promise doesn’t cover every Microsoft patent on .NET technologies implemented by Mono.
Even some parts of the library under the System namespaces aren’t covered by the community promise.
So, this is a good step but it’s just not enough. We can’t rely on C# with full safety yet.
There are great applications relying on Mono (I use some of them myself) but that’s not enough to give up the fight. We should try to get Microsoft to open C# up (fully) or we should encourage alternative applications of similar functionality not relying on these technologies.
Ok I retract the ill-informed garbage statement. I read your post and it actually was quite good, I was just angry that the person did it without leaving his details.
Ill answer this first “When you say you want people to keep an “open mind” and “listen to the discussion” what you really mean is “shut up and go along with Novell and Team Mono””. No I just want all the talk to stop its very annoying. Mono software has been included in ubuntu for a good few releases now and not a peep out of Microsoft. They promise that they wont sue you and still people complain. Yes Micosoft are huge, proprietary and want everybody’s money but they not only havent sued but they say that they arent going to sue.
“you can do whatever the hell you like with anything under it” I know that it isnt in there but I didnt want to have to start quoting the entire text to explain it.
The main point of my post was to lay out what I think and why the whole debate is redundant at this stage. I wouldnt think you agree with that because you are a from an anti-mono site.
I know we should always be careful when dealing with legal matters but at this stage it seems a little excessive.
Its not needed because GTK+ is similar.
I find that strongly lobbying european politicians into legalizing software patents kind of grants them the “doing something and it’s really bad and not reassuring at all, no matter what sugar coating they dress up with” award.
But if .NET on Windows has a bug and Mono fixes that bug, then all Windows .NET apps that rely on this bug will fail on Mono. And the blame will unjustly be put on Mono and on the free desktops. And Mono will have to decide whether they introduce the bug in their software for compatibility reasons, or whether they want to be incompatible with existing Windows .NET apps.
I hate anonymous posting.
@ooopsss
I don’t think I said it was the same, perhaps I wasn’t clear. I just said I wasn’t going to make any decisions, the referral to the SFLC article is valid in context as there hasn’t been an announcement on the Community Promise that I’ve seen yet.
Mono is a different story to wine but to port programs written in C#… etc was why mono was started. Mono doesnt have to follow Microsoft to the letter actually I hear that some of the mono components run faster than on windows. They have their own code if Microsoft’s one has a bug that doesnt mean the Mono one will have the same bug.
Well thats a statement that you should ask someone who knows more about the subject. Programming languages are very flexible anyway if the build fails in Mono just debug it and change the code slightly. No open source implementations of proprietary software are perfect look at Gnash the open source implementation of Flash.
Well Amarok is ok but listen is quite similar and K3b is good too but cant we have an all in one music and video player? Adding more dependencies is always a bad thing and adding qt to the GNOME desktop would be a mistake.
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Shanefagan,
Hey thanks for not calling my writing garbage!
I know that the talk is annoying. I agree 100%. The problem is some of us really do think this is a serious problem.
If we do stop talking, then the serious problem is stuck. That’s what a lot of companies rely on – do something wrong and wait for people to get tired of talking about it.
You are right I don’t think it is redundant yet, because I still see a lot of misunderstanding from people. If I didn’t see all the misunderstanding and felt like people really understood and *still* were OK, then I would leave it be.
I hope you see where I am coming from!
Thanks!
@shanefagan,
Hi! I am the author of that “ill-informed garbage.”
Did you notice, per chance, that the very first response was from Miguel de Icaza agreeing with my point in his own friendly way:
“We are aware of that, after all, we write the software.”
Of course, they haven’t fixed the problem yet, but I’m sure they will any second now.
There are a lot of valid concerns with mono. Your post here, and your flat rejection of anything critical of mono marks you as closed-minded as you would like to portray mono critics.
For example, the Community Promise most certainly does *not* say “you can do whatever the hell you like with anything under it”. That you think so, shows you have not “read too much” and do not understand the Community Promise nor people’s concerns. Not just mine. I mean people like Red Hat, the Free Software Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center.
When you say you want people to keep an “open mind” and “listen to the discussion” what you really mean is “shut up and go along with Novell and Team Mono”.
I’m sorry to say some of us feel that is the wrong path to go down.
Have a nice day!
The comment : “Mono software has been included in ubuntu for a good few releases now and not a peep out of Microsoft.” is a real worry. Just because they haven’t sued for the last few releases doesn’t change the fact that they might want to in the future. The promise is a start, but certainly not the whole story and if Ubuntu were to start seriously worrying Microsoft, then you’d see the more usual side of Microsoft emerge – the one that drove many of us to try Ubuntu in the first place.
Just because Mono has been included for the past few releases shouldn’t make be an argument for keeping it.
I’ll miss Banshee if Mono goes south, but I’m sure alternatives will crop up – that’s pretty much how open source works, right?
Well in the TomTom case it was a completely different story and I think it was something about the use of a particular Microsoft patent that was the problem (It was something to do with long file names I think but others may know more).
SCO are completely different altogether they are saying that linux contains unix source.
OOXML no one has been sued over it and I think its another community promise thing.
Moonlight is the mono implementation of silverlight and is under the same agreement as mono.
Is it not inconceivable to think that Microsoft likes the fact that the Mono Project exists, in a way it taps into “the dark side” where people have not been previously exposed to the world of .NET because they didn’t want to fall into the expensive, Microsoft ecosystem?
Seems like an easy way to gain further market acceptance if you ask me, and they don’t even have to do anything.
and adding mono to it is not a mistake ? It is another dependency.
and to be realistic most apps in the Linux land are either in Qt or in GTK+, and both camps have some great apps. For most users it is impossible to run pure GTK+ environment or pure Qt4 environment, there will always be “this one great app” that a person just cannot get rid off…
I really makes more sense for a distro to be shiping both Qt4 and GTK+ users end up installing Qt in GNOME anyway … the same about GTK+ in KDE.
I hate anonymous posting. I have read too much about the subject and want all of the BS and hating to end. People who dont want mono and who post crap like this will always try to make people doubt it but dont believe everything you read. By all means read everything available and get informed and make your own mind up. Here is the URL of a very long discussion with someone who knows what he is talking about http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Jul-06.html
All I want is for people to keep an open mind and listen to the discussion with an open mind and not listen to the very biased stuff.
An open mind is one thing but caution is not a bad thing either, especially geiven some of the comments the SFLC have made about MS’s open specifications.
Very true caution is always good anyway when dealing with legal matters.
Shanefagan,
Moonlight is *not* under the same agreement as mono.
Here is Microsoft’s Silverlight Covenent:
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx
Please read it.
Note it *only* covers Novell. It *specifically* does not allow distribution from non-Novell sources.
It *specifically* does not permit non-PC devices (like phones, PDAs, etc.)
Please, please. Read more about this issue. People aren’t just upset just to be hating on Microsoft. Or not everyone who is a mono critic, anyway!
Ok by an open mind is you read what both sides have to say develop you own ideas and run with that. The problem at the moment is that people post some stuff that is completely ridiculous and pass it off as fact. I dont care if people dont agree with me just to listen. Im not a hater or a lover of mono, I have no links to novell. I just want to stop un-necessary debate.
Actually thanks I didnt see that page.
Its nice to see that that you are at least reading the stuff out there and trying to address the issues. We may not agree on a lot but at least we can talk about it like adults.
Look here http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx#E1D
Read the entire page and get your facts right. Look Q: Is this Community Promise legally binding on Microsoft and will it be available in the future to me and to others?”
I agree but the fact that they havent done anything reassures me and that plus the promise makes me feel secure enough.