Secondly, Novell is a sellout. They could have stood tall and not knuckled under like Fedora and Canonical stood up for Linux. I take nothing back in that.

Thirdly, Microsoft is opposed to open source and what it stands for and has said so on numerous occasions and have actively spread FUD against it. Their recent litigation against Tom Tom shows what lengths they will go to protect their IP. By using .NET in the form of Mono then we are playing into their hands. It is not a question of IF, but WHEN they litigate, IMO.

Finally, the intent of my rant was not to educate, but to express my confusion and dismay at the inconsistencies in the way that Ubuntu is handling this.

I have no problem with Mono being available, but see no reason why I should be forced to install it in the same ways that I should not be forced to use proprietary drivers and codecs.

The fact that good applications are being written in Mono is a red herring. Tomboy may be excellent. But until this issue is made clear it is tainted in my eyes and in the eyes of many. If Microsoft came out tomorrow and said that Mono was not an infringement on their IP then I would not have an objection.

Until that time I believe that including Mono is unnecessary and individuals who use it are opening us up to unnecessary risk in the same way that Tom Tom would have been well advised not to include FAT32 file in their devices when there were alternatives.

Mono is not an emotional issue with me. Microsoft does not bother me. I don’t use any of their products and want to keep it that way. Leaving Ubuntu is not something that I would take lightly and that is emotional for me.

Ubuntu is driving me away if they continue to push Mono at me. There is talk of adding Banshee as part of their installation. I don’t like being pushed and being spun and that is why I am venting.

For now I will stick with Kubuntu.

and because we see the benefits. but we also see that the world (the software portion of the world anyway) would be a better place if more people saw this, if more people understood, if, as it were, we had greater market share. and we’re gaining.

it’s be a shame to give that up. emphasis on give, because the way we’re going it’s not somebody taking that away, we’re giving it freely.

DBO

i don’t even think they will come after canonical or distro:s themselves. they don’t want our money, they don’t want to give us licenses – for a fee or otherwise – they want to be able to say to their customers who are comtemplating going with open source solutions over their own:

“look, novell got patent protections from us – that must mean we have valid patents. we’re not going to point them out so OSS can fix them, we’re just saying. this means you would be under threat if you go with, say, X linux. so how about going with our solutions, dear CIO? or at the very least novell’s? you’d be safe then. just saying.”

it’s not a tool to hurt us, as users, it’s not a weapon to be wielded in battle, it’s a cloud of uncertainty to gain/maintain market share. at the expense of whom? at the expense of the whole OSS community, that’s who. and we’re supplying the very fuel for this, seemingly willingly in the name of… ease-of-development(?) because we say:

“hey, they’re not gonna come after us, don’t be silly – and if they do, we’ll fix it”. (that’s canonical’s stance).

i know we can fix it, or avoid it, or work around it, if it was pointed out to us, if they came after us, but that’s not what it’s for… it’s market share. it’s fud. it’s embrace, extend, extinguish.

what if someone builds something very useful in mono/c# and it’s adopted by corporations who are smart enough to go OSS, but not wise enough to steer clear of mono. perhaps they even say to themselves “hey this mono solution is cool, because c# developers are a dime a dozen, and we can grab windows developers as well as linux if push comes to shove, we can even port it to run it on windows if we wanted to move back – we’re golden.”

well, the day will surely come after the technology is adopted when microsoft will point to this cloud of uncertainty and say to that CIO “look, patent issues – go with us, we might come after you if you don’t, and that’s costly” – the CIO will shiver in his boots, as they do, and go back to MS. huge losses for OSS. it’s gonna be cheaper than potential legal wrangles.

do they need to come after us to get what they want? not at all. do they need to go after canonical, nope. we’re both safe. we’re also both losing users, and we’re losing market share, and developers, and we did it to ourselves.

would microsoft do this? would they really be so rotten? really? surely not. surely i’m crying wolf.

look at their history. please, just look.

(also consider; if the anti-mono-camp, who simply want mono out of default installs, is wrong – what have we lost? if the mono-camp is, horrors, wrong – what have we lost?)

but yeah, the anti-mono-camp just paranoid. just like every other technology/business/standard were “just paranoid” up until very the last moment right before they were usurped by MS.

Thanks, I used that link you provided in another post (in the post link that replies to DBO’s comment below). Again, I appreciate your valuable input.

VERY nice input, please can you see: Mono – Discussion With a Developer
Perhaps you and others could shed more light on this?

“Why Mono is Currently An Unacceptable Risk”
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blo.....g/mono

I really liked your article, if nothing else it does help me see where some people, especially outsiders, are coming from on this issue. First I should mention that I am a core developer of GNOME Do and as such I obviously hold a positive view of Mono. I’d like to share my view on this whole thing, and I will take it piece by piece. Please keep in mind that as you read it, I intend it all with a very even, and calm tone. I hope it comes across well.

anti-Mono camp:
Most of them are fairly level headed and will have a decent talk with you actually. Some however have spammed our bug tracker and mailing list in the past and left defamatory comments about my personal work. It is upsetting that someone would do that to something I do in my free time. I do not push it on anyone after all. I’d really like to see a lot of the emotions put aside so we can have a real nice talk about the serious issues.

pro-Mono camp:
We have made mistakes and been a bit too strong sometimes. I have gotten too upset when my bugtracker gets spammed or someone tells me I am trying to kill Linux. We need to be clearer, and calmer.

Microsoft (patents ignored):
I don’t think it matters that Microsoft comes up with the spec (I will cover the patent thing, please wait). Microsoft is a company like any other and the fact that they invented C# makes it no worse than if AT&T had invented it or if Sun had or Apple. However Microsoft does get a bigger knee jerk reaction.

Microsoft Patents:
I am not a lawyer, but here is my view. There are parts of mono that are covered by patents here and there, but they are the System.Data namespace and the System.Windows.Forms namespace. Neither of these seem to be used by open source apps such as Banshee/Tomboy/F-Spot/GNOME Do. This nicely sidesteps most of the patent issues to start with, after all, we use GTK# and SQlite. If there are other potential violations someone calmly pointing them out so they too can be avoided would be nice. Nobody seems interesting in actually resolving this, they just want to use it as a way to throw out the baby with the bath water.

The rest of the language is available as an EMCA spec and is therefore not covered by any patents (as goes my understanding). Additionally there is supposed to be royalty free license available, however it has been shown to be difficult (maybe impossible?) to obtain. Someone should exhaustively explore this. I read about someone that did try, but they seemed way too content to say its not easy and didn’t really push to hard for it. No lawyers got involved, which they probably should have.

Mono is for Developers:
So are libraries, like libc, but we ship them because applications use them. The reason mono gets shipped is not because you use it, but because an application you use uses it. Additionally Ubuntu only ships the parts of mono that applications are actually using (you dont have to install the whole thing). The parts clearly covered by patents are not shipped by default at all. Again, I am not a lawyer (and neither is the other side) so we need to really get one involved to find out for sure how this all should be handled.

Risk to the User:
The user is not at risk. Who is MS going to sue? You the user, or me the software developer? If I get sued I wont be dropping the project, worse comes to worse I’ll port it but the chances of it going that far are slim to none. Not to mention there is quite a bit of a patent portfolio on both sides. Something of a patent cold war, they sue us, we sue them, everyone loses. Still, no risk to the end user, even if things go nuclear.

Why Ubuntu Ships It:
Ubuntu ships it because the applications that are the best of the best use Mono (some of them). Tomboy is still better than GNote as it has a more vibrant developer community around it and more plugins. F-Spot is better than gThumb as gThumb is not actually a photo manager, its file system based, not tag based. Banshee is probably going to be replacing Rhythmbox for those who paid attention to the Ubuntu Developers Summit. This will mean that the default music player on Ubuntu will also by mono based. In all fairness, banshee is much more actively developed than Rhythmbox (which is hardly maintained these days). As a distro, Ubuntu makes a good choice to ship software that is developed actively over software that is hardly maintained, regardless of language.

HDD Space:
Its a weird argument. Mono in full uses less than a pennies worth of hard drive space. Yeah its 50MB, but so are 10-15 mp3′s. It’s not that much really. I can see the argument made for it making space on the install CD however. That makes sense until they try to push GNote which requires gtkmm which will take up sizable space to get all the C++ bindings for gnome in there. That and somebody would have to write a reasonable replacement for f-spot.

Memory Requirements:
This is a completely bunk argument. I’ve fixed maybe 100 memory leaks in GNOME Do since I started hacking it. 90% of those leaks were from the C libraries we were binding. The truth is, its easier to leak memory in C where you have to do your own memory management. We have sent 3 or 4 patches upstream to fix big ones and they have fixed the rest or provided us a way to get around the leaks. The runtime itself has maybe a 10MB penalty on memory, but that does not grow with time, and is shared between all mono apps running at the time. In fact the more mono apps you run, the more memory they will share which can often result in a net gain of free memory. To be honest however, we are not nearly there yet, thats just a “imagine if” kind of thing.

Anyhow, thats how I feel. I am not a lawyer, just a coder and developer. I would love to hear what other people think, so long as they can express it rationally and simply without getting emotional over the issue. Also if anyone actually is a lawyer, please let us know =)

DBO

You obviously did not read the complete article.

At the end I clearly said that I don’t agree with Mono being included by default.
I also said I had no idea why Ubuntu is including it.
I even said that I’m removing it off my system.

Next time, before you start flinging mud my way, please read the post in it’s entirety and don’t assume the conclusion without first reading it – Thanks.

Thanks for the suggestions. As mentioned in the post, I’m going to remove Mono, and it’s nice to know there are replacements for one of the apps that depend on it.

You simply discounted everything that was anti-mono. Well, let me put it simply for you.

SCREW MONO. Keep that garbage out of Linux. It has legal issues that have not been addressed by MS and it’s not required. There are many other languages and platforms that can be used to program. No need in supporting MS. Look at MS history, and see how much they have tried to EEE.

The majority of users whether developers or not seem to agree that mono should be kept out of Ubuntu. Dont give a damn about their syntax or if it’s supposedly faster than x language.

Also, next time try to be more partial intstead of a journalist that misleads people with the opening. Soooo biased, one-sided coverage. Digital middle finger.

I don’t use Tracker (pretty sure there’s an alternative to that anyway), F-Spot is just lol (stuck with Picasa, the only decent thing), and Tomboy has been replaced by a faster, less resource-hungry Gnote already.

Gnome-DO is still here though. And the argument that Mono breeds better software, as raised by the Mono camp, is absolute bogus as Gnome-DO is not an original thing at all.