http://www.amanra.com

who has started using linix, entry point into linix, produce their software for linix, I love linix

Dude, first, it’s Linux, please. If you love it at least know its name.

Second, “resign it to the history books”? You really want to talk about “history books” when talking about this? Please, check the history books or the current newspaper for about what microsoft have to offer about all this stuff. Check the OOXML and the current Yahoo! news and you’ll see the kind of dirty game *always* played by them and on 10 years check the history books to see what they say about of all this shit.

If you love GNU/Linux so much, please gimme a break and try to program on a really free multiplatform language. There’s a lot out there without any kind of microsoft “poison”.

Linix current suffers from a lack of comerial companies being willing to produce their software for linix.

No, the world current suffers from a lack of developers resisting to go out the microsoft world because they don’t want to learn anything else. That’s the point.

Mono for companies like the one I work for is an entry point into linix. Without mono we wouldnt even consider supporting it.

Linix current suffers from a lack of comerial companies being willing to produce their software for linix. Mono hugely reduces that barrier to entry for us.

I love linix and what it has to offer I would hate to see the attitudes being displayed above resign it to the history books.

In fact I’m considering making the distro an XFCE release and just purging Gnome entirely, since I foresee quite a battle ahead trying to keep Gnome “clean” in the future. Overall it’s probably just easier to depreciate it.

The “purge” won’t end there either. I’ll be doing a full audit on an ongoing basis, to see what other not-really-Free software is lurking in Fedora.

Stay tuned.

As I mentioned, this is largely a technical thing, and could be fixed if people did the work. Most developers probably don’t feel it’s worth the work.

I don’t know if you got my point but, it’s not broken, no need to be fixed!
They did the work perfectly and we can use the proprietary drivers *only if we want to*. Seems that the most developers involved on Ubuntu thought that it would be a good thing, and wow, it is.

As most business deals are done in private, neither you nor I are party to the reasons why in most of these cases. But I don’t think that the higher invoicing by Novell is a coincidence.

Stay tuned because aside from some news, I’m seeking permission to post details from a leak. The short story is that FUD is still used for marketing; discounts also (heck, Microsoft would cover all expenses if it needs to, if only because hurting companies like Red Hat and Ubuntu is in Microsoft’s interest).

But we’ve now strayed away from Mono and Beagle and GNOME, which is why I posted in the first place. The engineering decisions are largely separated from the business decisions.

That’s reassuring to know. Thanks, Joe.

Let’s think about proprietary drivers: on Ubuntu I can use them or not, and this is the main point to me, I can choose! Xorg will not say to me “looks, dude, I won’t start if you use nv, you’ll need nvidia on your xorg.conf”.

As I mentioned, this is largely a technical thing, and could be fixed if people did the work. Most developers probably don’t feel it’s worth the work.

Joe

Really? You mean like this? [link] The gist: Microsoft/Novell use FUD to market themselves and in the process they say on behalf of their customers (and wrongly so) that they care about patent protection.

Well, you’re using one case to back up your point. Not every company is buying Novell (or Red Hat) for the same reasons, and that includes patent protection or indemnification. As most business deals are done in private, neither you nor I are party to the reasons why in most of these cases. But I don’t think that the higher invoicing by Novell is a coincidence.

Anyway, I am not trying to defend Novell or Microsoft or their behavior. Microsoft has been sleazy about patents for years, and the HSBC thing is just more evidence of that.

But we’ve now strayed away from Mono and Beagle and GNOME, which is why I posted in the first place. The engineering decisions are largely separated from the business decisions.

Joe

But why support a distribution that ships Mono? Aren’t you compromising your principles in some way?

If, as I told, it offers me a way to remove the packages, it don’t affects my freedom of not to use software I don’t want to. I don’t see a problem if it keeps this way.

Let’s think about proprietary drivers: on Ubuntu I can use them or not, and this is the main point to me, I can choose! Xorg will not say to me “looks, dude, I won’t start if you use nv, you’ll need nvidia on your xorg.conf”. Even if a distro comes with “official” microsoft programs ported to GNU/Linux on it and keep a way to remove them completly, I’ll not see a problem.

Btw, my “supported” distro is Slackware, but I like to play and know others also.

But why support a distribution that ships Mono? Aren’t you compromising your principles in some way?

Especially in the libbeagle case, that code is nothing more than message passing, like D-Bus, and is totally inert if Beagle itself isn’t installed and running. Other than some wasted disk space, what’s the harm there?

Joe

As I mentioned in another comment, I’d like to see a citation on the Mono protection thing.

One among several references I can hand over to you is this.

I read the agreement between Xandros and Microsoft, and one of the excluded products was Mono, so Microsoft promises to not sue Xandros over their distribution but excluding Mono and a few other products, i.e. they reserve the right to sue over Mono. I wonder if this is an interesting preview of on what basis they want to fight the free world.

Interestingly, the Novell deal seems to be different, Mono is not excluded from the Novell deal. So Microsoft seems to be promising not to sue Novell over Mono, but keeps the option open for Xandros. Weird but true.

You then say:

On the other hand, it’s a reasonable business argument for those people who have been reluctant to adopt Linux because of perceived threats — and there have been many, unfortunately.

Really? You mean like this?

Microsoft Hijacks the Voice of Novell Customers

The gist: Microsoft/Novell use FUD to market themselves and in the process they say on behalf of their customers (and wrongly so) that they care about patent protection. IOW, lies are used to argue that customers care about what you call “perceived threats”. This argument was reiterated last night by Matt Asay, who could only think of Wal-Mart as the exception (and on that too he had something to say). Wal-Mart executives and Microsoft changed teams so they could be doing each other favour by spreading FUD. I can find that reference from Asay if you pine for it.

Lots of people have been buying Red Hat. There’s indemnification as well. That ought to prove that the “perceived threats” is pretty much void and merely an excuse for Novell’s management. Had Novell acted properly to mitigate threats (either real or perceived), no tactless deal with Microsoft would be necessary and no FUD would hold water.

The broader “protection” thing, yeah, it’s a stupid move by Novell to try to use that as a positive thing in the community. On the other hand, it’s a reasonable business argument for those people who have been reluctant to adopt Linux because of perceived threats — and there have been many, unfortunately.

But I can tell you from an engineering standpoint that there’s absolutely no pressure on engineers to somehow taint GNOME in any way. Engineers are trusted to use whatever language and tools they feel will work for their job. Many of us used Mono because we liked the programming environment — that and the availability of software ported from Java (Java and C# are very similar) were the two main motivating factors in choosing C# for Beagle. Not scaring people.

There is a real disconnect in the company between the people selling stuff (and making public statements) and the people actually writing the code. That’s a good thing.

Joe

As I mentioned in another comment, I would respect this site a lot more if it called for a boycott of Ubuntu and Fedora for just shipping Mono.

As I said on the second comment, we can safely remove mono from Ubuntu. I’m downloading the Fedora 8 DVD and will install it later to check if this is possible there also. The problem is not to ship, is make it mandatory.

As I mentioned in another comment, I would respect this site a lot more if it called for a boycott of Ubuntu and Fedora for just shipping Mono, let alone any sort of GNOME integration.

Why is Novell using its ‘protection’ as a marketing tool? Why would it brag having Mono ‘protection’? Novell has an interest in filling a typical and complete GNOME build with Mono. This way, Novell is seen as possessing an advantage, however illusionary it may be.

It’s mainly a technical one. Yelp just isn’t written to be able to dynamically load these things at runtime (like a Firefox extension, for example). Or conversely, you could argue that RPM is deficient because there’s no way to decide what options you want or not (unlike Gentoo and its USE flags).

There’s nothing to keep Yelp from doing this, other than the fact that it’s quite a bit more work, harder to get right, and much more error prone. I expect that the Yelp maintainer (a GNOME volunteer with no ties to Novell) would be willing to consider a patch to do this.

My concern with this site and its comments is the unfortunate assumption that every action anyone at Novell makes — particularly engineers — is inherently sinister. An amount of skepticism is healthy, but it’s taken to an extreme here. I guess everybody needs an outlet though, and the Internet certainly provides that.

And making this distinction between an application and it’s framework or bindings, is just puerile and evasive, like making a distinction between a shotgun and its cartridges. One exists to serve the other, and only to serve the other. It’s Mono by the back door; an attempt to slowly squeeze it in, one inch at a time, and hope that nobody notices.

Not exactly. If the code isn’t used, what harm does it really have sitting on your machine? I’m no fan of unnecessary libraries sitting on my machine, but it doesn’t mean the end of the world. libbeagle is no more enabling than, say, D-Bus is or NFS. Just because it has “beagle” in the name doesn’t mean that it’s Mono or what have you.

I notice that you’re considering switching to KDE. Why not switch off Fedora entirely, since they ship Mono components? What better way to vote than with your feet? As I mentioned in another comment, I would respect this site a lot more if it called for a boycott of Ubuntu and Fedora for just shipping Mono, let alone any sort of GNOME integration.

Joe

The point at which Yelp gained support for Beagle is not the issue; it is the point at which downstream distributions started pulling in Mono bindings as default dependencies, that is the immediate problem – as is my concern that Mono applications will follow soon after. It’s the next logical step in this seemingly unstoppable deterioration.

Right now, on this Fedora box, I am using Gnome and Yelp, which pulls in libbeagle as a dependency. There is nothing I can do about that, short of downloading the sources and trying to figure out how to rip out this dependency.

I do not, nor will I ever use Beagle, nor any other Mono application, so why the Hell should I be forced to install Mono bindings that I will never use, that were not previously required, but apparently are now mandatory in this distro? And from my research so far, Fedora is not alone. What do I do … dump Gnome, after all these years, for the sake of just one undesirable component? That is rapidly looking like the only option.

And making this distinction between an application and it’s framework or bindings, is just puerile and evasive, like making a distinction between a shotgun and its cartridges. One exists to serve the other, and only to serve the other. It’s Mono by the back door; an attempt to slowly squeeze it in, one inch at a time, and hope that nobody notices.

Well I noticed, and I would very much like to retain my previous option to not have those components, but sadly it looks like I have lost that particular Freedom.