Bonum Certa Men Certa

Reader's Thoughts on Mark Shuttleworth's Response (Regarding Microsoft Codecs)

It was only several hours ago that this mailing list thread came to our attention. Therein, Mark Shuttleworth addresses a post from Boycott Novell. An anonymous reader took it upon himself to respond to it. His response is quoted below in full. Context and background can be found here.






“FOSS distros shouldn't be a vector for licensing problems...”If Mark Shuttleworth wants to be unambiguous about it, he needs to state "is not and shall not" make a deal for closed codecs. I know that comes close to splitting hairs, but his answer will help prevent unpleasant surprises.

If he's dealing with proprietary codecs, or general Microsoft technology, he should be wise from the mistakes of others: there's a trail of out of work CEOs that thought that their company should remain "willing to work with Microsoft, under reasonable and transparent conditions, to further goals that we share" e.g.

"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense -- I deserve it."

--Be's CEO Jean-Louis Gassée



Mark's not dumb. He shouldn't try to act dumb. Just how would Canonical survive a deal with Microsoft when no other company to-date has?

However, that's not as concrete as the mono infection which is listed on the project page:

Subnotebooks, especially those with small HDs or SSDs don't have 100's of GB to spare for mono-bloat for just a few packages. Subnotebooks, especially those with low power CPUs don't have the gigacycles to deal with mono's bloat spaghetti code. FOSS distros shouldn't be a vector for licensing problems, like the ones still unresolved after (10?) years of mono.

Note F-Spot:      http://www.canonical.com/netbooks

Note mono infection:




$ apt-cache depends f-spot f-spot Depends: dbus Depends: libart-2.0-2 Depends: libatk1.0-0 Depends: libc6 |Depends: libc6 |Depends: <libc6.1> Depends: <libc0.1> Depends: libcairo2 Depends: libexif12 Depends: libflickrnet2.1.5-cil Depends: libgconf2.0-cil |Depends: libgl1-mesa-glx Depends: <libgl1> libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-swx11 Depends: libglade2.0-cil Depends: libglib2.0-0 Depends: libglib2.0-cil Depends: libgnome-vfs2.0-cil Depends: libgnome2.0-cil Depends: libgnomeui-0 Depends: libgnomevfs2-0 Depends: libgphoto2-2 Depends: libgphoto2-port0 Depends: libgtk2.0-0 Depends: libgtk2.0-cil Depends: libgtkhtml3.16-cil Depends: libjpeg62 Depends: liblcms1 Depends: libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil Depends: libmono-addins0.2-cil Depends: libmono-cairo2.0-cil Depends: libmono-corlib2.0-cil Depends: libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil Depends: libmono-sqlite2.0-cil Depends: libmono-system-data2.0-cil Depends: libmono-system-web2.0-cil Depends: libmono-system2.0-cil Depends: libmono2.0-cil Depends: libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil Depends: libndesk-dbus1.0-cil Depends: libx11-6 Depends: libxcomposite1 Depends: mono-runtime Depends: sqlite Depends: sqlite3 Recommends: dbus-x11 Recommends: dcraw



I fought to mention that subnotebooks are often being used in environments/situations where the instability caused by mono causes more harm than in more relaxed situations.

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