04.16.09
“Desperately Seeking Patent Tax” (Microsoft, Novell, and Mono)
“I saw that internally inside Microsoft many times when I was told to stay away from supporting Mono in public. They reserve the right to sue”
–Robert Scoble, former Microsoft evangelist
Summary: Some more thoughts about Mono and also new developments (against Mono)
THERE IS an element of speculation here regarding a new post which is titled “Desperately Seeking Mediocrity”. As resistance against Mono obviously grows, this vague post which does not mention any software package or particular application names argues against rejection of assimilation.
At risk of being too speculative, Jo Shields from the Mono team seems to be complaining right now because people increasingly reject ‘advanced’ (Mono?) applications. Maybe people woke up to the realisation that Microsoft is suing Linux (c/f TomTom) while Novell, additionally, seeds its software to achieve this. In essence, Microsoft needs to plant or circulate a bait before it establishes a strong case. So Jo’s latest rant, assuming it might refer to Mono, simply neglects all this by describing the issue with ‘advanced’ software (Mono?) as one of dissimilarity/similarity while characterising anything but ‘advanced’ (Mono?) as “mediocre”. But again, this is speculative.
And this is why I find myself baffled when reading web forums, seeing the number of people who actively want Ubuntu to be less awesome, by dropping superior apps on the basis of perceived “difference first” attitudes, the feeling that they “don’t want to be using a lagging version of proprietary foo”. Perhaps there’s something I’m missing here. Or perhaps a lot of people on the Internet are idiots. Hard to say.
Are those “idiots” also those who reject Mono? Speaking of which, pseudonym Béranger, who pretends to have ditched Free software, is still experimenting with GNU/Linux (he probably misses it too much). He tried OpenSUSE and had this to say:
[H]ave you noticed that in this review of SLED, the morons have mistaken Mono for the original? “Microsoft .NET applications, such as Banshee, Tomboy and F-Spot, have a prominent place in the SUSE enterprise desktop.”
In more encouraging news, the bestest[sic] project in the world — called Gnote [1, 2, 3, 4] — is now in OpenSUSE-planet and there is also a new release. Gnote replaces Tomboy, which is a Mono entrapment. █
Ed Landaveri said,
April 16, 2009 at 8:00 pm
“don’t want to be using a lagging version of proprietary s???t” To be correct!
Only a loser can call those “superior” applications. No way! People all over the world are waking up to the realization that using mono ONLY benefits Microsoft’s NON-HIDDEN agenda whose ONLY goal it’s neutralization and destruction of GNU/Linux && FLOSS
Down with mono apps! Welcome GNote and anything that has NO mono!
Do NOT forget ONLY GNU/GPL v3 is Open Source. Anything else it’s just a mockery!
ml2mst said,
April 17, 2009 at 9:04 am
I also laughed about those imaginary “SUPERIOR” apps. Now let’s take a look at these supposedly “Superior” apps:
1. F-Spot: Yet another bitmap viewer/editor, for which there are half a dozen MONO-Free alternatives: gThumb, DigiKam (just to name a few).
2. TomBoy notes: recently rewritten by the author in C++, besides that many users have Screenlets installed on Gnome and what do we find in the Screenlets manager? Ah, notes! and like Ed Landaveri already wrote: GNote.
3. Gnome-goo: a supposedly “advanced” program launcher (runner). I installed it, when MONO was still installed on my Ubuntu box. Other than occupying diskspace it did nothing even worth mentioning. The key combination [Alt]+ [F2] will popup a similar “launcher” on Gnome and it even support auto addition.
Someone who calls this MONO dependent junk “superior” will eventually claim that EDLIN of MS-DOS was probably a “superior” text editor as well.
Roy Schestowitz said,
April 17, 2009 at 9:09 am
I am still not entirely sure it was about Mono, but given context and recent events, I thought it might.
ml2mst said,
April 17, 2009 at 7:56 pm
@ Roy:
Please don’t worry about that to much. You’ve made it perfectly clear that you where not sure it was about NOMO.
Quote from your post:
At risk of being too speculative…
Keep up the good work