05.04.09
Posted in FUD, GNOME, GNU/Linux, KDE, Microsoft, Mono, Novell at 3:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Miguel de Icaza and the Linux Hater blog
Tough love
Summary: A quick look at an unhealthy infatuation and its effects on GNU/Linux
AN ANONYMOUS READER has just expressed his concerns about Miguel de Icaza, whose fascination with everything Microsoft may be just the tip of the iceberg. Does he also have a sadistic relationship with GNU/Linux? Some people think so and our reader sent over some reasonable evidence.
“…almost everything in de Icaza’s blog nowadays is about Mono/.NET or other Microsoft software.”Now that Gnote is entering Fedora and probably other distributions also, it becomes clearer that Mono is no necessity. There is nothing that can be achieved in C# that cannot be achieved in other programming languages which also offer vastly superior performance. As Seth put it in 2004, Mono is an unacceptable risk. But almost everything in de Icaza’s blog nowadays is about Mono/.NET or other Microsoft software. It would be amazing for an outsider to think or be told that such a person is even associated with GNU/Linux, which is constantly attacked by the very same company that he (de Icaza) admires and wanted to work for directly.
We were once told that Miguel de Icaza personally knows “Linux Hater” (he knows the real identity). For those who don’t know, it’s an obscene anti-Linux blogger who flames GNU/Linux developers as well as recites and thus propagates old injurious myths. Some say it's a Microsoft front and our reader — independently — thinks so too. We keep hearing it from different people.
Our reader sent us this pointer to de Icaza’s blog:
Lets please avoid inflicting in GNOME a KDE 4.0 (yes, I know its not the exact same scenario; and yes, I know those clock applets are cute).
[...]
Update: As usual, the Linux Hater Blog has some great commentary. Some of his feedback on KDE 4.0 applies to our own decision making. Worth a read.
“I haven’t been paying close attention, but anyone who recommends Linux Hater is either a useful idiot (in the Stalinist meaning) or is himself taking the piss,” says our reader. “Whichever, the man has put himself beyond the pale. Regardless of his programming abilities, is there any way of having him removed to where he can’t do any more damage?
“That previous blog entry of his has him trashing a fellow Gnome developer (Emmanuele Bassi) while referencing a blog that uses the term ‘feces’ in regards to the KDE developers. This is the kind of commentator he recommends people read:”
“I was getting a little worried that I wouldn’t have something appropriate to close of K-pride week with, but then sweet feces rained down from heaven”
To quote another set of examples:
“the mindset is dangerously close to the rationalization used recently by a KDE spokesperson and lampooned by the Linux Hater Blog” — Miguel de Icaza on 15 Jul 2008
“As usual, the Linux Hater Blog has some great commentary. Some of his feedback on KDE 4.0 applies to our own decision making. Worth a read” — Miguel de Icaza on 14 Jul 2008
As a side note and a change of subject, the reader asked us to see this quote from the man’s Wiki entry:
“Miguel de Icaza [..] tried to persuade his interviewers to free the IE code even before Netscape did with their own browser“
“This is total news to me,” says the reader, “and I do try and keep up. How could Microsoft free up the IE code when they didn’t own it and why would they be contemporaneously trying to BUY Netscape if they had any code to free up?
“Has this man been drinking from the Microsoft well of forgetfulness, you know, the one where people can change the past buy remembering if different from the rest of us?”
Here is a classic blog post from de Icaza: LinuxHater’s blog, I am a fan
I love the LinuxHater’s Blog. This is a must-read RSS feed.
[...]
A first class grilling/roasting of Linux and the Linux community. It should help keep things in perspective.
Epic. What more can be said? █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Mono, Patents, TomTom at 2:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Workaround created to dodge FAT patents, but why is Mono learning nothing from all this?
FAT Lessons
FOR THOSE who have not seen the details yet, Groklaw published “Tridge — Subject: [PATCH] Add CONFIG_VFAT_NO_CREATE_WITH_LONGNAMES option”
It is already covered bt Heise.
A new patch to the VFAT filing system in the Linux kernel adds an option to disable the creation of files with long file names.
This is all happening whilst OIN at al attempt to invalidate those patents (e.g. using prior art), which directly refer to something Microsoft implemented. That initiative is still on.
We’re all familiar with the MS vs TomTom case regarding FAT patents. While that has settled, there appears to be some consequential action from this case…
From this whole thing we not only learned but were also given evidence to show that Microsoft is not interested in "interoperability"; it’s all about what we previously called “taxoperability” [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. A few days ago, a Microsoft-loving Seattle-based Web site wrote about Ray Ozzie’s spiel on “devices, startups, IP and open source.”
“IP and open source…”
Where Microsoft assumes that open source (not Free software) is all fine and dandy with software patents and apathetic towards Microsoft products/protocols that are plagued by this. As long as this “open source” thing only enriches and helps sell more copies of Windows, then Microsoft won’t go hostile. It’s attacking Linux for the most part. As Steve Ballmer put it in 2007, “I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows.”
That’s why they specifically attack GNU/Linux, which Ballmer compared to “cancer”. And that’s why it’s foolish to put a hopeless copy of .NET inside GNU/Linux. It might not be long before Microsoft uses that too as an excuse to knock on people’s doors and demand patent tax (or otherwise force Mono-built applications to change, which would not resolve the API riddle).
Jonathan Corbet Likes Gnote?
Gnote is still receiving quite a lot of press. The editor of LWN.net is offering a good word to Gnote for technical merit, but he is almost totally ignoring the problems with Mono itself.
Some people have complained about its faults for a while; Hubert Figuiere, instead, chose to do something about it in the form of the Gnote utility.
[...]
So what are the problems with Tomboy? For your editor, at least, the biggest issue is the simple sluggishness of the tool. It is a large program which takes quite some time to start up. If one tries to bring up a note on a system which has been used for other things, there can be a lengthy delay before the menu from the taskbar icon appears. Rightly or wrongly, users blame this fundamental slowness on Tomboy’s use of the Mono platform. Now, of course, use of Mono brings in a whole host of other complaints, but we need not consider those here. The simple fact is that Mono adds a great deal of baggage to what should be a small and simple application. A basic note-taking tool should not be a heavyweight program.
Gnote is a reimplementation of Tomboy’s functionality using C++ and GTK+. In a sense, though, it is not an independently-developed application. Instead, Gnote is a straightforward port of the original C# code to C++.
The point to be added is that it’s not about performance, which too is an advantage. There is a recurring theme in the pro-Mono blogs which portrays Gnote as just a matter of changing programming languages for the sake of it. Regardless of the real motivation, these people conveniently hide what matters to us a lot more: the issue of programmer control and legal control. If this is not a simple concept for Mono enthusiasts to grasp, then previous posts about Gnote and the Mono/FAT issue might be required reading [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. █
“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
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