11.05.10
Banshee (MCP-Excluded Mono Trap) is Not Yet in Next Ubuntu, There is Still Time to Stop It
Summary: Clarifications about Novell’s Banshee, which is a uniquely problematic Mono application that OMG!Ubuntu gives an unnecessary boost to
THIS Web site has already covered and addressed promotion or disinformation about Banshee in OMG!Ubuntu, which highlights numerous Mono-based applications (and sometimes Mono itself) on a routine basis [1, 2, 3, 4]. Here is the latest example of this. The Source responds to this site’s alleged deception regarding Banshee:
Ubuntu has a totally un-biased poll asking their readers “If the decision was up to you which media player would you choose as a default?”
The only choices in this pool are Banshee and Rhythmbox, and the numbers are very close (even considering the poll is being flogged by Team Apologista on Twitter) but the point I’d like to make here isn’t really about the poll itself, but about what the comments reveal.
As we pointed out some days ago, OMG!Ubuntu claims that Banshee will be in the next release of Ubuntu even though this is not certain. Sam Varghese writes about this subject as follows:
Much has been written about the fact that the next version of Ubuntu, Natty Narwhal, will switch its interface from GNOME to Canonical’s own Unity interface.
Little has been said about the plan to introduce a Mono-dependent application, Banshee, as the default music player.
This is yet to be finalised; it is dependent on the application fitting into a single CD, along with the rest of the distribution.
Mono is an attempt to reproduce some parts of Microsoft’s .NET development environment as an open source offering. It has been said more than once, and by more than one authority, that it may could well pose patent dangers to developers as it is core technology from Microsoft.
The man behind it, Miguel de Icaza, a co-founder of the GNOME desktop project and a vice-president of Novell, has been trying very hard for the last nine years to make it an acceptable alternative. Yet it has won few followers.
Last year, de Icaza admitted to having developed portions of .NET, which were not submitted to ECMA by Microsoft, as part of his open source project.
As Microsoft's Community Promise helps prove (the terms show it clearly), Mono (not ECMA-adherent) and Moonlight are patent traps. The latter has just been rendered quite obsolete, so we are unlikely to hear about it in the future. It is developed by Novell staff, just like the Mono-based Pinta for example. We have written about Pinta many times before, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11] and Webupd8 wrote about it some days ago. Why promote Mono applications? They do not advance the cause of GNU/Linux. █
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