Bonum Certa Men Certa

GNOME-Mono Dependency Revisited (Updated)

Here is an interesting nugget of information. Slated, a reader of this Web site, wishes to share his new discovery with us.




I was horrified to discover the following, just moments ago:

~]# yum update [snip] --> Processing Dependency: libbeagle.so.0 for package: yelp

”Therefore the core of Gnome is now Mono dependent, just as I predicted it would eventually become.“As you may or may not know, Novell's Beagle search tool is built on Mono technology, and Yelp is Gnome's built-in help system (i.e. a core part of Gnome). Therefore the core of Gnome is now Mono dependent, just as I predicted it would eventually become.

It's hardly surprising that this infestation comes to us via Novell, since Miguel de Icaza is deeply connected to all three entities; Novell, Gnome and Mono. And again as you may or may not know, Icaza is a hair's breadth away from being a Microsoft MVP in his activities, regularly attending Microsoft developer conferences and private meetings. Indeed, it would not at all surprise me if de Icaza had MSCE certification by now.

I'm going to blog this, but before I do, I'll need some confirmation. Specifically: Every build is unique to the build host, and this version of Yelp is built by a third party who maintains recent versions of Firefox for Fedora Core 6 (Fedora's /official/ Firefox release on FC6 is stuck on the 1.x branch. They only maintain Firefox 2.x for Fedora 7 and above).

Since Yelp is also dependent on Firefox (it uses Gecko) then a Firefox update pulls in a Yelp update by dependency, and the version of Yelp required to utilise Firefox 2.x support libraries is different from the official 1.x release for FC6. Thus the maintainer must also rebuild and release newer versions of Yelp on his repo, to satisfy that dependency.

The only Fedora 7 system that I have is a headless server, and thus devoid of many things like Firefox and Yelp, but I might easily assume that the official Fedora 7 builds of Firefox and Yelp do also pull in libbeagle as a dependency. I'll have to verify.

It is possible that this third party has enabled a configure option that is not the default. Even so, I am deeply troubled by this discovery, since it is at least suggestive of the future direction that Gnome intends to follow - just as I suspected - with Mono fully integrated into Gnome. The mere fact that such a configure option is even there at all, would suggest that there is a concerted effort to poison Gnome with Mono at the core developer level.

FYI: The third party repo is here:

http://dribble.org.uk

I'll be contacting the repo maintainer today, to ask him what's going on, but I suspect he'll be blissfully ignorant of the problem, if he's running an automated buildsystem. I'll also check the SRPM; the spec file may have comments that reveal the truth.

As a side note; I would just add that this repo maintainer is also in violation of Mozilla Corporation's trademark policy, since he is distributing a modified build of Firefox that retains the Firefox€® trademarked name and logo. Between encumbered components like Mozilla products and Mono, the so-called Free Software tree is being slowly poisoned, and there doesn't seem to be many who care this is happening.

My instincts tell me that this is a very sad day for the Gnome project; the turning point at which Gnome essentially became Microsoft property.




This seems to shatter Jeff's argument, after he requested a correction. For all it seems, GNOME is indeed becoming dependent on Mono.

Mono is Novell



Update: mind the following ongoing discussion (ignore the trolls too)

It seems like it's getting harder and harder to avoid Microsoft IP, thanks to people like you and de Icaza. Thankfully there are those who are prepared to do the work to undo the damage you're doing.

And even if Gnome /does/ become infested with Mono, that's no big deal, right? After all, Mono /is/ "Free Software", isn't it? And it has /nothing/ whatever to do with Microsoft, and I'm sure Microsoft /will/ keep their non-legally binding "Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory" "promise", right Jeff. Microsoft would /never/ dream of using their IP claims to undermine Free Software, now would they? Nor would they ever make exclusionary deals to "protect" /one/ GNU/Linux vendor from .NET patent litigation, but not others ... right?

Oh wait...

So once you've finished poisoning the Free Software tree with encumbered Microsoft technology, just make sure to send me the invoice, so I know who to write the cheque out to. I wouldn't want to be caught running an "illegal" GNU/Linux distribution without paying Microsoft the correct "protection" fee, now would I?

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