Bonum Certa Men Certa

Tomboy is Afraid of Gnote, Its Mono-free Sibling

Nomo



Summary: Tomboy does not fancy Gnote; Jo Shields keeps promoting Mono in Debian and Ubuntu

IN PREVIOUS POSTS which mentioned Gnote [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] it was shown and pointed out that there might be a future for GNOME without Mono, which is a patent trap exploited by Microsoft and Novell. We were not really expecting the developer of Tomboy to draw attention to Gnote, but he just did:



A Note about Gnote



Some people have started asking about Gnote, Hubert Figuiere's line-for-line port of Tomboy to C++. Our stance on Gnote is that it is counterproductive to maintain identical software in two languages. It will be harmful to the community, especially as these two apps inevitably diverge. It will result in duplication of effort, duplication of bugs, and a lot of wasted time for those who are trying to add value to the user experience.

Tomboy is not going away, and it will continue to be developed on the extremely productive Mono/GTK# language platform. Anyone thinking about distributing Gnote should consider the impact on users and their data. When we develop, we should always be asking ourselves, "is this adding value for our users?"


The answer is, "definitely."

After the TomTom row, it is abundantly clear that Microsoft seeks to resolve its serious problems by suing (or 'settling') over patents where its de facto standards -- such as FAT or .NET -- are used. Only a "box of monos" (pun intended) would consider Mono to be a Good Idea™.

As a team, the Debian Mono Group (which is these days a joint Debian/Ubuntu effort) have helped to reduce our footprint by a good few meg in the Jaunty cycle, as part of the Mono 2.0 transition. And now I have a proposal which I’m going to make to the Desktop team at Ubuntu Developer Summit in May, which will save six precious megabytes.


The problem is not just technical; it's not about bloat, either. It is an issue of programmer control (by Microsoft) and legal control (by Microsoft). Moments ago we shared a news report confirming that Windows XP being sold for less than $15. Microsoft is hurting financially because of GNU/Linux and it is actively looking for ways to tax GNU/Linux, thereby elevating the price of its #1 competition. Mono is one such convenient route.

"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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