GNOME Zeitgeist Decides Not to Go with Mono

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2009-06-03 16:37:21 UTC
Modified: 2009-06-03 16:37:21 UTC

Summary: Another new case of rejecting Mono follows several others

RED HAT wanted to remove Mono from Fedora and it finally went ahead and did it. The Microsoft vs. TomTom case raised awareness and led to greater opposition to Mono, but there are other factors at play (some of which not related to patents, either). Only such rational opposition to Mono prevents GNOME Zeitgeist from stepping on a trap. To quote from a new blog post:

Before UDS, GNOME Zeitgeist was getting some good attention, but sadly we never got directions from anybody concerning the engine. All of the Developers are actually students so our time and resources are limited. This however all changed during UDS. Thanks to David Barth and Emmet Hikory who took the time to sit down with us to understand Zeitgeist, thus setting new directions for the Zeitgeist “Service” as well as a strategy to avoid any political problems (sorry guys I am a Mono fan boy, but sadly the 2 other maintainers in the Team aren’t, so no worries the only language the engine would be ported to would be C). And for the first time we have a semi roadmap, thanks to the UNR team Milo, which we never got to set up since we were busy developing and going with the flow.

The concern about Mono in Zeitgeist is one that we wrote about before [1, 2].

Yesterday we wrote about Easy-LTSP dumping Mono and there is a more extensive article about it right now.

Even OpenSUSE recognises drawbacks of Mono

Mention Mono in a story and you are certain to draw two kinds of readers - the followers, those who have drunk the kool-aid ladled out by Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza, and the detractors, who realise that it could cause them patent headaches a few years hence.

[...]

Easy-LTSP was originally written in C# but, according to the OpenSUSE project "Easy-LTSP was designed to work on any distribution, but unfortunately it is not integrated anywhere other than openSUSE, discussing with the upstream LTSP developers suggested the slight reservation could be due to it being written in C#."

Easy-LTSP is being rewritten to include new features and OpenSUSE has now decided to use Python instead, "which would be easier to attract more contributors and increase possibility that users of all distributions running LTSP server can benefit from it inclusion in their preferred distro."

Might this be the beginning of a trend? ⬆

Comments

Needs Sunlight

2009-06-03 19:25:08

C# is rather a poor technology anyway. It's not going to catch up to Java because of the MS taint in the design, the development, the developers and the shrinking user community. C# is fake open source, being tied to MS and Windows.

The last obstacle, for some, with Java is gone, now that it is open source. http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2006/11/at_last_open_source_java.html

Roy Schestowitz

2009-06-03 19:27:43

There is a lot of good Java news this week.

Oracle to consider Java-powered netbooks and phones. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1184495/oracle-invest-heavily-java

Java Applications shop is here. http://ostatic.com/blog/sun-execs-debut-java-app-store

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GNOME Zeitgeist Decides Not to Go with Mono

Even OpenSUSE recognises drawbacks of Mono

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