Bonum Certa Men Certa

Ubuntu Users Plead to Keep Novell's Banshee Out (and Other Miscellaneous Mono News)

Pleading hands



Summary: Progress on the argument for GNU/Linux without Mono as a dependency

IT IS no secret that Mono boosters are trying to put Novell's Banshee deep inside the most used GNU/Linux distribution. Putting aside vocal people like Jo Shields ("directhex"), who is currently busy attacking messengers that oppose Mono, there are actual users of Ubuntu out there and they do not want the bloat of Mono. To quote a small portion from an ongoing discussion:



Banshee replacing Rhytmbox on the other hand, not so much.

However, it does seem to use 3-10x more memory than RB which is very troubling (60-300MB compared to RBs fairly consistent 25MB),

Please, Please think of those of us who only have 512 Mb of ram in a laptop, or even those with less.


Red Hat is already removing its dependency on Mono. Here is Rahul commenting on the inclusion of Gnote:

A while back when I saw Hub announcing Gnote on April first, it just seemed like one of those jokes but with a predictable weekly release schedule, this application has now improved in leaps and bounds. One of the great things of being involved in Fedora is that you can watch applications and technologies grow from a nascent immature but promising state to something that everybody is in awe about.


Hubert points out, "we are no longer on a weekly release schedule. I'm trying to work on other stuff too :-) but it is steadily going forward."

This is good news for Gnote, which is stealing capturing Tomboy's thunder and delivering it without Mono, which also means a lot less bloat.

The Tomboy team is worried about Gnote and its key developer, Sandy Armstrong (he too works for Novell), takes the fight to social networks along with colleagues. According to this new article from Ars Techica, a key plug-in for Tomboy was being developed as part of Novell's Hack Week.

l developer Brad Taylor created Snowy in his free time as an experiment. It matured recently when Tomboy developer Sandy Armstrong teamed up with Taylor during one of Novell's Hack Weeks in an effort to accelerate progress on the project.


Doesn't Novell want to accelerate the project called Gnote? And if not, why? Does everything have to use Mono, whose copyrights are Novell's and other rights (not just leadership in direction) are Microsoft's? ⬆

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