Bonum Certa Men Certa

What Nessus Teaches About Mono

Statue



Summary: Some Mono analogies, analysis, and news

"THE more things change, the more they stay the same," claims one of our readers, who prefers to remain anonymous. "Got .Nessus in your country's infrastructure?" is the question he asks when suggesting that Microsoft is trying to poison the GNU/Linux operating system so as to gain more control over it because Free software takes over at the expense of Microsoft. The reference to Nessus is a mythological one as the reader explains thusly:



Nessus gave a poison cape as a gift.

Fenrir was tricked into letting an ubreakable chain be wrapped around his neck.

Amherst gave blankets from a deadly communicable disease to a population with particular vulnerability to the disease.

[Microsoft people] are on the way out, and like the dying Nessus want to give C# / .NET as a gift to 'help'.

I'm sure there are other more common examples of poison pills from history and literature.

_______ Nessus' cape: [1] [2] [3]

Fenrir's chain: [4] [5]

Amherst's blankets: [6]


This would be a nice analogy and a valuable reference. To borrow another example from this week's news, the US military coup in Honduras might be worth a mention. To quote from this new report, "First, we know that the coup was led by Gen. Romeo Vasquez, a graduate of the US Army School of the Americas. As we know very well from history, these “graduates” maintain ties to the US military as they climb the military career ladders in their respective countries. That is a major reason why the US trains these individuals." The short story is that several decades ago, more radical leaders in the White House worked to ensure that leader who are loyal to them reign southern and central America. Likewise, Microsoft seeks to infiltrate open source, other operating systems, and even standards bodies.

“We already wrote to explain why Microsoft's community promise is confirmation that this is part of an "extent and extinguish" routine.”Ravi correctly states in his headline: "We will never kill Mono - Says Microsoft"

Of course they will never kill Mono. Well, Mono is good for Microsoft. That it has many issues associated with it is a problem which GNU/Linux is bound to suffer from. Consider this new interview with the developer of GNOME-Do, David Siegel. He explains why he chose Mono and as Tacone points out, "how much he loves c# 3.0 (which is out of standard) and Linq (also out of standard)."

We already wrote to explain why Microsoft's community promise is confirmation that this is part of an "extent and extinguish" routine. Banshee, for example, already uses some of the "uncovered" parts of .NET. This means that only SLED users (customer) can 'safely' use it for a few more years.

GNU/Linux users who understand what's at stake do not want Mono (see comments in LinuxToday for example) and as one person puts it, "Mono is and always was a bad idea. Let Miguel live his Microsoftian dreams in peace but please keep it out of the GNU/Linux reality."

Mono-Nono has this new article about Mono infatuation with Microsoft. As always, it is an excellent analysis from Jason.

I picked this one because I think in 4 short sentences it illustrates most of the points that I see over and over again:

1. It is a representative quote – it’s given as part of an interview, not a twitter, blog entry, or part of a flame war on Slashdot. So it comes across as “official” Team Mono/Novell stuff. 2. It boasts of the “exclusivity” that Novell/Team Mono enjoys with Microsoft. Even if you don’t think this is a problem, I hope you can see how it could be perceived as offensive. 3. It constantly and unconditionally praises the technology. Everything is always “fantastic” or “superb” or “awesome” or “brilliant”. It comes across as worshipful, fanboy stuff. 4. It insults alternatives. Team Mono is not only always singing the praises of Mono/Moonlight/Microsoft, but it is a rare opportunity to degrade an alternative that passes by. 5. It promotes Mono/Moonlight as absolutely the right choice and ready for the most key parts of major projects.

On top of that, running on about Silverlight is a quadruple offense:

1. It has all the negative baggage that Mono has. 2. Plus, there is no ECMA/ISO standard to hide behind. 3. Plus, there is the incredibly offensive and anti-community Covenant. 4. Plus, de Icaza often talks about the exclusive help the Mono Project is getting from Microsoft. So good I mention this one twice.

Now, I’m sure yourself or Mr. de Icaza can justify and explain these sort of quotes – or maybe you don’t see anything wrong with them at all – but from my lights they are pretty close to the “infatuation” side of the relationship chart.


As we showed on a couple of occasions this week, Novell is putting Mono at the centre of its desktop and is integrating that with Moonlight too [1, 2]. Mono advocate Ryan Paul confirms that this is happening.

Banshee developer Aaron Bockover has revealed details about the next major version of the popular open source media player. Banshee will gain photo management capabilities and a custom user interface prototype designed specifically for netbooks.


It is worrying to see Canonical getting dragged into Novell's desktop (Mono) strategy. From the Ubuntu Web site:

In this week’s Packaging Training Session Jo Shields (directhex), of the Debian/Ubuntu Mono team, will be explaining how to package Mono applications and libraries.


Based on what we learned, Ubuntu derivative gNewSense is looking at removal of Mono.

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