Summary: Novell's biggest patent liability -- with Microsoft patents that Microsoft excluded from its Community Promise (MCP) -- is being pushed into Ubuntu GNU/Linux
SOME MONTHS ago we congratulated Canonical for removing the Mono-based F-Spot from Ubuntu Netbook Edition (NBE) 10.10. But Canonical has just added to Ubuntu Netbook Edition something even worse. It decided to added the patent trap (excluded from the MCP) called Banshee -- a Novell product which the Mono lobbyists have been pushing into Ubuntu for well over a year. The latest OpenSUSE is already afflicted.
Thanks to Sebsebseb for alerting on about
this poor decision from Canonical, which will replace a decent media player with a bloated Trojan horse from Microsoft and Novell:
As we told you a little while back, Banshee is now the default media player for Ubuntu 10.10 NBE and Alpha 3 sees the netbook interface for it enabled by default.
This addition is good news for Microsoft, which is also pushing Novell to promote .NET at API level, software patents aside. Earlier this week we wrote about
Novell's helping hand to Visual Studio, which .NET booster David Worthington is
promoting right now while ZDNet
promotes it in the context of mobile devices. [
via]
With Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2.0, Mono said it has created an easy way for .Net developers to build apps for the iPhone and (soon) Android platform.
Anyway, we encourage Ubuntu users to
politely convince Canonical not to accept Banshee (
which many users detest anyway). Ubuntu is
not a democracy, but there is still room for consultation. We sometimes worry that certain people in Ubuntu underestimate the Mono problem (the
CTO is shrewd enough to understand the dangers) and it's not helping that Microsoft is now supporting Jono Bacon with a free copy of
Vista 7. From
his Web site:
While I tried to get this working in Ubuntu, this particular hardware is not well supported so I needed to use Windows. I contacted a friend of mine at Microsoft and explained the project and she kindly hooked me up with a boxed copy of Windows 7 for the laptop.
This morning we showed that
The Source had warned that Mono boosters are talking over parts of Ubuntu and since many GNU/Linux users depend on Ubuntu, this is risky business. The same is being done to MeeGo at the moment (Novell is pushing Banshee into it [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6]).
⬆
Comments
twitter
2010-08-07 18:12:56
I wonder if he will answer or "moderate" it.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2010-08-07 18:22:36
Jono ought to understand that we defend freedom; he doesn't need to daemonise the site using lies.
twitter
2010-08-08 18:19:27
If Jono subscribes to Richard Stallman's excellent news feed, he might also have noticed the use of the term Micro$oft there too. I quit using both Micro$oft and M$ because I was afraid that Google is not picking up the terms, not because trolls wasted lots of time on this trivial issue. Google should fix this issue because it is clear that serious criticism is intended by users of the terms and it is clear what the terms mean.
If Jono can't do better than this, Canonical should get someone who can.