Comments

• Agent_Smith

  2010-10-30 00:22:38

  Quote "The fact of the matter is that you can’t write a hello world application without violating some patent, or at least you can’t be sure that you aren’t. "
  
  I'm amazed, on how this humble comment is, TRUE, and SANE, and, too bad for the rest of us, may Saint Ignutius protect us from american US patent system, or else, we're all @#$@#$#@$@#$. ;-)

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2010-10-30 00:26:53

  Figuratively speaking?

• Agent_Smith

  2010-10-30 00:31:46

  Actually, there are so many patents, one day write a Hello World program will be risky . If some patent Troll already has not patented Hello World, for instance.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2010-10-30 00:35:54

  There's one for progress bar.

• eean

  2010-10-29 22:16:35

  You seem to have the philosophy that if you happen to know of a US patent, it is important to honor it. Of course C# is various Microsoft patents; you know this because C# was developed by Microsoft. However most patents are hardly that clear.
  
  For instance you complain about Banshee, due to the aforementioned patents. What is the chance that Rhythmbox does not violate another US patent? For instance I recall that Microsoft sued Apple over patents it had relating to the iTunes UI. And I'm going to just guess that Apple has its own patents over that UI.
  
  What if tomorrow someone discovered that such a patent existed. Would you then stop using Rhythmbox?
  
  What if some patent was found "violated" by Linux (of course that's probably less of a hypothetical). Would you then start a "Anti-Linux" talk at FOSDEM? What about GCC?
  
  Its really absurd how some free software advocates are sounding pretty much like Microsoft patent attorneys!
  
  The fact of the matter is that you can't write a hello world application without violating some patent, or at least you can't be sure that you aren't.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2010-10-29 22:20:18

  I accept your point about the diversity of these malicious patents, but Microsoft tends to do patents in "retail mode" (they use bundles of them to deter countersuit) and for Microsoft to point at the MCP and then at Mono makes an easy exercise of extortion.

• dyfet

  2010-10-28 20:26:04

  Vala is a different and interesting question. At the heart it does show there is both interest in and need for true object oriented development of gtk applications in a language that supports it (python-gtk perhaps?), I believe this can also be largely satisfied with gtkmm which lets you use C++.
  
  Vala also has the problem of being an "unfinished" thing without a sufficiently rigorous design. Hence new releases still tend to break existing code from what I have seen of it. I also never really liked the idea of transcoding languages to C and compiling that way. It makes true source debugging impossible.
  
  From a purely technical perspective the one really interesting thing about Vala is that it directly uses the gobject model. I am sure this makes it much easier to write d-bus applications, since d-bus is explicitly tied to gobject and it's object model, and this is what seems to makes it so difficult to map d-bus objects into C++. Python and the way it uses d-bus seemed more palatable to me than the efforts of doing so in C++.
  
  But what of the threat to freedom represented in Vala? This is not something I had considered before because I was not using Vala. I suspect if the issue is purely on language features, most prior art goes to Java, though that too of course is in rather hostile hands currently. I think if Vala truly became more viable and practical I would have to spend time more deeply thinking of this question.