06.12.09
Real-time Linux Hacker Bill Huey Called the Mono Plan “Misguided”
Update (21/09/09): Huey adds that his criticism of Mono is purely technical and that he never met de Icaza.
Summary: Better to use closed-source Java than to be a prisoner of Redmond; ongoing dialogues about Mono
WHILE LOOKING for some daily videos we found the following gem.
Huey calls Miguel “misguided” (maybe guided by Microsoft), having personally met him already [see update at the top]. He also adds that Java is a lot better than .NET and Mono. That was in 2004, a couple of years before Java was on route to becoming Free software (GPLv2).
Check out this new massive thread which mostly voices opposition to Mono (amongst Linux Today’s readership). In one comment, however, Richard Dale states:
Well Arno Rehn and myself have been quietly working on Qt/KDE Qyoto and Kimono C# bindings for some time and they work pretty well, although I don’t think we done enough to publicize them yet. If someone comes along and writes apps in C# which happen to be as good as Tomboy and F-Spot, and they get included in distributions like Kubuntu, then maybe you’ll have to move somewhere other than KDE.
As far as I know in Gnome there are only applications written using Mono/GTK#. That is very different to writing parts of the infrastructure of Gnome using Mono. It isn’t up to me to decide about what Gnome does, but as far as KDE is concerned there is absolutely zero chance of us basing any infrastructure on Mono. We’re only interested in allowing people to write Qt and KDE applications, plugins and Plasma applets in what some people might think is a tidier language than C++.
Dale is one among those who put Mono bindings in KDE [1, 2, 3, 4]. Arno Rehn is the other [1, 2].
Carla Schroder, the managing editor of Linux Today, has invited more feedback regarding Mono and she personally adds:
The issue is not whether Mono should be available at all, but included in the default Ubuntu image. The pro-Mono comments here are completely ignoring that and instead launching into rah-rah reasons why nobody should object to Mono. (Lotsa luck.) Removing it from the default Ubuntu image and keeping it easily available in the repos is a sensible and simple solution. Thousands of packages do not make it into the default Ubuntu image; it’s not a badge of shame, and I don’t see the sense in including the fat Mono runtime in the scarce real estate of a CD image just to support a few small specialty apps.
One of our readers will explore this issue in more details as well.
I’m planning to do another (different) attempt to get the conversation right in the next weeks, either.
There are patterns of FUD that are used to actually defend Mono. How about this one for a familiar pattern?
DotGNU? They suffer from the same problem. DotGNU only gets mentioned by Mono people, apart from when they’re FUDing them, when they want to deflect some attention away from Mono.
Bernard Swiss argues:
There seems to be some real major, FUD-laced campaigns under way, lately, pushing Mono and denigrating ODF. To to be fair, many participants appear to be absolutely genuine, but there also seems to be some significant upper-tier instigation/coordination “fanning the flames”, so to speak.
Luckily, Mononono is making its entry into Ubuntu. █
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Will said,
June 12, 2009 at 8:17 am
Last I checked, even the venerable emacs doesn’t make it into the default Ubuntu installation, so there’s certainly no badge of shame moving mono stuff back into the repositories as an optional download. Actually, that might be a good thing. If Mono applications are as hot as some would like us to believe, then we should still see people flocking to download them after installation, right?
But about this mono stuff in Ubuntu, for example the Banshee controversy, if the Banshee push succeeds, does that mean that Banshee will be merely a default included app that can be easily removed, or will it then somehow become a dependency of ubuntu-desktop or some other metapackage that will cause its absence to make things more difficult come upgrade time?