01.25.10
Gemini version available ♊︎Novell Spreads Microsoft Inside GNU/Linux Whereas LINA Spreads GNU/Linux Inside Windows
“Shouldn’t we leave the [Microsoft] elephant alone and stop poking it with sticks? Well, the problem is they aren’t going to leave us alone.”
–Jeremy Allison, LCA 2010
Summary: News about Mono and Microsoft sticking themselves onto GNU/Linux; Zenoss and LINA demonstrate correct way to build bridges
David Worthington, a journalist who spent some time with Microsoft and Novell earlier this month, is not promoting Mono/C# (he did this before), but he does promote Microsoft’s F#. Why advance a language (and APIs) from a company that’s a convicted abuser, or simply a violator of the law? Developers mostly dislike or at least distrust Microsoft. Maybe it takes some guts to have principles and refuse to help sinister agendas. Jeremy Allison is not too shy to tell the truth about Microsoft and Mono. From a new article:
Telling it like it is, the Allison way
He’s the man with a conscience in the computer industry. Not too many of them around these days, an era when people attach the name “open source” to anything in a bid to attract funding.
Never mind if the business in question is really not gving away source code.
Jeremy Allison caused a stir in 2006 when he announced that he was leaving Novell because the company had signed a patent indemnification deal with Microsoft.
One could well argue that someone with his reputation could easily do this, as he wouldn’t have had a problem finding a job anywhere.
But then, just tell those who raise this argument that a couple of gentlemen by the names of Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman stayed behind at Novell when Allison left and see how quickly silence prevails.
Jason from Mono-Nono has this update about Gnote and Red Hat (or Fedora):
Gnote and Fedora
The Good: Gnote has a new support team in place with exciting plans.
The Bad: Said support team has to bend over backward to make it clear they are not “anti-Mono”. After effects of the smear campaign against the original author of Gnote?
Those smears (one might call it a “campaign”) can be seen here.
“Banshee is a Novell project that uses non-ECMA bits that Microsoft’s community promise (MCP) does not cover.”Debates about Mono in Ubuntu sometimes heat up a bit. One person ends up bringing forth Banshee as candidate for Ubuntu, only to receive comments like: “Banshee is a very bad idea. Amarok is a totally better option, has been around a lot longer and isn’t based upon Mono.”
Also he is told: “I Agree with Brandon regarding mono apps. Mono is bad. Rythmbox is a great player, they should have kept that player over the garbage mono alternatives. Water under the bridge for me though, i moved to Arch/Linux with KDE. Amarok is a worthy music player.”
Banshee is a Novell project that uses non-ECMA bits that Microsoft’s community promise (MCP) does not cover. It would be better not to promote Go-oo either; it’s just Novell’s attempt to take control of an important GNU/Linux project/program, adding Mono and Microsoft’s OOXML to it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
Here is a better way to ‘embrace’ Windows users, namely to compile for GNU/Linux and then allow them to also try out some applications on Windows. As this press release from Zenoss puts it:
The Zenoss Core project., a leading open source IT monitoring and management solution, today announced the general availability of Zenoss Core version 2.5.1 under the GNU General Public License (V2) is now available as a free and open source solution for the Microsoft Windows operating system. This latest release of the open source monitoring and systems management project enables users to run applications compiled for Linux under Windows with a native look and feel using the beta version of the LINA run-time environment developed by Lina Software.
When LINA reaches full maturity it will be a decent tool for doing exactly the opposite of Mono. With Mono, users can taste a sample of .NET and if they want to use the “real thing”, then they move over to Windows. With LINA it’s the opposite because GNU/Linux is the “master” for which applications get compiled. For the “full experience”, GNU/Linux is required.
Mono developers are virtually going through the garbage can called “Microsoft” to use their ideas by duplicating them. The winning APIs are then Microsoft’s. █
“The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.”
–Bill Gates
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dyfet said,
January 25, 2010 at 5:36 pm
I had not heard of Lina before so I was curious. I did not think the Lina site did a very good job of explaining what they actually do, however, which is a shame. What I did puzzle out of it is they seem to use a baseline Debian GNU/Linux baseline distro running in what I am gathering might well be a rather heavily modified VirtualBox that integrates nicer as their underlying methodology of a universal GNU/Linux platform, since they talk about how Lina is not compatible with existing VirtualBox installations.
They apparently have an native external package manager which I am guessing installs things into the VBox vdi, and perhaps they do things like map user home folders and host drives back into VirtualBox mapped drives and such. I actually do not think this is a bad idea if that is what they have done and I recall VirtualBox is a GPL licensed vm that runs on all the platforms they speak about running on so it would be possible to do many creative things with it.
uberVU - social comments said,
January 25, 2010 at 11:04 pm
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