04.30.10
Keeping Mono Out of Ubuntu 10.04 and Android; HTC Sued Again for Software Patents
Summary: Reminder of Mono’s promotion of proprietary software and attempts at Android inclusion; Klausner takes his trolling tour to HTC
UBUNTU 10.04 has been out for about a day now and reviews of this GNU/Linux distribution have been mostly positive so far. For those who wish to keep Mono out of it, there are new instructions too.
Over at Novell’s de Icaza’s blog, it’s all about Microsoft and Apple this week. This Microsoft MVP announced the use of “Mono’s C# Compiler as a Service on Windows.”
It’s great, isn’t it?
Mono is enriching Windows. That’s partly what it’s intended to achieve [1, 2]. With MonoTouch, which Apple is now blocking [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8], Mono also promotes .NET, but Apple won’t let it be. Novell’s de Icaza writes about that very same issue a little more (no change in policy at Apple) and The Source has posted this strongly-worded response:
That’s how I feel about Mono: don’t give me that shit about Microsoft being selective in enforcing ECMA or non-ECMA coverved parts. Or that as long I get the software from a pre-approved source I’m covered by a “covenant”, as long as I am careful to stay within the lines of the covenant of course.
The bottom line is you have to be insanse to risk large amounts of time and effort that Microsoft won’t choose to enforce its “IP” if your project competes with them. No sane developer would voluntarily add risk to an already risky proposition if they can at all avoid it.
The FSF has already explained why C# is not safe. Microsoft’s patent racket is reaching Android and it doesn’t help that Novell pushes to include C# in Android [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9].
As we mentioned in previous coverage about Microsoft vs Android, there seems to have been some connection between Apple and Microsoft all along. They do compete against one another, but they also share a common enemy that they see in Free/libre software. The big funders of the world’s biggest patent troll are Microsoft, Apple, and Bill Gates (who loves patents in almost every area of life).
Dana Blankenhorn puts forth this baffling analysis:
There are three ways to speculate about Microsoft’s latest Linux patent cross-license, this time with HTC:
1. Microsoft is pushing its weight around (again).
2. Microsoft is aligning with Google against Apple.
3. Microsoft is making peace with everyone.
2 and 3 are ludicrous spin. They are probably not worth commenting on. Blankenhorn asks about Microsoft’s claims: “But what patents? How much? What’s in the fine print? This we are never told. The game has been going on for over three years now — since the first deal with Novell — and the public is still being kept in the dark.”
It all started with Novell (and Novell initiated this) and the latest victim is HTC.
The sad news is that HTC has just been sued again, possibly for its Android handsets. The plaintiff is Klausner, who is somewhat of a patent troll whom we wrote about in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] (more links in TechDirt).
Inventor Judah Klausner added HTC Corp to the list of big phone makers against which he has filed lawsuits alleging infringement of technology patents related to visual voicemail.
LG is also a victim of Klausner and LG — like HTC — pays Microsoft for Linux. Klausner is a patent troll that we wrote about many times before and it is possible that Android will suffer some more from such trolls (e.g. caller ID being removed due to intimidation from a software patent holder), including from those giants who sometimes fund them, namely Microsoft and Apple, which also sued HTC. █
Content is available under CC-BY-SA
Needs Sunlight said,
May 3, 2010 at 8:21 am
The instructions to remove Mono are good. It would be better if Canonical sharpened up and got rid of the Mono Guard before they cause more harm. Microsoft really is a way of thinking and if that spreads, soon we’ll have the Linux distros rewritten to require 100x more resources and re-designed to spread malware.
One mistake in Alan’s latest: it was “DirectHex” who tried to pull one over on Alan by telling him to remove sqlite. “DirectHex” got caught and the correction was made by Evan Stevens back on November 2nd, 2009 :
http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2009/10/29/how-to-remove-mono-from-ubuntu-9-10-karmic-koala/
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
May 3rd, 2010 at 4:11 pm
The Mono folks are developing a Mono version of sqlite.
Needs Sunlight said,
May 3, 2010 at 12:10 pm
If these characters really wanted to help people, they would promote coding in something like Python/Qt or Java/Jambi. These are perfectly cross-platform, and very functional and, unlike MS products, good quality.
http://www.python.org/
http://java.com/en/
http://qt.nokia.com/products
Java and Python are free to use, even in commercial products and services. Same with Qt.
bean.java said,
May 3, 2010 at 9:45 pm
I may be new here and not really know how to fully search for mono but a quick try of the advise here showed that Monono isn’t in Xubuntu 10.04 which is the XFCE remix of ubuntu. none of the mentioned libraries/programs/”whatever” that it advises to remove was found installed
Dr. Roy Schestowitz said,
May 4, 2010 at 1:43 am
@bean.java
I don’t think that Mono is installed by default in Xubuntu.