Unwanted intrusions

Summary: Banshee booster has history trying to put Mono inside Fedora and a new file format, 'LOOXML', is said to be pushed into LibreOffice possibly because of Novell's influence

A FEW DAYS ago we wrote about OMG!Ubuntu! announcing that Banshee had been added to Ubuntu after a lot of insistence from Mono boosters. Over at Groklaw, Pamela Jones spotted the news and wrote, "Can Canonical find any more ways to stuff Mono into Ubuntu?"

Jones and Groklaw members -- like many others including the FSF -- have repeatedly warned that Mono should be avoided, and to quote one such opinion on it, "Banshee is just being pushed now in the latest Ubuntu Natty downloads, bad news."

If one checks where the immense promotion of Banshee came from to OMG!Ubuntu!, it's this person who says in his profile that he is "maintaining primarily Mono packages including Banshee." He was to Fedora what Shields et al. are to Ubuntu -- Mono pushforce. To quote a mail message sent to him from Matthew Woehlke and posted in his blog:

I’m going to guess a lot of that “disrespectful personal mail” revolves around the use of mono? And why shouldn’t it? Lots of people (myself included) have a special hatred of Microsoft’s Trojan Horse, and good reason to question the honesty and motives of people that push it. (Which is not to say I don’t believe there are honest people that are either deluded or simply don’t care.)

If you’re going to promote the technology of a Linux-hostile, GPL-hating, monopolistic bully of a company that regularly engages in racketeering, encourages people to violate the GPL, and is currently suing against Linux… well, some people aren’t going to like that :-) .

Personally, the only thing I would want to do with mono code would be to port it to !mono. YMMV.

This came around the time Fedora leaders were discouraging his lobbying for Mono inside Fedora by putting it more gently: "Red Hat Enterprise Linux continues to not ship mono. Draw your own conclusions."

Another source of Mono advocacy is Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza, whose promotion of Mono extends to CES and it's not surprising that anti-Linux trolls support de Icaza. Microsoft advocates who for years troll and harass people in Linux forums are celebrating news about Mono for Android because they know it's bad for GNU/Linux (there is only who person there who is a GNU/Linux advocate, others are rude trolls who thrive in an unmoderated forum, one is a Microsoft MVP).

The inclusion of Banshee in Ubuntu extends further into the panels, which are always running and usually within sight. They is increasing dependency on Mono at more levels, as this post helps show:

An update today finally sets Banshee as the default music player in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. Since Banshee is now default, it has replaced Rhythmbox in the Ubuntu Sound Menu...

Mono is of course property of Novell (to be AttachMSFT), which received a lot of money from Microsoft in order to advance Microsoft's agenda. Mono is part of this agenda and the relationship to Novell's SLES can be watched in this new video. Novell helps Microsoft in turning GNU/Linux servers into .NET hosts and one of the main people from the FFII seems concerned about LibreOffice, perhaps because of the Go-OO connection. We are currently investigating just how much influence Novell has in this fork because Novell staff (including one whom the OpenOffice.org team rejected repeatedly) dominates the IRC channel/s and the gentleman from the FFII, who fought against OOXML, is concerned that LibreOffice is going to support LOOXML in spite of spin. He wrote: "Expect a fresh format flavour would then be named LOOXML, that’s a perfectly silly silly silly nerd pun on LOL (laugh out loud), XML (extensible markup language), LO (libreoffice) and OOXML (office open XML) and possible other British phrases of general interest. LOOXML is an OOXML-inspired format intended to approximate the OOXML-O10 which eventually is known as ISO/ECMA OOXML transitional. LibreOffice 3.3. will be released January 10. Feel free to put to popular vote if LOOXML or LOOOXML or LO-OOXML suits you best."

Ubuntu was alleged to have adopted LibreOffice, but Canonical denied this later. All in all, yet again we see the toxic poison from Novell (paid by Microsoft) having a bad effect on Ubuntu and other projects. Boycott Novell to defend GNU/Linux. ⬆