Stop the insanity and drop Mono now [LWN.net]

Stop the insanity and drop Mono now

Posted Oct 21, 2004 5:13 UTC (Thu) by LinuxLobbyist (guest, #6541)
In reply to: A couple of applications from your future desktop by simon_kitching
Parent article: A couple of applications from your future desktop

Yes, that is what I'm wondering as well.

Let the assimilation begin.

I've read the arguments, and I don't buy them. Miguel and the other Mono proponents are completely ignoring history. If M$ can figure a way to crush FOSS, it will. This just gives them a toehold to do just that.

While M$ might not succeed in crushing FOSS with the Mono toehold, the potential for the need to rewrite large portions of GNOME if Mono takes hold among developers of core GNOME apps could be devastating. Mark my words, it WILL happen.

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Stop the insanity and drop Mono now

Posted Oct 21, 2004 8:10 UTC (Thu) by walles (subscriber, #954) [Link]

The CLR (and thus Mono) is designed to be able to run programs compiled from many different languages, C included.

Thus, in the long run there's nothing preventing Gnome from both running inside of Mono and being written in C to a large extent.

See http://www.go-mono.com/languages.html#c for example.

Stop the insanity and drop Mono now

Posted Oct 21, 2004 23:13 UTC (Thu) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]

Miguel and the other Mono proponents are completely ignoring history.

No, we're not.

The only weapon Microsoft could have against Mono is software patents.

If you look carefully, those nice applications do not use "the Microsoft stack" of .NET libraries. They are based on the ECMA standards, and on wrappers on the Posix and Gnome libraries. The ECMA standards do not have patent issues from Microsoft, and the other libraries... well, every Gnome application would be using those libraries anyway! Look into that, Mono provides (and uses) wrappers for GTK, Mozilla, Posix... if there were patent issues, they would not be in the wrappers, but in the libraries themselves, so I state it again, every application using them would be at risk. Using Mono makes no difference.

Add to this Novell's patent policy (which is intended to minimize the risk that somebody actually starts a patent war against open source projects, including Mono)...

So no, the issue is not been overlooked. And chances are that any other technology that does similar things would be covered by the same patents, including Java (seen the Kodak disaster?), and why not, the new perl interpreter, parrot. At the very least the Mono core is covered by the ECMA standard!

Stop the insanity and drop Mono now

Posted Oct 22, 2004 1:43 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

OK, I'm willing to mark your words. If Microsoft hasn't managed to crush Mono in 5 years, then will you admit you were wrong? And, if they do, I'll admit I was wrong. Personally, I don't think they'll even try; talk about a low percentage effort. Note that quibbling over the .NET emulation libraries is very possible, but that doesn't matter because Gnome software doesn't use them.

Without a time limit, your prediction has about as much meaning as "the end of the world is coming!" i.e., not much.

Stop the insanity and drop Mono now

Posted Oct 22, 2004 4:00 UTC (Fri) by LinuxLobbyist (guest, #6541) [Link]

Five years is reasonable. And, yes, of course I'll admit I'm wrong if it doesn't happen. But with a caveat: only if the policies of the USPTO do not change for the better (i.e.: disallow or severely limit the award of software patents). If the policies change for the better, my assertion becomes moot.

I think many people forget how easy it is for an extremely wealthy company with a near inexhaustible supply of money can game the patent system as well as standards bodies. And it's only getting worse. Witness what happened with the IETF MARID Working Group for but one example. I was (am, actually, but the traffic is near nil, now) subscribed to that list as well as spf-discuss before that and warned of getting too close to Microsoft very early on. And look what happened.

I don't know much about ECMA, but having parts of .NET in the hands of a standards body doesn't give me much comfort, given what I've seen from some standards bodies.

And Microsoft doesn't have to be *right* if they make any kind of claim against Mono in order to hold it in limbo in court for years and drain the financial resources of those who back it and/or distribute it. I personally know people who Microsoft did just that to.

Novell's new patent policy is extremely commendable. It'll likely have an effect against SCO-like (but with patents added) suits of the future. But against the Microsofts of the world, we'll have to see.