RedHat had better be right on this one [LWN.net]

RedHat had better be right on this one

Posted Jan 11, 2006 3:58 UTC (Wed) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203)
Parent article: Mono added to Fedora Core

For years now the line from RedHat had been "Mono ain't ever going in so shut up already." Then one day, with no public discussion it shows up in rawhide. They better have the legal ducks in a row on this one because a year from now it will be a decision that can't be unmade.

As all who have been following things Mono should know, the GNOME guys have been hellbent on rewriting pretty much everything in C# with the only holdup being RedHat's constant refrain of "Well you guys can do that but since we can't ship it....." Now that that is settled I'd expect a frenzy of pent up energy to be released and GNOME to become a .net project for all intents and purposes by this time next year.

Which is probably about when the SCO foolishness will be playing itself out and the patent wars heating up. So if this is a trap the community will be just about dead center of it when it springs.

And since RedHat never publicly discussed exactly what legal problem they saw originally and is being equally silent as to what caused them to suddenly change their mind, all us interested bystanders can do is sit around and watch the fun. Just hope Debian keeps mono out so we will have one safe distro left.

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RedHat had better be right on this one

Posted Jan 11, 2006 5:37 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

>> and GNOME to become a .net project for all intents and purposes by this time next year.

this is ridiculous. even if it were desirable, even if all gnome coders were in favor of such a move, you would not see such a migration in so short a period of time. mono will continue to be a strong option.

>> So if this is a trap

set by who? why?

>> And since RedHat never publicly discussed exactly what legal problem they saw originally

how do you know it was a legal issue? as far as i can tell they simply didn't want to endorse a tool being promoted by its chief competitor novell.

>> just hope Debian keeps mono out

mono is packaged for debian and has been cleared by debian people with regards to these so-called issues

Not going in Red Hat EL

Posted Jan 11, 2006 17:02 UTC (Wed) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

According to Chris Blizzard, Mono isn't going into Red Hat, only Fedora.

RedHat had better be right on this one

Posted Jan 12, 2006 4:11 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]

"GNOME guys have been hellbent on rewriting pretty much everything in C#"

Except for the part where GNOME developers haven't rewritten anything in C#. There's plenty of *new* development in C#, most of it by people who aren't core GNOME developers, and those apps are targetted at GNOME, but C# becoming "the" core of GNOME is not likely anytime soon.