LWN.net Logo

novell die-off imminent?

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 20:17 UTC (Tue) by gravious (subscriber, #7662)
In reply to: novell die-off imminent? by b7j0c
Parent article: On Novell and Microsoft

Though the way you phrased it is a tad coarse for LWN I feel it is true that there had been some concerns about Mono and patents. It does seem that Novell were saying "oh no - it's all right, Mono is _fine_" while everybody else was going "um, this _the_ Microsoft we're talking about here". When Fedora gave Mono the green light I think most of us relaxed but now Novell seems to be saying "Mono is covered (now)" which if correct sucks either way.

I think it should be recognised by distribution creators that .Net and Java are really MS and Sun vehicles and that the less we rely on them the better. Sure there's some cool Mono and Java apps (Beagle, Tomboy, Eclipse, Limewire) but languages/platforms should be completely company agnostic. Who owns C? Who owns Python? I feel we all do in a communal kind of way. But when it comes to Mono/.Net and Java you know for sure all roads lead back to Redmond and Menlo Park. We should tread carefully. I wonder how easy it would be to make a version of Ubuntu without Mono and Java?

I know there are more imporatant things in life :)
Anthony


(Log in to post comments)

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 21:20 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

well in a way if this was to come to a head, maybe now is the time for it to happen, before mono becomes deeply integrated into popular distributions.

as of now, purging mono and living without it appears to be relatively painless, and once again this validates the open source ecosystem of tools as compared to monoculture (pun intended!).

novell die-off imminent?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 22:28 UTC (Tue) by N0NB (subscriber, #3407) [Link]

So far as I know, living without mono is quite painless as I don't have it installed anywhere. Java is another story as several apps depend on having it available although Debian does stay away from Sun's version. Worse is Flash which has no real work-alike available. I hold it in disdain, but keep it installed for the odd webpage that uses it which is generally for entertainment purposes and could probably be excised without too much pain. NoScript helps with that a lot.

Copyright © 2008, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds
Powered by Rackspace Managed Hosting.