01.26.08
On Beagle’s Increasing Mono-ization and Novell’s Role
Debajyoti Bera made a comment on a recent post that addresses the Mono problem [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33].
On the face of it, there is some skirting around the issue with trivialities and what seems like incorrect statements. According to a source that got in touch with us: “Beagle most certainly is a Novell project, and it is hosted and developed by Gnome.” The project’s address, http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/beagle/0.3/, seems to pretty much confirm this, but there was an incident in the past where Jeff Waugh begged to differ, the context being OpenOffice.org. Regardless, these Mono complications appear to be getting worse before they get any better. A couple of months ago, in the GNOME Foundation’s mailing list, it was promised that Novell would be notified of the issue and decrease the use of Mono where it is not necessary, at least in order to appease Richard Stallman’s concerns.
Yesterday, however, we found this, which refers to Beagle (in OpenSUSE):
* We would be extremely happy if beagle only used C# for all its operations. Unfortunately, we have to depend on a lot of C libraries for indexing certain files. Sometimes memory leaks (the C type) and segmentation faults happen in them. These are harder to spot since mono does not know about the memory allocated in the C libraries. ¶
This happens to be the observation which got Slated started (I posted this to USENET). As stated in Slated:
“I must admit that I grow weary of Gnome and Novell people constantly trying to distance themselves from Mono and OOXML issues, with excuses and trivialities. I also find it quite ironic, since if (as many of them maintain) there is nothing wrong with either Mono or OOXML, then why would they be so keen to deny any involvement.” █
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.