01.30.08
Quote of the Day: Slashdot Users on Novell’s Mono in GNOME
Mono has returned to some people’s attention. Last week, for example, an IBM Vice President rejected Mono. We wrote about other Mono problems just a couple of days ago. It seems as though we are not the only ones who are concerned. Here are some new comments from Slashdot. They appeared in reference to an article about GNOME: [hat tip: Planète Béranger]
Removed .NET yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
[…]
Any chance that they’ve removed the dependency on Microsoft’s patented .NET technologies via Mono?
(Yes, I know you can manually remove bits of the Gnome environment to get rid of Mono; but the Gnome environment by default includes Mono.)
The reply is equally interesting:
Re:Removed .NET yet? (Score:4)
[…]
As a business user you can be fined under sarbines Oxley for running pirated and unlicensed software. MS could make that case that the user didn’t pay a licensing fee to MS to use Gnome and .NET.
That alone is fud and can scare many managers away from using non MS products thanks to the whole split within the linux community.
The second comment comes from the user “Billly Gates”, so it is somewhat sarcastic. It does, however, contain an element of truth because it gives insight into Microsoft’s ideas. Remember that Mono is a Novell project. █
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.
Woods said,
January 31, 2008 at 7:07 am
I haven’t seen much comment about the fact that ndesk-dbus has been approved for inclusion to Gnome 2.22 (amidst all the other hoopla)
I find this worrying because it is a Mono-implementation of D-Bus, which I would consider a core-technology for the desktop (and I for one am not laughing over the “libdbus should be put out of its misery”-comments from GUADEC ‘07 (http://www.atoker.com/dbus/managed-dbus-guadec07.pdf))
For example (from Gnome Live! for Gnome 2.22) the GDM (display manager) is listed with “Redesign of GDM so that it makes use of D-Bus for all interprocess communications.”
I never thought Miguel’s plans for a whole C#-implementation of Gnome would actually turn into reality…
Hopefully I’m worrying over nothing here…
Roy Schestowitz said,
January 31, 2008 at 7:19 am
Jeff Waugh has assured us that GNOME will always be separable and independent from Mono. In the Foundation’s mailing list, Stallman was told that Novell would be encouraged to stop this. It’s sad to see that early observations of prophecies might actually become an irreversible reality. Novell likes using its co called ‘patent protection’ as a selling point.
Great said,
February 10, 2008 at 12:43 pm
**** YOU NOVELL FOR DOING THIS. U R JUST A BUNCH OF SELLOUT PRICKS. STOP POLLUTING GNOME FOR GOD SAKE !!!! YOU BASTARDS.