08.12.08
Mono Spreads, Fails
A few days ago, we spotted Richard Dale facilitating C# in KDE, which is reason for some concern. This carries on, based on the very latest commit digest.
Richard Dale committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdebindings/csharp:
* Add a QtScript module for scripting C# apps
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (+ 10 more)
With that in place, there’s room for more Mono in KDE, but the biggest Trojan horse is actually affecting merely every desktop environment. It’s Moonlight, which depends on Mono. It needs to be rejected (it already is), just like Silverlight, which is poison on the Web. The Commission investigates it for anti-competitive reasons while Novell shields Microsoft from regulators, just as it did to harm Samba.
Yeah, it would have been nice to be able to watch the Olympics event playbacks and live feeds on Linux using Moonlight. But right now, Moonlight only supports Silverlight 1.0 apps, and NBCOlympics.com is implemented using 2.0. As Novell’s chief Mono/Moonlight developer, Miguel de Icaza told me several weeks ago before the NBCOlympics content launch, “Work on this has started, but it will take a lot of work. And sadly, there are very few people willing to contribute to make this happen on time.”
And yet, Microsoft gets to wrongly claim that Silverlight is cool with GNU/Linux. It keeps some critics lawyers away. Another special thank-you to Novell. If it were not for Novell, Microsoft would have ported Silverlight to GNU/Linux, for better or for worse. It suggested this some months ago. █
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.
vincent said,
August 12, 2008 at 8:14 am
The problem with Mono, it’s Microsoft’s patents. As long as Microsoft will not release .Net under a royalty-free patent license to be call the Community Promise for .Net or better to merge .Net and Mono and to bring the new technology obtained under a free license as the LGPL v3.
Excuse me if there are mistakes in grammar, my native language is the french and not English.
Needs Sunlight said,
August 12, 2008 at 2:47 pm
The other problem with mono, .Net, C# and the other garbage is the bloat and poor design. If the licensing problems aren’t enough on their own, there are always the technical problems.