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04.07.09

Did Tomboy Learn from TomTom? Project Forked, Moves Away from Microsoft ‘Standards’

Posted in Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, TomTom at 4:03 pm by Roy Schestowitz

Moneyville

Tomboy’s role in GNOME has made it a troublesome component that grabs an entire Mono stack into many GNU/Linux distributions. For reasons that were brought up before, the TomTom lawsuit teaches everyone why Mono does not belong in GNU/Linux. It is thus reassuring to hear that Tomboy is now being rewritten in C++. The company which vigorously promotes Mono/.NET no longer employs this developer. Stefano Forenza summarises the situation by connecting the dots and stating that “the most ironical thing, is that his project is born out of boredom, after getting la[id off] from Novell.”

TomTom will replace FAT. It’s time to replace Mono, as well. It’s the same problem, but the latter is still waiting to break out.

“[...] we know that Microsoft is getting patents on some features of C#. So I think it’s dangerous to use C#, and it may be dangerous to use Mono.”

Richard Stallman

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16 Comments

  1. aeshna23 said,

    April 7, 2009 at 6:35 pm

    Gravatar

    This is great news! Actions like this start trends.

    I want real Linux, not fake Windows!

  2. DOUGman said,

    April 7, 2009 at 7:30 pm

    Gravatar

    About damn time….this should have been done years ago.

  3. Ed Landaveri said,

    April 7, 2009 at 8:44 pm

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    I have stopped using it long ago. I hope the rewrite happens fast and others follow its steps. Get back to the real FOSS roots! “If it ain’t GNU/GPL v.3 ain’t FOSS”

  4. Lyle Howard Seave said,

    April 7, 2009 at 9:11 pm

    Gravatar

    I guess you will have this /. link up later.

    This is called a Major League burn:

    http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/07/2241233
    Major League Baseball Dumps Silverlight For Flash
    Posted by kdawson on Tuesday April 07, @07:50PM
    from the silverlight-in-the-pan dept.
    Microsoft Entertainment
    christian.einfeldt writes “This week, Major League Baseball will open without Microsoft’s Silverlight at the plate, according to Bob Bowman, CEO of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, which handles much of the back-end operations for MLB and several other leagues and sporting events. The change was decided on last year but was set to be rolled out this spring. Among the causes of MLB’s disillusionment with Silverlight were technical glitches users experienced, including needing administrator privileges to install the plugin (often impossible in workplaces). Baseball’s opening day last year was plagued by Silverlight instability, with many users unable to log on and others unable to watch games. Adobe Flash already exists on 99% of user machines, said Bowman, and Adobe is ‘committed to the customer experience in video with the Flash Player.’ MLBAM’s decision to dump Silverlight is particularly problematic for Microsoft’s effort to compete with Adobe, due to the fact that MLBAM handles much of the back-end operations for CBS’ Webcasts of the NCAA Basketball Tournament and this year will do the encoding for the 2009 Masters golf tournament.”
    top tags

    * flash o x o ! * microsoft o x o !
    * entertainment o x o ! * goodriddance o x
    o ! * silverlight o x o ! * entertainment
    o x o ! * microsoft o x o !

  5. Roy Schestowitz said,

    April 7, 2009 at 11:41 pm

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    I saw this a day ago. It’s not exactly news, but the explanation is.

  6. Arun SAG said,

    April 8, 2009 at 2:57 am

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    I use KNOTES ..I dumped tomboy.exe

  7. Mikko said,

    April 8, 2009 at 4:02 am

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    i removed tomboy and mono and installed mononono

  8. Fred said,

    April 8, 2009 at 5:21 am

    Gravatar

    What are the alternatives for mono? I suppose the reason why the tomboy devs used mono is not their enthusiasm for the .NET-Platform, but the need for a modern language with a simple structure and simple build process, which support rapid application development. C++ does not provide this really. So which language is there to use instead of C#?

    GNOME has a quite decent python interface, which is object oriented and very easy to use. Python’s problem as a scripting language of course is the speed. While it is fine for writing plugins for various applications like rhythmbox, I think when developing a full application, you might get to the point sometime, when you reach it’s limits.
    There is also GNOME’s Vala, which looks quite promising, but as it is in a somewhat early stage right now I have not tried it yet.
    Finally there is also Java, which seems to have an interface for GNOME/GTK too, which is actively developed (http://java-gnome.sourceforge.net). I wonder why such a small amount of gnome apps are written in Java at the moment, while the advantages are obvious:
    1. Fast JIT code execution
    2. easy to port to other platforms
    3. simple but expressive code structure
    4. OpenJDK/JDK is part of most of the modern linux distributions
    5. Very simple build process
    6. Very good IDE support

    Why not make Java part of the official gnome distribution instead of mono? Any clues on that?

    MonkeeSage Reply:

    @Fred:

    Check out Vala[1] as well. Vala is a modern language with C#-like syntax. It relies on a preprocessor to convert the language to ANSI C, using GLib / GObject for its object system, and then uses gcc to compile the generated C to native code.

    ____

    [1] http://live.gnome.org/Vala

    MonkeeSage Reply:

    @Fred:

    Be sure to have a look at Vala. Vala is a language with a C#-like syntax, which compiles down to ANSI C (using GLib / GObject for its object system), and finally compiles down to native code (using GCC). I find it a very interesting alternative to C#, even though it is a young project.

    Daniel Reply:

    @Fred: I’m not a coder myself, but I do know that that one of the largest FLOSS-ERP-systems (www.openerp.com) is entirely made in Python.

  9. Darren said,

    April 8, 2009 at 10:39 am

    Gravatar

    I think that once OpenJDK 7 is released into the wild, you’d be nuts not to look seriously at it.

    We are using Java to create everything from web client, rcp, data access etc. We run it on everthing fromk linux, windows, macs, as/400 etc

    I really need to look at the gnome java project. Looks interesting.

  10. Roy Schestowitz said,

    April 8, 2009 at 10:50 am

    Gravatar

    Going back to the genesis of .NET, it’s a Java wannabe. Mono is a .NET wannabe, i.e. a wannabe of a wannabe. Why not just use Java now that it’s Free software? Mono is not even purely GPL.

  11. GreyGeek said,

    April 8, 2009 at 3:16 pm

    Gravatar

    What are the alternatives for mono?

    A good cross-platform toolkit and a fantastic IDE to match.

    Qt4 is that toolkit and Qt-Creator is that IDE.

  12. Jerry said,

    April 8, 2009 at 3:19 pm

    Gravatar

    I would love to use open source programming tools exclusively;however, where I live, 95% of the programming jobs are .net (mostly C#)

  13. Miguel NoMoMono said,

    April 9, 2009 at 1:49 pm

    Gravatar

    HOW TO DO IT ON UBUNTU

    sudo apt-get remove –purge mono-common libmono0
    [sudo] password for MIGUEL:
    Reading package lists… Done
    Building dependency tree
    Reading state information… Done
    The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
    nvidia-kernel-common monodoc-gtk2.0-manual monodoc-manual
    Use ‘apt-get autoremove’ to remove them.
    The following packages will be REMOVED:
    f-spot* gtk-sharp2* gtk-sharp2-examples* gtk-sharp2-gapi* libart2.0-cil* libflickrnet2.1.5-cil*
    libgconf2.0-cil* libglade2.0-cil* libglib2.0-cil* libgmime2.2-cil* libgnome-keyring1.0-cil*
    libgnome-vfs2.0-cil* libgnome2.0-cil* libgtk2.0-cil* libgtkhtml3.16-cil* libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil*
    libmono-addins0.2-cil* libmono-cairo1.0-cil* libmono-cairo2.0-cil* libmono-corlib1.0-cil*
    libmono-corlib2.0-cil* libmono-data-tds1.0-cil* libmono-data-tds2.0-cil* libmono-security1.0-cil*
    libmono-security2.0-cil* libmono-sharpzip0.84-cil* libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil* libmono-sqlite2.0-cil*
    libmono-system-data1.0-cil* libmono-system-data2.0-cil* libmono-system-web1.0-cil*
    libmono-system-web2.0-cil* libmono-system1.0-cil* libmono-system2.0-cil* libmono0* libmono1.0-cil*
    libmono2.0-cil* libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil* libndesk-dbus1.0-cil* mono-common* mono-gac* mono-gmcs* mono-jit*
    mono-runtime* nemo* sysinfo* tomboy*
    0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 47 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
    After this operation, 61.4MB disk space will be freed.
    Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y

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