The next major version of the GNOME desktop environment, version 3.0, may contain more than the one Mono-dependent application than it currently does, according to GNOME Foundation member Dave Neary.
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Red Hat’s community Linux distribution, Fedora, recently decided to throw out Mono altogether from its default install, and replaced Tomboy with Gnote, a recently created port of Tomboy.
# Lead Program Manager at Microsoft
# User Experience Manager at Microsoft
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Usability Engineer, Usability Manager
Microsoft
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; MSFT; Computer Software industry)
March 1998 — May 2005 (7 years 3 months)
Usability engineer, and later usability manager, for Microsoft’s Visual Studio family of products. Lead user centered design efforts across the suite of of developer tools.
“Visual Studio,” eh? A good deal of Mono hype tends to come from Microsoft employees or pro-Microsoft reporters, as we have shown many times before. Interestingly enough, anti-Linux trolls love to extol the virtues of Mono, which is telling. They just try to spread it.
But why replace the GIMP with .NET/Mono in the first place? F-Spot is hardly suitable as an image editor. There is already opposition to this move.
How to I scale an image in f-spot ? If there’s a way, I have not been able to find it (same for red eyes). How do I annotate an image (putting text somewhere) ?
Yet people ask “Gimp is cool but.. should it belong to LiveCD?” I’ll give you a better question: what should belong to the LiveCD ?
Removing GIMP from the LiveCd fully defeats the showing off purpouse of the LiveCd and lives you without any handy tool to perform basic manipulation on images. Now, it can be just me, but I can’t find anything useful in that regard inside Jaunty’s f-spot.
I can’t see how f-spot belongs to the live cd more than the Gimp. And sure the Gimp UI sucks (at least, I hate it. Not that I love f-spot’s though) but it can take burden of tasks that nothing else provides. Should we leave our users without even basic image manipulation, just like OS X users ? Shouldn’t Ubuntu be better than that ?
We all know that it’s as tight on the LiveCD as a metro during rush hour. It’s almost impossible to fit something else on it, most of the times you’ll have to sacrifice something for it.
Unfortunately localisation of the LiveCDs is something that can’t be supported because of a lack of space. It’s one of the many things that can’t be put on the CD because of a lack of space.
Ubuntu would look a lot more professional if it would actually use the language you selected on boot. Looking professional is essential. In my eyes the LiveCD should show the best what we have to offer. F-Spot isn’t exactly the epitome of supreme look & feel and is useless on the LiveCD since there are no photos to use it with.
Shields makes a claim that Mono is hundreds of times faster than Python - but offers no benchmarks to back up this incredible claim.
He makes no mention of the fact that Microsoft first tried to corrupt the Java standard and then, and then only, came up with C#. a language similar to Java.
And, above all, he avoids mentioning the fact that .NET is wholly Microsoft technology and therefore the chances that it holds patents on the same is much higher than in the case of any other technology on which it claims to have patents.
Mono is good for Windows, so it is hardly surprising that the Microsoft crowd advances it [1, 2, 3]. It’s time to say “No more”, not “Mono”. █
Summary: Another new case of rejecting Mono follows several others
RED HAT wanted to remove Mono from Fedora and it finally went ahead and did it. The Microsoft vs. TomTom case raised awareness and led to greater opposition to Mono, but there are other factors at play (some of which not related to patents, either). Only such rational opposition to Mono prevents GNOME Zeitgeist from stepping on a trap. To quote from a new blog post:
Before UDS, GNOME Zeitgeist was getting some good attention, but sadly we never got directions from anybody concerning the engine. All of the Developers are actually students so our time and resources are limited. This however all changed during UDS. Thanks to David Barth and Emmet Hikory who took the time to sit down with us to understand Zeitgeist, thus setting new directions for the Zeitgeist “Service” as well as a strategy to avoid any political problems (sorry guys I am a Mono fan boy, but sadly the 2 other maintainers in the Team aren’t, so no worries the only language the engine would be ported to would be C). And for the first time we have a semi roadmap, thanks to the UNR team Milo, which we never got to set up since we were busy developing and going with the flow.
The concern about Mono in Zeitgeist is one that we wrote about before [1, 2].
Mention Mono in a story and you are certain to draw two kinds of readers - the followers, those who have drunk the kool-aid ladled out by Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza, and the detractors, who realise that it could cause them patent headaches a few years hence.
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Easy-LTSP was originally written in C# but, according to the OpenSUSE project “Easy-LTSP was designed to work on any distribution, but unfortunately it is not integrated anywhere other than openSUSE, discussing with the upstream LTSP developers suggested the slight reservation could be due to it being written in C#.”
Easy-LTSP is being rewritten to include new features and OpenSUSE has now decided to use Python instead, “which would be easier to attract more contributors and increase possibility that users of all distributions running LTSP server can benefit from it inclusion in their preferred distro.”
I have now changed the default panel configuration in F12 to include gnote instead of tomboy, and changed comps to make gnote default and tomboy optional.
This won’t replace tomboy in existing installations, but new installations will get gnote instead of tomboy.
This also means that gnote should show up on the live cd (where we excluded tomboy previously, due to no space for mono).
Some things are still needed for a 100% smooth experience:
- pick up existing tomboy notes (less urgent now, since we do not replace tomboy…)
- don’t show the ’start here’ note initially
Gnote is installed by default in GNOME for this release replacing Tomboy. Gnote is a port of Tomboy from Mono to C++ and consumes less resources. Gnote is both an applet that can sit in your GNOME panel as well as a individual application you can run within other desktop environments. Fedora Desktop Live CD excluded Mono in the last releases due to lack of space. Gnote will be installed by default in the Live CD as well in this release. Tomboy is still available as a optional alternative. If you are upgrading from the previous release you will not be migrated to Gnote and will continue to have Tomboy. It is easy to migrate to Gnote however as it shares the file format. This migration is not automatic. You can copy the notes from Tomboy to Gnote using the following command in your home directory
The developer of Gnote, Hubert, has already moved to Fedora and there is prior coverage of this news right here (the information was shared in Twitter half a day ago).
Redhat/Fedora drops Mono
It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I am heartily encouraged by this small snippet of news I picked up via Twitter this afternoon (thanks Roy)
This is a major milestone in the ongoing eradication of Mono as a dependency in GNU/Linux distributions. To put it bluntly, Mono is trouble. █
Summary: Upon the release of Gnote 0.4.0, another clear warning is given
Gnote 0.4.0 has just been released and Stefano Forenza warns that without shunning Mono early enough, the whole of GNOME can become dependent on it and thus be removed completely upon the invocation of Mono removal.
The day it will require you to remove the whole gnome, instead, you’ll know we’re in big troubles.
Get rid of Mono while it’s still simple. Gnote makes it even simpler. █
Don’t let Novell tarnish GNOME with “Microsoft tax” and patent deals
Not that Figuiere is a Mono advocate. But his opposition over the years has been more practical than philosophical. For instance, in several discussion threads about Including Mono in GNOME on the desktop-devel-list in July 2006, Figuiere objected to shipping Mono-based apps on the grounds that the language required a lot of disk space, but was supporting only minor applications — and he made the same objection to Python, a far less contentious programming language.
This objection, incidentally, is one that he continues to hold today. Gnote, he tells me, “has all to do with the burden of carrying runtime systems designed to make the programmer’s life easier (but not the users’). Had Tomboy been written in Python, it would have gotten the same treatment.”
Of course, Figuiere might have soured on Mono after being laid off at Novell in February. But, if he did, it would be strange if he continued to use what he describes as an “openSUSE 11.1 custom build with SUSE Studio with some custom packages” — free software versions of Novell’s own products.
“We do NOT want to ship the ’standard’ with Windows because we want to make the native APIs more attractive. We want to evolve the standard APIs rapidly, and not have ISVs [independent software vendors] spending time on something that is cross-platform. Java standard server APIs are bad news for us. I veto any cooperation with this group unless someone comes and convinces me otherwise.”
–Bill Gates, Microsoft
“Don’t encourage new, cross-platform Java classes, especially don’t help get great Win 32 implementations written/deployed. [...] Do encourage fragmentation of the Java classlib space.”
–Ben Slivka, Microsoft
“The core of this trial is consumer choice and the premise is that consumers ought to make that decision, not Microsoft. Microsoft’s argument that says Java would have died anyway is a little bit like saying if somebody shoots you they can defend [themselves] by saying you have cancer.”
note has already entered Ubuntu, Debian, and other GNU/Linux distributions [1, 2, 3, 4]. But it is even more interesting to see just how many people got involved. Here is a Debian graph of the number of submitters as time goes by.
