06.26.08
Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, Opensuse, GNOME, KDE, Audio/Video, Review at 3:31 pm by Roy Schestowitz
A
fter this previous post, and over at the IRC channel, I promised AlbertoP some more specific details. He asked for a better supported set of complaints that show the weaknesses of OpenSUSE 11.0. So here is just a quick rundown.
Too much like Vista, says Techie Moe in his short review.
OpenSuSE 11: Channeling Vista
If SuSE is actively trying to make Vista converts feel comfortable (at the expense of everyone else), they’re catering to a different demographic than me. When that sort of thing happens, I look elsewhere.
Visual gripes aside I had a solid experience with OpenSuSE 11, when I installed it from the DVD. It’s not quite something I’d pay $60USD for, but it would let me do what I needed on Rig 2 in a pinch.
Bruce on the lack on focus:
OpenSUSE 11: A Feature-Rich Distro in Search of Direction
Some members of the free software community will reject openSUSE out of hand, remembering the Microsoft-Novell pact in November 2006, and damning openSUSE along with its patron Novell. That is understandable if not entirely fair.
However, thinking only on the technical side, a better reason to have reservations about openSUSE is its lack of focus. These days, major distributions are known for a particular focus — for example, Ubuntu for user-friendliness, Fedora for the latest innovations, and Debian for stability and software freedom. By contrast, like the distributions of a decade ago, is still trying to be everything to everybody.
This guy too reckons it’s for power users:
openSUSE 11.0 x86_64 Review
I have finished setting up openSUSE 11.0 on my HP dv2000z AMD Turion64 X2. Up to version 10.3 I was running the 32-bit version of SUSE and decided now was a good time to do a ‘New’ install and give x86_64 a spin.
[…]
I’ve covered the basics for getting openSUSE 11.0 x86_64 installed. So far, I have had only a few minor ‘nuisance’ issues described above and feel that the openSUSE Development Team have done a great job of putting together another winner. YaST is even easier to use combined with ‘one-click’ installations that puts it on the same level of ease of use with Ubuntu’s Synaptic GUI. At the same time openSUSE is a power-user’s Linux.
Beranger takes things apart, as one just ought to expect.
40 minutes with KDE4 under openSUSE 11.0
I was initially impressed by what I thought it was minutiae in Bruce’s report, but this ended shortly after I noticed he mixed old and new impressions as if everything was hot stuff. The babbling about the EULA is certainly BS: «By accepting the license, you agree not to distribute copies for profit or bundled with anything else, and also not to reverse engineer or transfer rights. The rationale is probably that the license refers to the distribution as a whole, but, all the same, it seems at odds with the free licenses of the individual applications — especially any version of the GNU General Public License — so you might want to consult a lawyer before using openSUSE commercially.»
Fiddling phobia:
openSuSE 11.0 - A Closer Look
So, to summarize at this point, I am considerably happier with openSuSE 11.0 than i was after first installing it. However, I still think that it is much more complex, and requires a lot more fiddling and tuning from the user, than Ubuntu 8.04. If I were setting up a system for someone else, I would certainly install Ubuntu. But if I were setting up a system for myself, I would seriously consider openSuSE, and I will have to do some more investigation before making a final decision.
Audio issues:
Resolving openSUSE 11.0 Sound Issue With Some Audigy Cards
In the last few days I managed to install openSUSE 11.0 on more than 6 desktops, helping my friends on setting up the distribution, and on one of them I encountered a strange problem, running KDE 4.0. The problem occurred with the Audigy 2 ZS card, same as the one I have. From forums I noticed that I was not the only one to get this strange hiccup. As it seems, this small problem lies within the KMix settings.
Achieve Zen with openSUSE 11.0 (i.e Get rid of pulse audio)
I’ve been having a lot of stability issues with openSUSE 11.0 lately and the majority of them boiled down to audio.
Jan shared some pet peeve which is to do with package management.
OpenSUSE - searching for programs and packages
Looking for software that isn’t there is a nuisance, though you can’t expect the repositories to contain everything you like. What really got on my nerve was the menu panel. I switch from app to app and to click on Computer, then on More programs and then have to wait in order to see the list and then find the application is cumbersome and requires more mouse clicks than I want. Okay, I didn’t dump it immediately. I added a new panel and a menubar.
Moosy’s speed comparison (on fat and bloat):
Ubuntu faster then openSUSE?
So, my conclusion. If you change the openSUSE 11.0 menu to the traditional GNOME menu and disable some of the need features of openSUSE it feels very very similar.
The impact of including an early version of KDE4?
Staying with openSUSE - Switching to GNOME
I started using Linux at the suggestion of a friend, around the time of RedHat 7.1, and that friend told me to install KDE because it was better than GNOME, and I did.
The disconnect that newbies would find daunting:
Installed OpenSuse 11.0
First, the installer misdetected my monitor resolution, then i told him the good one, but that ended up in a messed xorg.conf that applied zoom onto the desktop, i had the remove the Option “PreferredMode” line from the file.
No match for Ubuntu yet:
openSUSE 11 installation this weekend
In summary: a great effort, lots of neat features. I’m not sure it would replace my hardy heron laptop yet. Looking forward to 11.1.
Minor complaint:
openSUSE 11.0
In the future, I would appreciate that developers focus on the individual applications and drivers, to reach a very high level of desktop functionality.
This is not intended to demoralise. It’s mostly specific and instructive. █
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06.20.08
Posted in Red Hat, GNU/Linux, GNOME at 9:45 am by Roy Schestowitz
In a previous (and still ongoing) discussion it emerged that Fedora’s Live CD had removed Tomboy in its latest iteration. Tomboy has special significance to GNOME for reasons that were discussed here many times before, e.g. in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Tomboy is a Mono application and it’s part of GNOME, which could — shall it be necessary — be complied without it.
Whether this latest omission from Fedora Live CD is deliberate or not, it would probably be hard to tell. Recently we saw also Fedora blocking Novell’s Moonlight.
Without Tomboy, new users will be less likely to depend — practically speaking — on Mono applications and store their data in them. █
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06.02.08
Posted in Red Hat, Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Mono, GNOME, Ubuntu, xandros, Scalix at 9:34 pm by Roy Schestowitz
GNOME and Mono continue to be separable and it’s important to keep it that way. In practice, however, the two are often combined to form GNU/Linux distributions. Yes, unfortunately enough, Mono is also in Fedora. It’s in almost every modern distro with GNOME (if not all the popular ones). Here is the analysis of Ubuntu. We contacted Fedora’s leader and Mark Shuttleworth, from whom the Reply was this. They remain unconvinced and unalerted.
Another separability to consider is one that divides free GNU/Linux distributions from ones which Microsoft is milking through software patent deals.
Some time ago, Florian von Kurnatowski from Xandros (formerly of Scalix, which was acquired) said to us about Eee PC that there was “no impact or royalties to Redmond in this case, most of it open source, the stuff that’s not ours and Asus’ own development, and given the numbers this little thingy leaves the building in, actually one of the most successful end-user products based on open technology, ever.”
Despite all of this, Sam Varghese seems to insist otherwise. He believes that the Eee PC from ASUS is either affected by the deal or is somewhat of a timebomb (”Trojan horse” is what he calls it)..
Could the eeePC end up being Microsoft’s trojan horse?
[…]
In the excitement of the moment, everyone seems to have forgotten that Xandros is one of the companies that lined up meekly in June 2007 to sign a patent deal with Microsoft.
[…]
No, this kind of patent deal works through the fear factor. Once there is a sufficient large number of people using the software that is susceptible to the FUD factor, the company which has IP in the mix begins a campaign through issuing warnings of one kind or the other.
[…]
For the moment, the eeePC is free of insidious software like Mono and Silverlight, both the creations of the GNOME project co-founder Miguel de Icaza, and both posing susceptible to posing patent threats as they are both implementations of Microsoft technology.
Right now, there is no talk from the folk at Microsoft about any kind of patent threat. That kind of talk seems to have disappeared. But remember the deal with Xandros is a five-year affair - it runs till 2011. What happens after that?
There is some ongoing discussion in the #boycottnovell IRC channel (FreeNode) and some E-mail correspondence which could soon shed some more light (hopefully not Moonlight) on Mono. It’s now said to be believed, based on a reliable source, that Mono is even worse than Moonlight, which we wrote about last week.
Disclaimer: I like GNOME. I use it sometimes. I just don’t trust Mono (and yes, mainly because of Microsoft) █
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05.30.08
Posted in Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Novell, Opensuse, SLES/SLED, Mono, GNOME, Patents, Fork, FOSS at 3:43 am by Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft-Miguel-Novell tag team extraordinaire
A reader contacted us regarding a serious problem. He said that he “pointed out on a forum that .NET had died on the vine and that when .NET projects run out of time and money people turn back to Java to get the task finished. That appears to have got the Microsoft fans going with this one.”
To conclude, he added: “.NET really does seem to have died on the vine, but Microsoft boosters see the value of tainting as many FOSS projects with software patents as possible.”
This reader is not alone. have a look at this new analysis of the direction of GNOME:
When such an important project as GNOME obviously lacks a direction, has a poor governance and a missing leadership, how can I trust it not to get more and more Mono-encumbered?
Some people object that there are very few Mono-based applications in GNOME (mainly Tomboy and F-Spot), however they are always advertised with each and every GNOME release!
* Let’s now take a historical look of how some guy wanted to screw GNOME since 2002 (Red Hat, were you sleeping those days?):
* 2002-02-01: Gnome to be based on .NET – de Icaza. «”I’d like to see Gnome applications written in .NET in version 4.0 - no, version 3.0. But Gnome 4.0 should be based on .NET,” he told us.»
* 2002-06-01: Mono and GNOME. The long reply. (Miguel de Icaza). «As you might realize by now, GNOME 4 is not planned, it is not possible to know what is in there. So my comments on GNOME 4 only reflect the fact that I personally believe that people will see that Mono is an interesting platform to write new applications.»
* 2002-06-04: one more message from de Icaza: «I was not trying to force Mono on anyone. The only reason why I thought that GNOME would move to Mono on the long term is because our goals are aligned. […] But the real reason is that .NET (and hence Mono) was designed to be an evolutionary path for applications. […] For example, it would be silly to rewrite Gnumeric or StarOffice with C#, that would be a complete waste of time. But one really useful feature for Gnumeric would be to have its VB interpreter running on Mono.»
* If the KDE flock is going with KDE4, why should we assume there isn’t a similar bunch of GNOME sheep to go with Miguel de Icaza’s Mono?
Miguel de Icaza is currently the Vice President of Developer Platform at Novell Inc. That’s the company somebody chose to write a thesis about: Managing Firm-Sponsored Open Source Communities. That’s a company for the future. And Miguel is a smart guy.
So it’s very likely that GNOME 3.0 or 4.0 will indeed be Mono-based.
And no, tiny bugs in Gedit won’t get fixed in the meantime. It’s not “sexy”, you know.
As the first comment states (and to an extent demonstrates too), it’s an eye opener to some.
People were brainwashed by the likes of Slashdot — essentially pushed to the point of believing Miguel was an open source hero. Well, by Microsoft’s definition of it, maybe he is.
Shortly afterward there was a less restrained outburst, especially at the sight of Moonlight’s legal implications, which we warned about all along (since the project’s inception and even a couple of days ago).
Mono, The Road To Hell: Final Proof
[…]
This is a Microsoft-branded piece of shit.
Now, if there are still Linux users still loving Mono, and still believing they have anything in common with FREEDOM & Open Source, they’re idiots like hell.
Proofs of MALA FIDE from Microsoft’s part:
1. NOBODY interested in a good-faith patent protection would restrict the protection to the downstream recipients of a UNIQUE source — but this is what Microsoft is doing!
2. NOBODY interested in a good-faith patent protection would restrict the protection to the UNMODIFIED AND USED “AS INTENDED” (”for the intended purpose”) for an OPEN-SOURCE project — but this is what Microsoft is doing!
3. NOBODY interested in a good-faith patent protection would restrict the protection in any ways. Simply imposing restrictions means WHATEVER FALLS OUTSIDE THE SPECIFIC CONDITIONS IS SUBJECT TO FEAR, UNCERTAINTY AND DOUBT!
Yes, this is Microsoft. Yes, this covenant is ONLY and ONLY for the benefit of Novell’s SLED and SLES, and for the benefit of openSUSE. This is for people to ONLY consider openSUSE as a “safe” Linux way to use Moonlight and Mono, and therefore to increase the penetration of SLED/SLES as “the” Linux for the Enterprise.
This is the abjection of the Microsoft-Novell fascist conspiracy.
Will somebody. Anybody. Somewhere. Please stop Novell and Miguel already. I’m sure that the typical Microsoft/Novell boosters/apologists will continue to attack this Web site and do gymnastics in logic to deny all of this. That’s pointless. In fact, this item will be closed to comments.
As another reminder of the ‘political’ corruption that’s striving to phase in software patents everywhere, here are some news picks (mostly from Digital Majority):
The following bit is about applying a taxation mechanism to patents. The hope is to hinder abuse/misuse of the system.
Merpel adds, as for patent renewal fees, their adjustment will presumably affect the behaviour of the small fry far more than that of the big battalions — but it’s not the tiddlers that create the thickets and do the trolling, is it?
That all sounds good in theory, but…
Patent Reform Act “dead in the water,” eh? So says the following article, which merely repeats what we already know: the system is too corrupt to repair itself (exhorting against the corruption would be a cyclic thing). It seems hopeless, unless the system totally collapses and people take it to the streets.
The efficacy of the patent system is not equivalent across all industries, and appears to be particularly ineffective in software, said a panel at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference held at Yale University last week.
[…]
A lot of unpatented prior art, which does not make it into considerations at the patent and trademark office, said Berger, could add to this problem. She added that EFF is working with open source company Mozilla to crease a wiki-style platform of prior art in software they hope can be eventually used by patent examiners.
Efforts have failed so far in terms of patent reform, she said, citing the status of the Patent Reform Act as “dead in the water” in the US Congress for the time being, and asking what people interested in technology policy might do about this problem.
More debates on software patents in the UK:
Patent attorneys, lawyers, judges and businesses have often had trouble determining exactly what inventions are and are not eligible for patent protection, particularly where the invention involves software. A 2006 ruling in the Court of Appeal was designed to settle the issue by clarifying the rules that patent examiners and judges should apply to assess whether inventions are for patentable subject matter.
[…]
“The election to solicit pre-pay clientele is unarguably a ‘business method’,” wrote Judge Fysh. “The consequence in ‘computer terms’ forms no part of the invention; it is done with appropriate software. Moreover, even if it did form part of the invention, it would therefore only involve the construction of appropriate computer programs and would also be excluded from patentability.”
Lots of the gory details are here. [via Digital Majority] Bear in mind that the likes of Finjan (London-base, sponsored by Microsoft) are already doing what they can to totally ruin the UK as well.
Last but not least, lookie here! Look who’s back. Commissioner McCreevy [1, 2, 3] talks about harmonisation, but one that revolves around legal destruction, not peace and harmony.
Ministers will discuss a progress report on this issue prepared by the Slovenian Presidency. Commissioner McCreevy will encourage Member States to continue to work constructively in this process.
For interesting information about patents and Linux in the Halloween memo, see this document. Mono’s greatest and most vocal among defenders would tell us to just “shut us and code.” Those Mono defenders who ‘know better’ blindly accept the abuse of GNOME by Novell and Miguel. After all, who needs to ever bother with all that tiresome ‘politics’, right? Well… █
“Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won’t leave you alone.”
–Richard Stallman
No Mo’!
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05.27.08
Posted in Microsoft, Mono, GNOME, Patents, RAND, Ecma, FOSS at 11:57 pm by Roy Schestowitz
Post contributed by Slated
As some people here probably already know, I am no fan of Mono - not for technical reasons (mostly [3]), but simply for political ones. Specifically, I’m talking about so-called Software Patents, and even more importantly, precisely who owns those patents. In this case, that would be Microsoft, a convicted monopolist with a viciously anti-FOSS agenda, that employs business methods remarkably similar to that of the Mafia.
IMO the mere fact that .NET/Mono is Microsoft technology should be enough to dissuade any Free Software advocate from going anywhere near it [1], but there is a large contingent of Mono “fans” out there, lead by people like Jeff Waugh and Miguel de Icaza, who (either through ignorance; naivety; apathy or even malice) don’t seem to give a damn about whether or not Mono (or even OOXML) endangers the future of Free Software.
Trying to convince people, and especially distro maintainers, that they should stay away from Mono, is therefore extraordinarily difficult, and usually goes something like this:
[P]oint | [C]ounterpoint
P: Don’t use Mono
C: Why?
P: Because it is patented
C: So is a lot of other software
P: Yes, but this is patented by Microsoft
C: So?
P: Microsoft is a convicted monopolist
C: You’re just biased against Microsoft
P: I believe I am justified given Microsoft’s history
C: What history?
P: See [1]
C: What has that got to do with Mono?
P: Microsoft has a history of abusing their “IP” as a weapon to destroy others, and maintain a monopoly
C: But how do you know that Microsoft will try to do that to FOSS?
P: Because they have already made patent allegations against FOSS; have repeatedly expressed their contempt and hatred for FOSS; have established a protection racket for commercial Linux vendors; have admitted that Linux (they mean FOSS) is their number one competitor; and have a sociopathic tendency to violently attack anyone (read: competitor) who threatens Microsoft’s monopoly, using the most unethical and underhand methods they think they can get away with
[At this point, some heavyweight like Waugh enters the debate]
C: Rubbish. Mono only implements the ECMA parts of the .NET framework, which are covered by a RAND covenant to not sue, so you’re whining for no good reason
P: I don’t trust RANDs, especially those underwritten by Microsoft
C: Why?
P: Because, define “reasonable” … and then prove that Microsoft will never revoke their promises. In fact, prove that Microsoft has good intentions in this, or any other endeavour
[This is usually the end of the discussion, although sometimes it goes off on one of the following tangents]
[Either]
C: My country doesn’t enforce software patents anyway, so I don’t care
P: Maybe some day it will (see [2]). What then?
[Or]
“How many of those patent holders would risk losing 30 Billion USD just to strike a blow against FOSS (see Microsoft’s recent failed Yahoo takeover bid)? How many of those patent holders are convicted monopolists?”C: Probably every piece of software ever written violates some patent or another. If FOSS developers were to abandon packages based on possible patents, then there wouldn’t be any Free Software at all
P: How many of those patent holders have the immoral and aggressive tendencies that Microsoft has? How many of those patent holders would risk losing 30 Billion USD just to strike a blow against FOSS (see Microsoft’s recent failed Yahoo takeover bid)? How many of those patent holders are convicted monopolists? How many of those patent holders have made actual infringement claims against Free Software? How many of those patent holders have described Linux as a “cancer”? How many of those patent holders have created a Linux protection racket that attempts to stifle Free Software and line Microsoft’s pockets in the process? How many of those patent holders use bribery and corruption as a matter of standard procedure [1]? How many of those patent holders regularly and predictably stab their own customers and partners in the back whenever any given venture results in anything less than market domination (e.g. “PlaysForSure” and others)?
[And here the debate always ends, but without any resolution]
Occasionally I might get a parting “you’re just being paranoid”, from those too blind/naive/brainwashed to understand the truth.
Well I don’t know if it’ll help, but I recently discovered an article that (I believe) exposes RAND for the sham that it really is (quoted in full):
So much quarreling about open standards. Jason Matusow advocates for a
document format with RAND licensing conditions for the patents. What
does he mean when he talks about RAND? RAND stands for “reasonable and
non-discriminatory”. But Jason Matusow’s company Microsoft lacks honesty
when it talks about “reasonable and non-discriminatory” conditions.
We need to be precise about what reasonable and non-discriminatory
actually means. A restaurant in apartheid South Africa said it allowed
both Boers and English, so was “not discriminatory”. It even let some
Jews in. However it banned non-whites.
Reasonable and non-discriminatory in patent licensing means “we apply a
uniform fee”. However with respect to Microsoft’s legacy OOXML format,
one party controls the standard and the associated patents. All market
players need to license except the patent owner. For dominant standards
it is a tax on the market. It seems highly unreasonable that such
standards should become international standards, mandatory for
government users.
You may find it unreasonable for an ubiquitous standard. But there is a
more insidious aspect. RAND patent licensing conditions are a tool to
ban Free Software, which is entirely incompatible with RAND licensing
conditions. Now one side of the debate blames it on the patent licensing
conditions, the other side on the software licensing conditions.
“The reason I agree with the statement about patents and Free
Software not mixing is that there have been terms written into GPL
licenses that explicitly conflict with software patents. Okay, that is
the choice of the authors and users of those licenses.”
It sounds a bit like: well, you chose to marry an African woman, so we
cannot let you into the restaurant. Free choice, right?
Yes, Matusow calls his standards with RAND conditions “open standards”
and contradicts the commonly accepted definition of “open standards”. We
should speak about shared standards. These shared standards appear to
discriminate less, but they still discriminate against the only real
competitor to Microsoft’s hegemony.
It is true that ISO, driven by simple pragmatism, allows shared
standards. From the ISO/IEC directives:
“14.1 If, in exceptional situations, technical reasons justify such
a step, there is no objection in principle to preparing an International
Standard in terms which include the use of items covered by patent
rights – defined as patents, utility models and other statutory rights
based on inventions, including any published applications for any of the
foregoing – even if the terms of the standard are such that there are no
alternative means of compliance.”
Generally international standards and patents are like water and oil,
and RAND conditions are the soap that allow them to mix. But as the move
towards Open Standards evolves, shared standards get more and more
unacceptable. Shared standards do discriminate and do appear to be
unreasonable.
It is time to adapt the legal definition of reasonable and
non-discriminatory to common sense.
I would also add that not only are ECMA/.NET patent terms unreasonable (how can it be an Open Standard if you have to pay a fee?), but the non-discriminatory terms have already been broken with Microsoft’s exclusive agreement with Novell:
I read the agreement between Xandros and Microsoft, and one of the
excluded products was Mono, so Microsoft promises to not sue Xandros
over their distribution but excluding Mono and a few other products,
i.e. they reserve the right to sue over Mono. I wonder if this is an
interesting preview of on what basis they want to fight the free world.
Interestingly, the Novell deal seems to be different, Mono is not
excluded from the Novell deal. So Microsoft seems to be promising not to
sue Novell over Mono, but keeps the option open for Xandros. Weird but
true.
All in all, it is clear that the ECMA/.Net/Mono patent conditions are far from either “reasonable” or “non-discriminatory”.
Meanwhile, I stumbled upon some old articles that reminded me of how much de Icaza is in love with the Redmond gangsters, and how dearly he’d love to mutate Gnome into the bastard son of Windows:
Gnome to be based on .NET – de Icaza
Learn to love The Beast
By Andrew Orlowski in New York
Published Friday 1st February 2002 17:56 GMT
[Interview]
How much do you love Microsoft’s .NET? Enough to trust your Gnome
applications to its APIs in the future?
That’s what Gnome leader Miguel de Icaza, believes should happen. Miguel
calls .NET the “natural upgrade” for the Gnome platform, and enthused
about the technology in an interview with us at LinuxWorld this week.
Basing Gnome on the .NET APIs will cut development time significantly,
He also had praise for the new Microsoft security model, dismissed the
notion that Redmond was employing embrace and extend to its web services
protocols, and put the message that the community should get over its
beef with The Beast.
“I’d like to see Gnome applications written in .NET in version 4.0 - no,
version 3.0. But Gnome 4.0 should be based on .NET,” he told us. “A lot
of people just see .NET as a fantastic upgrade for the development
platform from Microsoft.
Read the whole article, it’s most revealing.
Miguel loves ActiveX too:
At Microsoft I learned the truth about ActiveX and COM and I got very
interested in it inmediately(sic).
He shows extremely poor taste (in many things).
[1] For anyone still not convinced of Microsoft’s ethical depravity, please see the following:
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107100653
http://boycottnovell.com/microsoft-critique-resources/
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/05/25/eu-crackdown-astroturfing/
http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html
[2] Proposed US ACTA multi-lateral intellectual property trade agreement
http://antitrust.slated.org/censorship/acta-proposal-2007.pdf [PDF]
And finally:
[3] Why did Microsoft invent .NET (I’m assuming they invented it, rather than their usual MO of simply assimilating it from another source) when there is already Java? To answer this question, you may also like to consider why they “(re)invented” OOXML, Moonlight, XPS and other “fscking kill <vendor>” technologies.
Any supposedly Free Software advocate who can still defend or support Mono at this point, is clearly either irredeemably corrupt or terminally stupid (or possibly both). They are part of the problem, not part of the solution. And yes, the “problem” is Microsoft.
De Icaza, are you listening? █
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04.27.08
Posted in Microsoft, Windows, GNU/Linux, Novell, Mono, GNOME, SUN, Java at 9:44 am by Roy Schestowitz
It is no secret that Free software has been attracting some highly-skilled and influential developers, who can easily change the programming agenda, set trends, and turn some consistent choices into a de facto standard.
It is also no secret that Microsoft wants to destroy Java (even from the inside), which is soon to be fully GPLv2-licensed and therefore available pre-installed on GNU/Linux distributions (without IcedTea). So how come GNOME has adopted the following policy (if true)?
2. The front page of gtk.org.
There’s no evidence Java was ever on the front page of this site, and I’d love to see someone try to prove it - gtk-web is stored in GNOME’s svn, so you don’t need a cache, the full history is there.
C++, Python and C# are mentioned there. They also are the allowed dependencies in the GNOME desktop set, whereas Java is not.
A reader of ours says (outside this Web site): “If that is true, then there is the smoking gun that C# is being shoehorned into GNOME at the expense of open source material like Java.”
Only days ago the following article got published in Dr. Dobb’s, which is quite a respected and authoritative source of information on these matters:
I expect in five years time there will be two main languages: Java and C#, closely followed by good-old Visual Basic. There is no new paradigm foreseen.
DDJ: Which languages seem to be losing ground?
PJ: C and C++ are definitely losing ground. There is a simple explanation for this. Languages without automated garbage collection are getting out of fashion.
Can you imagine why Microsoft might want its partner, Novell, which already controls Mono and to a large extent GNOME as well, to demote Java and promote Mono? Microsoft wants to become the standard for programming as we noted several times before. So here you have yet another reason for Sun to be bitter and impatient with Novell, which mocked OpenSolaris quite recently [1, 2, 3].
The story about Microsoft’s very malicious sabotage of Java has been told so many times before (even here), so here is just one among the many articles which talk about it with Linux and open source software in mind.
These [Halloween] memos are nothing short of fascinating. In them, the authors freely admit that many Open Source Software products equal or surpass the quality of commercially produced products, such as Microsoft’s own Windows NT, and urge that Microsoft itself could benefit by adopting certain aspects of the OSS development environment. The authors warn that OSS products (Linux, in particular) could certainly threaten Microsoft’s server market, and even allow that OSS could possibly erode the company’s existing desktop dominance — that is, if OSS is not stifled.
To this end, the authors suggest a number of ways in which the OSS threat might be attacked. Conceding that OSS products themselves are “FUD proof,” simply because they obviously have credibility by their very nature, the authors suggest instead that the the OSS production process itself might be brought into question — a rehash of the old “who you gonna blame if it doesn’t work?” argument.
[…]
This is an example of Microsoft’s infamous “embrace and extend” policy at its worst. Embed Microsoft-proprietary extensions in common Internet protocols hook unsuspecting customers on these look-alike but incompatible tools, and lock those customers into the resulting custom Microsoft solutions — neatly locking out Open Source Software (and commercial competitors) in the process.
How might this strategy work in practice? For an example, we need look no further than Microsoft’s alleged “embrace and extend” treatment of Java, a commercial product developed by competitor Sun Microsystems. To counter the threat that Java might marginalize their Windows products, some at Microsoft have recommended letting Microsoft’s “Java [developer tools] space fragment so that ‘write once, run anywhere’ does not happen” and “eliminate/contain cross-platform Java by growing the polluted Java market.”
And in a page that could have been taken directly from the Halloween Memos: “quietly grow [Microsoft’s versions of Java] and assume that people will take advantage of our [versions] without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps.”
In case you have time to spare, consider going through some old articles from this long-ago-retired articles archive of Boycott Microsoft. If you find something we can associate with present events, please share. Critics need to make use of the most evidence we have available and identify behavioral patterns, possibly managerial strategies too. So long it has been, yet so little has changed. █
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04.25.08
Posted in Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Novell, Mono, GNOME, Patents, GPL, RAND, Ecma at 9:44 pm by Roy Schestowitz
Image contributed by Beranger
Mainly by accident, yesterday I arrived at the following old article. It speaks about GNOME being “written — hopefully — in Mono and C#.” As we pointed out before, a similar article was corrected just recently, several years after it had originally been published. The article stated that GNOME was to be written in C#, but Miguel or somebody else probably felt compelled enough to ‘correct’ that article several years later by contacting editors.
Anyway, here is the opening paragraph from this other long article bearing the headline: The Upcoming GNOME Monarchy of Mono
Unix was originally all about not being… Multics. If Mono is to follow a similar nomenclature (just for the kicks), we have to talk about Mono’s upcoming ‘monopolization’ and ‘monarchy’ in the next generation of the Unix programming land. Your see, if everything goes well, in 2 to 3 years most new Gnome user/desktop applications will be written –hopefully– in Mono and C#. Update: Miguel deIcaza replies.
This update from de Icaza contains a clarification about GNOME and Mono, namely:
On Gnome and Mono
I am sure that there will be multiple editions of the same piece of software (One in C#, one in Python, and one in C 
, so for those of you who for some reason do not want to run Mono, you will always have some C code you can run with roughly the same functionality.
What does “roughly the same functionality” actually mean? Is there a C implementation of Moonlight, for example? Given that only Novell is claimed to have ‘bought’ Mono ‘protection’ from Microsoft (the filings reveal this), does that mean that only those not using Mono are ’safe’ and are promised to have roughly — whatever that means — the same functionality in GNOME? This relates to our old writings about second-class citizenships [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. It was only days ago that we spotted C# getting promoted in the GTK Web pages.
The main question asked here is not whether GNOME will be getting inherently dependent on Mono. The question is: how hard will it practically be to avoid Mono in GNOME? Or asked differently, how disconnected will the Free desktop pragmatically remain from Microsoft’s software patents? The excuses pointing to ECMA and the RAND are always somewhat comical because these are of course incompatible with the GPL. █
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04.23.08
Posted in Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Mono, GNOME, Patents at 7:20 am by Roy Schestowitz
MS-GNOME.NET, anybody?
Two completely independent warning shots were sent to us an hour ago by folks whose name shall remain undisclosed. The first is a pointer to this GNOME announcement stating “not sure what ’special rules’ means, but I thought you might find it interesting.” It seems to be about dbus, which we wrote about before [1, 2, 3, 4]. The second, which refers to a more recent observation, bears the subject line “Munchkins invading GTK+.” It says: “The GTK+ start page no longer mentions the major development tool, Java, now that it is open source, instead pushing a proprietary substitute…”
http://www.gtk.org/
http://www.gtk.org/language-bindings.html
Regarding Debian GNU/Linux, which this reader uses, he adds: “it is important to find out [if more evidence exist]. I hope it does not mean that Debian is breaking its famous Debian Social Contract to allow mono and mono-carrying developers to infect Debian projects. The social contract is one of Debian’s great strengths.
“As the Microsoft barge sinks the bailers are not just bailing their own boat, but tipping the water into other people’s boats. de Icaza and other Microsoft reps are working as fast as they can to contaminate as many projects as they can with Microsoft technologies. On the technical side, it will make the distros more bloated, inefficient and cumbersome. On the legal side, it will make easy pickings for Microsoft lawyers in the trade zones where software patents apply.”
Looking at the cache as supporting evidence, our reader adds: “I looked at archive.org, but it’s next most recent version is from August 2007. Java is, as you point out, listed in last week’s Google cache, but not on the start page. Instead Microsoft C# is being promoted.”
Can anybody shed light on this? Will GNOME promote Microsoft technologies at the expense of open source Java and C++? █
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« Previous entries ·
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.