Comments on: Before You Congratulate Mono

By: Jaarkonen

Jaarkonen — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:20:18 +0000

Well, Novell does things on their sole interest turning their back to the FOSS community. Novell has done it before. Did they change? Now we’re encouraged to follow as monkeys. F-spot? Tomboy? Bullshit! So, excelencia, Don Miguel de Icaza, what will be the next move? Are you or are you not paving the way for M$-Novell Silverlight crap being pushed down the careless FOSS community throats? Oh, my. Children, it’s time to learn and say no to unknown people offering candies at the schools’ doors. First, they put their .NET approach in everyones minds, then perhaps many will end up thinking the Gates way. Freedom and principles should not be taken for granted unless they’re real and they’re exercised.

By: Mono Roundup: Microsoft Following, Deception, and the Moonlight ‘Extend’ Phase | Boycott Novell

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 18:32:21 +0000

[...] Some people are justifiably concerned: [...]

By: mpdehaan

mpdehaan — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:07:34 +0000

Another problem, which I didn’t bring up originally, but probably does apply here too is the Novell exclusive protection deal WRT Silverlight, another example of the technology being used as a wedge. Where Silverlight isn’t good enough on Linux, it makes Linux look bad — because it’s not the same implementation, and it is definitely a problem because it’s not protected evenly across all distros. We need open standards that are completely free for everyone.

Never mind that Silverlight is or isn’t a good technology (I haven’t used it, that I know of), but insertion of such divide and conquer technology is dangerous, and in /that/ case, another minefield.

I question why anyone would want to support that, given the past history of those hostile to FOSS, and continually hostile (see Tom Tom FAT lawsuits, etc).

It seems to be setting the entire ecosystem up for failure by endorsing and promoting those angles.

We should be working for good, purely open, 100% unencumbered technology, not providing angles of entry for subtle things that whittle away at our resolve and blur the lines.

By: mpdehaan

mpdehaan — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:33:50 +0000

News to me, when did that start? Anyway, I speak for me, not my employer. Either way, I don’t intend to spread things that aren’t true there. Novell does some good things and some bad things.

Anyway, support or no — the rest of my concerns are still quite valid. Mono is likely a toy platform in Microsoft’s eyes, it exists as an upgrade path to their suite of tools and to get people interested in them, as well as to show that they “get” Open Source when they have made so many (and still do) attacks against it. It is used to say “yes we do Linux” when the platform is not of the same level of features and quality.

I stand by the rest of my opinions.

Those involved would have been better to work on a different language, IMHO, unfreed of such encumberances, able to stand on it’s own. Even though I’m not a Java fan, targetting the JVM instead of the CLR, especially now, seems a far safer bet.

By: Miguel de Icaza

Miguel de Icaza — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:48:24 +0000

Novell offers commercial support for Mono and Mono’s application server.

http://www.novell.com/products/mono/

We work with customers to improve the performance of their Mono deployments, fixing bugs in their code as well as improving Mono to suit their needs.

Not sure why you felt that you needed a FUD tirade against supportability of Mono. Perhaps you thought you needed to insert this little bit of fear and doubt to attack your competitor.

By: Sirrus

Sirrus — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:27:50 +0000

Very nice post, and despite the content, quite neutral to be frank.

I share your belief here. The .Net is a good piece of Windows technology in my view, but with the current state of things, there is absolutely no need for it in Linux. And I am actually rather doubtful whether it is that great to be required here; as you wrote, there are other solutions that are completely open sourced, such as Python (which integrates with GNOME very nicely, and is portable as well) or Java, which has a “framework” of its own and is not tied to any specific platform from day one.

By: mpdehaan

mpdehaan — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:07:05 +0000

Yeah, I know the feeling. Well with JBoss you can point them at Red Hat and say “these guys have support if you need it” (disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, in case that wasn’t already clear). Something you can’t do with Mono. Though really that has /nothing/ with my reason for posting the article — I felt that sting at a similar job, in that case, with .NET displacing some rather good Python. I think Mono just makes it worse, because it appears to be good, when really it just advances something we don’t want. We considered it an option at that job, but Mono would have never been taken seriously without support options and someone behind it — hence Linux also got the shaft. In fact, saying nice things about C# and such, even in the slightest way (like how it’s slightly better than Java), allows the wolf a foot in the door.

By: Edney Matias

Edney Matias — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:02:12 +0000

Hi there.

I have a problem somewhat like the one you depicted, but not at the legal side but related to how serious a specific piece of open source solution can be taken on an enterprise. And I’m talking about JBoss that only now have an opportunity to show what it can do for that enterprise but when you talk with people in there then you see they aren’t taking it for serious.

It’s true that it will have to beat solutions like SAP application server or Weblogic, but i’m convinced that it can, but i don’t know if the people in the enterprise are willing to give it a try.

What makes me sad is that some professionals of this company teach JBoss in the local universities and their students will be the professionals of that enterprise and then again will teach at the universities. But daily they seems to play at the dark side. :/

Sad.