Why is software becoming so political? Sometimes it feels like the tech industry is being infiltrated by a “software taliban” determined to root out all non-believers in the one true path.
A great example of the talibanisation of software is the reaction of parts of the open source community towards the Mono project. Why does Mono get the goat of the software taliban? Well, Mono is an open source implementation of a standard originally developed by the great satan Microsoft.
Whilst the software taliban’s fixation with Mono is unfortunate, their targeting of applications written using Mono is far worse. Many developers have chosen to use C# as their preferred language for application development on Linux. And a number of high quality applications has been the result. Why should the developers’ perfectly reasonable language choice result in the Mono uninstall fest that greets every new version of Ubuntu for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the application itself?
But the software taliban, being the purest of the pure, aren’t satisfied with high quality apps written for the one true operating system written under an open source licence. Mono, to the software taliban, has the whiff of being a Microsoft technology. And woe betide anybody who has the temerity to even think of using a Microsoft technology, even when the technology is completely open source and based upon published standards. If you do transgress you’ll have the software police descend upon your application in order to help the observant maintain a pure machine.
I’ve long harboured a suspicion that many liberals hide a strong streak of iliberalism, as exemplified by the Politically Correct brigade. The open source community, a community supposedly founded on the ideals of software freedom, seems to have developed a similar streak of iliberalism towards honest developers work.
[...] http://www.openxtra.co.uk/blog/the-talebanisation-of-software/ a few seconds ago from Gwibber [...]
i guess if you compare mono to the mujahideen the article suddenly turns a different color.
Great post. I’ve seen this for a while within the Linux community for a while in regards to “correct” free licenses. Ask why you can’t easily get ZFS for linux, for instance…
@mempko – I wasn’t comparing Mono to the mujahideen…
@L Green – Mono uses the GPL a licence that couldn’t be more pure. Still, not pure enough for some.
[...] I found the following link to an insulting piece about critics of Mono, amongst other controversial elements that may prove [...]
Look closer. The class libs of Mono are MIT license not GPL. Changed from LGPL after the deal with MS. Interesting that. Guess what area could contain lot of patented items not covered by the ECMA standard. The class libs. Any implied patent protection in MIT no. LGPL at least does have a implied one that could be disputed.
The deal with MS means Novell coders cannot be classed as legally independant. Have you seen one complaint about. The other open source implementation of .net. Answer no.
This should tell you something When 1 particular implementation is singled out there is a problem. Debian does contain dotgnu http://www.gnu.org/software/dotgnu/
Note dotgnu is true GPL not this screw around of mixed mess with alterations to remove protection of core parts.
Great article, and Roy Shestowitz has his panties in a big know about this article, I guess you hit a nerve.
Roy is all up in arms, by your reference, but yet he’s still happy to follow RMS in claiming Mono developers are “traitors”, and he’s certainly willing to hurl his own brand of hate speech and bitter bile at anyone who he does not agree with.
Boycottnovell, (sure they use Linux that is full of Novell code), is all upset by this post, so that tells me you are SPOT ON with your analysis.
Keep up the good work in exposing these crackpots, these Free software terrosists.
Well done,, and hopefully Roy the boycottboy will take notice, but I doubt it. He’s too busy living in his closed little world of hate.
Ahh oiaohm, you are acting as Roy’s guard dog as usual I see, good work, what’s Roy’s problem? is he scared (as usual) to stand up for himself…
Let me guess, Goblin will be next to try to spin this.
Trouble is it’s impossible to defend the undefencible..
You oiaohm, and Roy and all the other BN TROLLS should just keep to your own little world of hate and/or quietly GO AWAY, AND DONT COME BACK.
You are doing more damage to FOSS that Microsoft could ever do, so if you want to destroy something that can be good and really FREE keep going..
The real FOSS community think of you for just what you are, FOSS terrorists.
Tried to get anyone fired recently ??? im sure you have.. pathetic.. extreemism.
http://emotionalsurvival.com/extremist_groups.htm
Interesting read to see just what Roy does to proporgate his hate, and to feed his trolls.
@oiaohm – how many people/organisations have been sued by Microsoft for patent infringement of the Mono libraries? Mono has been around for a *long* time so presumably there is a long trail of patent litigation….?
Mono really doesn’t interest me that much, but I do find it sickening to see people encouraging others to delete open source apps for purely arbitrary and, from what I’ve seen, unwarranted reasons.
Nobody is deleting mono apps. People are merely asking for them not be distributed in the default installation of distros. Few extremist are asking for the development of those apps to be stopped or that they were removed from the repositories. But most of the guys opposing Mono apps just don’t think it is convenient to include them in the default. The legal safety of it is ambiguous at best, there is also the problem of turning the distros into imitation rather than innovation.
There’s plenty of asymmetry regarding the legality of Mono, Novell is supposedly the only company that can sell peace of mind for it thanks to some exclusive deal. It is not convenient
Of course, if Novell -the company holding Mono’s license rights- would just give away this exclusive right they got from MS, it would prove that Mono is perfectly legal and we wouldn’t mind anymore. Yet, for some reason, no matter how many community ‘promises’ are released, they don’t think it is safe to leave that right and advertise themselves as the ones with MS blessing.
Do you have a problem with people removing Mono manually and blogs offering instructions to do so? It is their computer and they can do whatever they want with it.
Number three? Oh wait, you said ‘high quality’ and not ‘kinda fine’ so I take it the number is 0.
oiaohm: During one of his conferences, RMS was asked about any differences in patent threats between dotGNU and Mono, he said there is none.
Richard Stallman, is not opposed to Mono itself. He just advices to avoid writing new free software in C#.
Regarding licenses and all, Mono is great as a free software alternative to .net . The GPL is not very practical for compilers and libraries.
I see distribution of Mono apps in the default as a practical problem and not an ideological one. MS has made no qualms about their desire to threat Linux distributions legally. And they in fact have done it already. The Community promise does not cover all of Mono. But more importantly, the core apps of a decent OS should be native… If you want to install banshee or for example some Java app after you installed ubuntu go ahead. But it is not convenient to have the default depend on them.
In my case, I am interested in free software just because it is free … I do not care so much about how many people use Linux BSD etc.
But I care a lot about something threatens to take away my and others’ freedom.
The main (only) threat is patent. Thus, I see Mono as a potential problem, which should not be used in all the important parts (such as Gnome) of a free operating system.
How big the problem is difficult to say but if you can not realize that this can be a problem and weigh it against the benefits, I think we are acting fairly naive at best, or have any real interest …
/ Rickard
GNU / Linux users in +10 years
Sweden
People have this whole “mono” thing all wrong from the start.
What they were saying is basically with mono you still are not allowed to write code that breaks patents.
But this is the case if you are using mono, C, C++, Ada, fortran, basic, assembly or any other computer language.
It’s the patents you break that is the issue, __NOT__ the computer programming language you are using.
So MS have developed some libraries (and patented software) USING MONO that they want to retain. SO WHAT.
Just because I program in C does not mean that I can use any patented software technique that I want too just because im using a particular programming language.
It’s well stupid to think otherwise. MONO the programming language is not the issue, wanting to use patented or copyrighted code that IS NOT YOURS applies with every language.
So to restrict yourself, (and the rest of the foss community) a good and valuable programming method (such as mono) is well kinda stupid IMHO.
But what is worse, is that the Anti-mono people what to TAKE AWAY our freedoms to use the best tools available or the best tool for the job.
If you want to develop your own library framework around mono, and assuming you do it in a way that does not break patents you are free to do so.
That applies to any programming language, why do people have so much trouble understanding this most simple of concepts ??? It’s beyond me, mabey you’ve been drinking a little too much of your own coolaid.
Mr @oiaohm is a known troll that resorts to lies to make his point. In this post he uses innuendo to imply that the class library license changed from LGPL to MIT X11 as the result of the Microsoft/Novell agreement.
There is nothing further away from the truth; Mono’s class libraries switched from LGPL to X11 on January of 2002 by Ximian. This is two years before Ximian is acquired by Novell, and five years before Novell and Microsoft sign an agreement.
But in @oiaohm’s world of paranoia, this was probably achieved by some agents of evil that got their hands on a time traveling device.
For the Google impaired, here is an article from 2002 announcing the change: http://lwn.net/2002/0131/
Or the actual announcement from the mailing lists:
http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-announce-list/2002-January/000015.html
Would you also class Jeremy Allison as a member of the taliban? He wrote this piece recently:
http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/299
Isn’t ‘oiaohm’ one of Roy Schestowit’z associates? Interesting that he shows up with no disclosures. I’d imagine that if a Novell employee posted here they would be immediately accused by Roy of shilling, but he has no problem with his little helpers doing the heavy lifting for him.
Oh, and even Varghese is here. Will wonders ever cease? As they themselves like to point out, this article must be asking the right questions for all these ‘hecklers’ to show up and ‘nitpick’ the issues, attacking the messenger and all that.
““Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer [...] I can’t imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business. I’m an American; I believe in the American way, I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don’t think we’ve done enough education of policymakers to understand the threat.”
–Jim Allchin, President of Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft
“
This statement: resulted in this headline by Boycottnovell’s Roy Schestowitz.
********
“Microsoft and Its Followers Compare Free Software to Terrorism”
From that statement by Jim Allchin, Roy was able to extract a comparison of free software to terrorism.
Ive read that statement a few times, and im trying to work out if it’s because he’s a US citizen, or if he’s working for Microsoft. But either way it’s a BIT LEAP, (too big), and it shows that Roy is more than capable of creating information that does not exist..
It would be more enlightening to the largely ignorant public
if everyone in the mono debate would vote for his opinion with
a responsible statement:
http://blog.ofset.org/ckhung/index.php?post/09ag
“How to Advocate for/against Mono Convincingly”
Unfortunately it seems that not many people are willing to
put their money where their mouth is.
Well, opinion is cheap. Everybody gets to express his/her
opinion but nobody has to pay for do this. Shrug.
The Dutch navigator designer TomTom used FAT16, convinced that was possible since M$ gave it to the world so long ago. FAT16, I since long don even bother with it and hardly use it, but on USB devices. So do you. Then the conservative, money-driven Americani Microsofti Talibani turned on TomTom.
You think I’m so naive to think that the same will NOT happen with Mono? Imagine I have the most succesful alternative operating system written tomorrow, and I take a mere 15% of the market, but it runs Mono too, don’t you think the same fighters from Microsoftistan wil try to catch me, torture me and make me pay a lot of money to get free again?
Mono is thus like a hidden bomb in a system, and nobody knows what the Americani peasants will do with it.