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.

–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..

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.

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

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.

/ Rickard
GNU / Linux users in +10 years
Sweden

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.

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

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.

, from what I’ve seen, unwarranted reasons.

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.

And a number of high quality applications have been the result

Number three? Oh wait, you said ‘high quality’ and not ‘kinda fine’ so I take it the number is 0.