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VIRTUALISATION RMS says Debian Mono decision 'risky'
VIRTUALISATION RMS says Debian Mono decision 'risky' | RMS says Debian Mono decision 'risky' |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Sunday, 28 June 2009 | |
  
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In a short statement published on the FSF site, Stallman, who launched the GNU Project in 1984 to develop a complete Unix-like operating system which is free software, slammed Debian's move which was taken "for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#." He said: "It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use." The Debian GNU/Linux project has plans to include Tomboy, a note-taking application in its next release, Squeeze. There has been no discussion about it on any of the regular mailing lists for Debian developers; the decision was made by a lone developer who packages the GNOME desktop for the distribution. A port of Tomboy known as Gnote was released recently Stallman said: "The problem is not unique to Mono; any free implementation of C# would raise the same issue. The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents. "This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger." He said that implementing C# itself was not objectionable. "Free C# implementations permit users to run their C# programs on free platforms, which is good. (The GNU Project has an implementation of C# also, called Portable.NET.) Ideally we want to provide free implementations for all languages that programmers have used." Red Hat's community Linux distribution, Fedora, recently decided to throw out Mono altogether from its default install, and replaced Tomboy with Gnote. While pro-Mono zealots often claim that it is possible to obtain a royalty-free, reasonable and non-discriminatory licence for the use of Microsoft patents which may be part of Mono, in reality, it is extremely difficult to even find out how one can do so. What one finds is things like this statement from 2004: "Importantly, Miguel (de Icaza, the Novell vice-president who started the Mono project) also said that Ximian had a letter from Microsoft, Intel and HP stating that they would offer *royalty-free* RAND licensing to the ECMA-submitted components of .NET." Of course, nobody else has ever been shown that letter. One doubts that anybody ever will get to see it, either. One doubts if it even exists. |
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