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Our Blogs Open Sauce Mono and Samba: smell the difference, says Allison
Our Blogs Open Sauce Mono and Samba: smell the difference, says Allison | Mono and Samba: smell the difference, says Allison |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 16 October 2009 | |
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In a long blog post, Allison also said that the Samba project had a differing view of software freedom, taking the view that all should have the same rights. His post has apparently been prompted by the amount of media that Mono, a partial implementation of a .NET-compatible set of tools, has received, and ill-informed comparisons of Mono to Samba, with some even claiming that Samba may be more open to patent claims than Mono. Allison pointed out that even though Samba and Mono were similar in that they were re-implementations of Microsoft technology, the genesis and development of the two projects could not be more different. Samba was originally created by Australian developer Dr Andrew Tridgell as a typical hacker's tool to connect to a Sun machine in his workplace. He was later surprised to find that the code he had knocked up also worked with PCs running Windows. Running on Linux, it could be used as a file and print server. It may be recalled that Allison quit Novell in disgust soon after the company signed a patent indemnification deal with Microsoft in November 2006. Allison says he once asked the creator of Mono, Miguel de Icaza, why he created the .NET clone and quotes De Icaza as telling him: "It's simple. I'm fed up of writing memory garbage collection code for C applications. There had to be an easier way to write Linux desktop applications than that." But Allison points out that De Icaza and the other Mono developers were smart enough to have made Java do what they wanted to do, even if they had to create Gnome-specific wrappers for the Gnome GUI. This was exactly what they had done for C# and Mono. He says the real reason for creating Mono may well have been "the old Open Source/Free Software disease of being unable or unwilling to cooperate with existing developers who are doing something similar to what you have in mind. Much easier to start your own project to do something similar, after all that way you have complete control over it." He adds: "And if you believe that by developing Mono you will get Microsoft Windows .NET developers to move their code over to Linux then you can even claim the moral high ground." Pointing out that Mono is dangerous for free software, Allison writes that Microsoft has patents on the technology inside .NET and had shown by the TomTom lawsuit that it was not averse to making patent infringement claims about free software. He said the Microsoft Community Promise was not good enough to allay these fears; if patent infringement threats forced the withdrawal of Mono, then one would lose not only the implementation but also all programs that depended on it. CONTINUED |
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