Debian may include Mono in default install

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 16 June 2009 07:45

Opinion and Analysis

Mouette, it may be recalled, was the developer who had posted what were considered sexist posts to the Debian project mailing list meant for important announcements for developers.

Millan was subjected to some scathing criticism by Mouette, with the latter headling a post on his blog "Robert Millan in the default troll?"

McIntyre said: "That means that it's more likely that users installing Gnome from CD or DVD will see Tomboy or Gnote installed, as the Depends: relationship will probably pull them onto CD#1 and DVD#1. However, previously the majority of users installing from *any* media would have had Tomboy alone: most of the current package management tools will install Recommended packages by default. Nothing is going to *force* people to install Tomboy (and hence Mono) right now.

"In terms of the deeper arguments about Mono, it looks like that's something that we need to have real discussion about in the Debian community. Unfortunately, it seems that some of our developers are more interested in ranting and raving in their blogs than having a rational, productive discussion on the mailing lists. That's not helping anyone.

"I'm personally no fan of Mono, but equally I'm not a great lover of C++ or Python either; I'm certainly not about to suggest that we drop any of them right now. There is some fear in the community about possible software patent attacks, but that hasn't stopped us packaging and shipping other software in the past. If a real problem arises, we'll deal with at that point. That has been our policy for quite a while now."

Red Hat's community Linux distribution, Fedora, recently decided to jettison Mono altogether from its default install, and replace Tomboy with Gnote. There are fears in many sections of the FOSS community that Mono may prove to be a patent trap down the line as .NET is totally Microsoft technology.

While some 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.