Debian claims Mono not part of default install

By Sam Varghese
Friday, 03 July 2009 06:18

Opinion and Analysis

The Debian GNU/Linux project has claimed that it installs Mono, the contentious open source clone of Microsoft's .NET development environment, as a default only for a small subset of users.
Debian spokesman Alexander Reichle-Schmehl said in a post on his blog, addressed to Free Software Foundation chief Richard M. Stallman, that this meant Mono was not part of the distribution's default GNOME installation.

He was reacting to a statement put out by Stallman a few days ago in which he urged Debian to avoid C# and termed any inclusion of Debian in the default installation - which Debian leader Steve McIntyre had said was a possibility - a risky one.

Reichle-Schmehl said: "It (Debian) still installs a more or less minimal Gnome Desktop without Tomboy and without Mono. As far as I know there haven't been major changes in package selection for the GNOME installation media, nor are there major changes planned."

Tomboy is a note-taking application written in C# and therefore dependent on Mono.

Strictly speaking, the default Debian installation has no graphical desktop at all; it is only after installing the base system and rebooting that one chooses a desktop environment.

Reichle-Schmehl has pointed to statistics generated by the popularity-contest package which tells Debian developers about the usage of various packages.

He says that a major part of Debian's GNOME users prefer to install the gnome-desktop meta package which pulls in a simple GNOME desktop or even the gnome-core meta-package which installs the bare necessities to run GNOME applications).

Mono is a dependency for the gnome meta package due to Tomboy being present - but Reichle-Schmehl says only a minority of users who explicitly wish to install everything GNOME-related would pull it in.
 
Red Hat's community Linux distribution, Fedora, recently decided to leave out Mono altogether from its default install, and replace Tomboy with Gnote, a port of Tomboy. Many sections of the FOSS community fear that Mono may prove to be a patent trap down the line as .NET is totally Microsoft technology.

Detractors 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.