Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
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.
David Bass
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