Mono: Microsoft community promise inadequate, says RMS

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 09 July 2009 06:39

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft's bid to dispel the patent fears surrounding the open source .NET clone, Mono, has met with little enthusiasm from free software advocates.


On Tuesday AEST, the company said, through an employee Peter Galli, that it would allow developers to use C# and the common language infrastructure, both of which are part of its .NET development environment, under the terms of its community promise.

Today, the head of the Free Software Foundation, Richard M. Stallman, told iTWire: "The preliminary report is that Microsoft's 'Community Promise' is quite inadequate.

"Also, there are C# standard libraries which are outside the ECMA standard and thus not covered by this statement at all."

The community promise extends to two sets of specifications, 334 and 335, submitted to ECMA, a standards body.

Stallman added: "The FSF will make a statement."

The technology director of the Software Freedom Law Centre, Bradley Kuhn, said that he still stood by his statement of June 29, in which he backed Stallman's earlier advice about it being better to avoid a language like C#.

"On a technical note, I honestly don't understand why people are even drawn to C#," Kuhn told iTWire. "I admit to only a cursory understanding, but I ask the same question over and over again of people and have yet to hear an adequate reply: why is C# a better choice than Python, Perl, PHP, Haskell, C and/or C++? 

"We have so many languages that are a better part of our community (some even developed by our community) and are not controlled by one company, why do we want to jump to using something that appears to have no new features over the other languages, and comes from a company who obviously has an ulterior motive?"

"In short: Why favor a corporate-controlled language over one from our community?"

Kuhn added" "I think too often, developers are driven more by fads than by actually the right tool for the job.  I've yet to see a good and clear reason given why C# is a better tool than the tools we already have in the FLOSS community."

Reaction was also sought from Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza through the company's PR director, Ian Bruce, but no reply has been forthcoming at the time of writing.

Mono is an open source implementation of parts of Microsoft's .NET development environment. Debate over its use has been fuelled recently by the news that Debian plans to include it in the default install, that Ubuntu has no IP concerns about it and by Stallman's reaction to the Debian decision.