Microsoft Mono move means exactly nothing

By Sam Varghese
Monday, 13 July 2009 06:21

Opinion and Analysis

When Britain was the superpower of the world, there was one tactic which its officials used, with great success, to manage its colonies - divide and rule.
Microsoft is adept at doing the same thing. At least it tries, and often succeeds.

That's exactly what it has done in the case of Mono, with its statement last week that it would be permitting developers to use C# and the common language infrastructure under its community promise.

The move is clever - it defuses one argument that has been going on for some time: is it okay to include applications like Tomboy and F-Spot by default in GNU/Linux installations?

People have now started to believe that there is no danger from any patent problems associated with Mono if one includes these applications and others too.

(This kind of fallacy could well have been helped along by clueless articles which lauded the Microsoft move as a landmark, adopting anything but a cautious approach - which is what is called for in cases like this.)

This, despite the fact that the Microsoft Community Promise has been found to be inadequate to offer sufficient guarantees to free software developers, such that they could use languages which owe their origins to Microsoft without fear of being hauled to court down the track.

All we have is a single blog post. Nothing further from the company as yet. If this is a carefully thought through move, then why isn't even the community promise page updated?

Even Microsoft's open specification promise has been found to be wanting when it comes to GPL-ed software. Not that this spec has anything to say about Mono - it is conspicuously missing. By contrast here is a promise that can be taken seriously.

For those looking for context here, 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 FSF chief Richard Stallman's reaction to the Debian move.

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