Sam Varghese
Thursday, 24 September 2009 09:47
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Perlow refers to the fact that de Icaza was co-founder of the GNOME desktop project. But he doesn't tell us that de Icaza no longer has any official position in GNOME. (The other co-founder, Federico Mena Quintero, continues to hack away for GNOME).
Perlow then gives de Icaza credit for developing the GTK+ libraries when most people who use FOSS are aware that Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis were the ones who did so. Perlow later corrects this - the only time he corrects himself.
Let's also remember that before GNOME came along, there was a mighty decent desktop named KDE which still exists and is in a much better state of development than GNOME has reached or will reach. We are not made wise to this fact - had GNOME not come along, KDE would have been more than adequate to fill the vacuum.
De Icaza built his case for a second desktop, and received support from the same FSF, because he raised the spectre of the QT library, which was being used by KDE, not being under a fully free licence. Some years ago, QT was freed up.
By likening Stallman's characterisation of de Icaza to the exclusion of Leon Trotsky during the Russian Revolution, Perlow brings in the topic of communism.
And that's a surefire way to get Americans on-side; after all most of the row in the current healthcare debate in the US has been fuelled by uneducated types throwing the word socialism into the mix. There are lots of ignorant comments which followed Perlow's post.
De Icaza has been tailgating Microsoft APIs for the last eight years and working away at a partial implementation of Microsoft's .NET development environment which is called Mono. Several Linux distributions, like
Fedora and Red Hat, have chosen not to include it in their default installations, while others, like
Ubuntu and
Debian, have chosen to go the other route.
Even Novell's own community project, OpenSUSE,
does not like the look of Mono.
Dspite de Icaza's long and tireless campiagn to sell Mono, after eight long years the number of open source people
using C# isn't anything to write home about.
The shadow that hangs over Mono comes from the fact that de Icaza has implemented parts of it which are not covered by the specifications submitted to the standards body ECMA by Microsoft; the parts submitted are said to be available on royalty-free terms and without fear of patent violations.
De Icaza
admitted on July 6 that he had implemented much more than the ECMA-covered parts, writing: "Astute readers will point out that Mono contains much more than the ECMA standards, and they will be correct.
"In the next few months we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions. One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others."
But does Perlow tell you this? No.
CONTINUED
