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 latest release of Red Hat's community GNU/Linux distribution, Fedora, installs Mono and Windows.Forms by default from DVD, an Unix developer has found.
Christopher Smart, who runs a site called Make The Move and once had his own distribution called Kororaa Linux, said he had found that while the Fedora 12 live CD had no traces of Mono, the DVD pulled in not only Mono but also support for Windows.Forms.
"Mono-winforms is outside the the ECMA standard (and not covered under Microsoft’s horribly inadequate Community Promise)," Smart, who is involved with the Distrowatch site, wrote.
Mono is a project begun by current Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza, a co-founder of the GNOME desktop project. It aims to create a free implementation of Microsoft's .NET development environment.
The project has been dogged by controversy because many people reason that, as many parts of .NET have not been released to ECMA, a private standards organisation, implementing those parts may lead to patent problems down the line.
In June this year, the Fedora project announced that it had decided to get rid of Tomboy, a note-taking application dependent on Mono and replace it with Gnote, a port of Tomboy in C++/Gtkmm released by former Novell developer Hubert Figuiere.
Earlier this year, when Microsoft made what appeared to be a promise not to sue those who implemented the ECMA-covered parts of .NET, de Icaza admitted that he had been developing parts of .NET which were not covered by the specification, even though he had been developing Mono for nearly eight years.
"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.," he wrote on July 6.
The figure below gives an indication of the extent to which Mono gets installed off the Fedora 12 DVD; this is from an installation I've done this morning:
There has been no further word on de Icaza's promise to split the code.
In the Mono licensing FAQ, it is noted that "The .NET Framework is divided in (sic) two parts: the ECMA/ISO covered technologies and the other technologies developed on top of it like ADO.NET, ASP.NET and Windows.Forms. Mono implements the ECMA/ISO covered parts, as well as being a project that aims to implement the higher level blocks like ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms."
Later it adds: "For people who need full compatibility with the Windows platform, Mono's strategy for dealing with any potential issues that might arise with ASP.NET, ADO.NET or Windows.Forms is: (1) work around the patent by using a different implementation technique that retains the API, but changes the mechanism; if that is not possible, we would (2) remove the pieces of code that were covered by those patents, and also (3) find prior art that would render the patent useless."
David Bass
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