How Mono apologists drive developers away

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 31 March 2010 11:46

Opinion and Analysis

When Hubert Figuiere, a developer who had lost his job with Novell in the first quarter of 2009, released the note-taking application Gnote on April 1 last year, one doubts that he had any idea about the kind of attacks which would be launched on him by Mono advocates and apologists.

A year on, Figuiere has retreated into silence, and has given up developing Gnote which has now passed to another developer, Debarshi Ray.

We don't know whether Figuiere has gained employment again as he does not answer queries any longer. One can't blame him, given that some of his answers were used to fuel conflict.

What is clear is that an active developer has now pulled out of a project which he started. And he was someone who was coding and maintaining an application that had been accepted into a number of well-known GNU/Linux distributions like Fedora and Debian.

Figuiere's sin? Gnote is a port of the note-taking application Tomboy, which is written in Mono and is an official part of the GNOME Desktop. Gnote is a port of the same code in C++/GTK.

Mono, for those who are unaware, is an attempt by Miguel de Icaza, co-founder of the GNOME desktop project and a vice-president at Novell, to create an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET development environment. Mono has attracted a fair share of controversy as many in FOSS circles fear that it may pose patent problems.

iTWire was the first mainstream media publication to interview Figuiere after he made the announcement on April 1. He was quick to respond and put forward his reasons for the port: he was bored due to being unemployed and had decided to port Tomboy because he used it and could not accommodate Mono on his little netbook due to space problems.