Waugh’s comments are predictable from the Mono defenders:

>>I mean, if you’re so angry about this, surely you’re angrier
>>about the bigger problems, right?

Geez Louise…. did he ask you if you stopped beating your wife too?

If ‘you’ care so much about a teeny-weenie itsy bitsie thing…. then its ‘you’ the problem.

Textbook.

Please dont let them silence you Chris.

Perfectly good free software is not being pushed aside by MPEG, whereas with Mono we are throwing out good software (or rather not developing it further) and it’s also being thrust upon users.

Thrown out? Thrust upon? Say what?

Miguel wants GNOME to be a Mono platform.

He made an off-the-cuff comment about “GNOME 3 should be built on Mono” at the height of his pre-reality excitement about is new project. Miguel isn’t a GNOME developer these days (his principal work focus is Mono) and it’s not like the GNOME community en large is interested in or excited about Mono at all.

So: The people who create it love it…. the people who want it use it… the people who matter aren’t embracing it anyway… and the people who have always been irrelevant are going absolutely batshit insane about it.

Maybe the aggressive approach would have merit (or even be relevant) if there were anyone on the “other side” advocating Mono as vigorously and obnoxiously as those protesting against it.

Yes, I am against distributions which ship any software that might violate software patents.

This is one of the reasons I don’t like Ubuntu (that and the fact that Canonical is not a free software company).

It’s also one of the reasons that I really like Red Hat and Fedora – they make a stance against these things and actively promote free formats. That speaks volumes to me and is why I hold them in such high regard.

I also don’t like distros which violate the GPL by say, shipping pre-compiled closed source video drivers (not that anyone would do that!). Dum de dum..

The thing with MPEG (and other patent encumbered formats) is that it’s not forced onto the users. If a user has some data that they want to play, they can install it. That’s good, but I’d much prefer to see education about proprietary formats.

Perfectly good free software is not being pushed aside by MPEG, whereas with Mono we are throwing out good software (or rather not developing it further) and it’s also being thrust upon users. Many distros are now including Mono apps by default, as you’d be well aware. Miguel wants GNOME to be a Mono platform.

My concern is becoming dependant on Mono and .NET. Mono is not a bad project, quite the contrary – it’s good to have a free implementation of .NET, but writing our own free software in it is not something that sits right with me, yet.

I mean, if you’re so angry about this, surely you’re angrier about the bigger problems, right?

Samba is acceptable to everyone because Microsoft cannot license or sue anyone over its use, thanks to their irrevocable royalty-free licensing agreement.

Let’s make a list… Age of Samba. Age of Mono. Age of Microsoft agreement regarding Samba. Number of people waving their arms about in terror about Samba. Number of people waving their arms about in terror about Mono.

The Samba team deliberately codes around patents that they are aware of. Were the Mono team alerted to specific patents they would work around them — oddly enough, they have said this numerous times and from memory have already done it once or twice.

The Mono team is splitting into standards and non-standards parts in order to avoid risk, not to demonstrate that it exists (the risk always exists, with any project).

Finally, are you coding with Mono (particularly outside the standards chunks)? Are your friends? Are important projects you care about? If not, you may just be angrily pissing in the wind about something which is not particularly important.

Mono is a Novell project, and Novell’s business strategy is to make money from selling licenses for Microsoft’s patented technology.

Could Microsoft sue people over OOXML? Possibly. Part of the standardization process is a requirement to license the patents “under reasonable terms”. You can’t have a standard and sue everyone for using it, but you can for components outside the standard (like we see with Mono). However, this does raise another issue, in that standards should not be created and controlled by a company.

FAT should not be the de facto standard for USB memory sticks.

Do you think Microsoft would collect royalties from anyone using, I dunno, FAT in the kernel? Oh wait, they do.

Samba is acceptable to everyone because Microsoft cannot license or sue anyone over its use, thanks to their irrevocable royalty-free licensing agreement.

Why do you think Andrew Tridgell created this agreement in the first place? Because it’s necessary, and Mono has no such agreement.

Secondly, the Samba team deliberately codes AROUND patent issues.

The Mono project does not. Why? Because Novell needs Mono to be patent encumbered to sell licenses. Mono is also now being split into “free” and “non-free” components by Novell. This shows how it’s a risk.

This whole thing could be resolved if Microsoft offered their .NET technology under an agreement similar to what they did with SMB. Until they do that, Mono continues to be a problem.

Ask yourself why Miguel de Icaza ensured that Novell got patent protection from Microsoft for Mono..

That’s the thing… he didn’t. Nat and Miguel didn’t know about the deal until it was very close to announcement. Why raise Miguel as an individual in this case?

I don’t think anyone truly believes that Microsoft is a friend to software freedom, but there’s a big difference between Microsoft (a company) and Mono (a Free Software project). Mono is both a pain and pleasure for Microsoft, and I think you too easily misjudge their “strategy” around it.

I look forward to similarly angry posts about how using Samba will control our future. It won’t happen, because Samba is acceptable to the lazy-brained, foot-stomping angry people.

Do you think Microsoft would sue anyone for OpenOffice.org implementing OOXML? For Samba? You have to start thinking critically about where they see the benefits from a Free Software project, and what they’ve done to facilitate the existence of it (and a whole bunch of other context around standards, EU monopoly cases and so on).