With all the whoo hah about why GNote sucks for Tomboy, mono is patent encumbered software by Microsoft, people eating FUD for breakfast, and other things, one argument I’ve failed to read is this:
GNote can bring Tomboy to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as Red Hat will not ship mono with its flagship product.
Whatever Red Hat’s reasons are for not shipping mono with RHEL, GNote is a major win for the open source community. Different people and different operating systems have different needs, and providing yet another application to fill a need is what Free Software is all about. This gives Red Hat the opportunity, if it desires, to bring Tomboy to RHEL through GNote.
Lastly, let’s not forget the Free Software Definition, which it seems GNote is taking advantage of:
- Run the program, for any purpose
- Study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
- Redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
- Improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits
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Fully agree … choice and availability is what the Ubuntu philosophy is all about.
Microsoft has only granted immunity to Novell users/clients, and Mono’s GPL does not cover Mono’s Windows compatibility stack – of which TomBoy uses extensively. There is a lot to be wary of from MS when using Mono’s Windows compatibility stack, and IMHO thus lots to be wary of from TomBoy.
The people who use RHEL will use a real life notepad to take notes anyways…
I agree, behaving like a closed source vendor is not helpful at all.
(via Planet Ubuntu) Good point about RHEL, I completely missed that.
I find there are funny echoes of “You’re hurting America!” in “It is harmful for the community” …and it has long been evident how weak the former statement is as an argument. “The Iraq war will turn out badly? Don’t say that, you’re helping the terrorists and hurting America!”
“Jason” here has been copy-pasting the exact same spiel anywhere he thinks it’ll get eyeballs. He doesn’t stick around anywhere long enough to explain his meaning (i.e. leaving a flaming bag on the doorstep), so we can only assume.
Let’s assume “Mono’s Windows compatibility stack” refers to the System.Windows.Forms namespace (I can’t imagine what else he could mean). He’s either misinformed, or deliberately lying. Here’s the full list of assemblies used by Tomboy:
directhex@desire:~$ monodis –assemblyref /usr/lib/tomboy/Tomboy.exe | grep Name
Name=mscorlib
Name=Mono.Posix
Name=gtk-sharp
Name=gnome-panel-sharp
Name=glib-sharp
Name=gdk-sharp
Name=System.Xml
Name=Mono.Addins
Name=System
Name=pango-sharp
Name=Mono.Addins.Gui
Name=Mono.Addins.Setup
Name=gnome-sharp
Name=gconf-sharp
Name=gconf-sharp-peditors
Name=NDesk.DBus
Name=NDesk.DBus.GLib
Now, of those, which of them are not CLEARLY Free Software, Mono-specific (but cross-platform) libraries designed to leverage Free Software technologies? These ones:
Name=mscorlib
Name=System.Xml
Name=System
I doubt anyone expecting to be taken seriously would claim that things like GConf or GTK are part of a “Windows compatibility stack”. Now, what of these three here? especially the scary-looking “ms” in “mscorlib”?
Well, take a trundle over to the ECMA-335 spec, available here: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Ecma-335.pdf – and jump down to Partition IV section 5, “The standard libraries”. Page 473, if it helps. This makes you aware that there are a number of core libraries in the international ISO/ECMA standard. The “BCL” library in section 5? THAT’s our “Name=mscorlib”. The “XML” library? Well, that’s “Name=System.Xml”. “Network” library? “Name=System”.
So, in short: can anyone explain what the hell “Jason” is suggesting? because if he’s suggesting there’s anything which isn’t either an ISO spec (i.e. the way C90 is an ISO spec) or ground-up Free (like DBus or Pango or whatever) then as you can see, he’s wrong.
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