Linked by Eugenia Loli on Fri 21st May 2004 01:17 UTC
Mono Project The tomato war between Red Hat, Novell and the developer Gnome community about Mono and its legal safety continued today. Novell's Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza replied to yesterday's editorial by Red Hat's Seth Nickell. Later, Red Hat's Havoc Pennington replied to Nat and Gnome's Andrew Sobala also threw a few (metallic) cents too. For future episodes, bookmark PlanetGnome (unverified rumors circulating on IRC claim that eggs might be used next if there is no sign of their lawyers meeting with Microsoft to try to give an end to the saga). In any case, you don't want to miss this.
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Shift Mono development overseas
by Anonymous on Fri 21st May 2004 05:33 UTC

It's obvious the the US is not a suitable place to do software development of this kind.

Shift Mono overseas, base it in a country where software patents don't exist, and the 'Mono project' won't have a problem any more.

Obviously, US software companies who choose to distribute Mono will have Microsofts axe resting on their necks, but if the US Government is so hell-bent on restricting freedom, by promoting corporate interests in the face of the common good, then so be it.

The problem with Mono as I see it, is that its fine for Novell or Redhat to license the technology from Microsoft for their distributions, but it basically leaves Debian/Gentoo/Slackware and all the other US non-commercial distributions, along with all the independent software developers in the US, out in the cold, and puts the Linux desktop squarely in the exclusive domain of the proprietary software mega-corporation for the US market.

I don't see a place for it in GNOME. I want GNOME to remain free, and if Ximian need an OO RAD environment that for some reason has to be part of GNOME, they should have put their efforts into improving Objective C, Python, Java or other tools that have put the Free and Open Source Software movement on the map today, instead of cloning .NET which, for all the hype, has yet to make a strong showing in the commercial application development world.

Nothing is stopping Novell from shipping their own proprietary Linux desktop, much like Sun's JDS - If thats what they want to do, then thats fine, but they need to realise that for GNOME, for Linux, and for me at least, freedom is the #1 goal here, not competing with MS on the desktop.