Re: [Gnewsense-dev] Mono in the default install

[Sakse Dalum]

This was just brought to my attention:
http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/openletter.html

Apparently, Microsoft will not be using any of their patents against
hackers or free software projects and are willing to collaborate with
free software communities to enhance virtualization software, etc.

I haven't really had time to think about it much, but I'm not sure of
the legal validity of the press release (whether or not this actually
protects anyone from being sued over patents by Microsoft). If it is
indeed valid, or if they are fully serious about not suing, then there's
no doubt that this will benefit open source development. Whether it will
hurt free software as a social movement is something I haven't really
thought about, though (I'm sitting in an airport right now).

Anyway, just thought I'd bring it to your attention.

- Sakse "Don S" Dalum

On Thu, 2009-07-02 at 15:02 +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As you might have heard, Richard Stallman has recently written an article,
> positioning himself against including Mono by default, and discouraging
> it as a platform for developing free software:
> 
>   http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono
> 
> The SFLC [1] and other members of the free software community [2] have made
> statements backing Stallman's position.
> 
> I agree with Richard that this is a serious problem which could in the future
> cause great harm to our community if left unstopped (I disagree, however, in
> the way Microsoft will use to attack us; if you want to know my own opinion,
> I wrote an essay about this in my blog [3]).
> 
> This matter concerns gNewSense because the i386/amd64 version is shipping Mono
> by default (as a dependency for Tomboy and F-Spot, AFAICS).
> 
> IMHO it should be considered among the gNewSense community to avoid promoting
> Mono whenever possible.  There's a replacement for Tomboy, Gnote [4], which is
> almost identical to Tomboy, and there are a number of high-quality 
> replacements
> for F-Spot.  Fortunately, at this time the move I'm proposing doesn't involve
> a great loss.
> 
> What does everyone think about this?
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2009/jun/29/language-patents/
> 
> [2] http://blogs.fsfe.org/adridg/?p=157
>     http://planet.gnu.org/gnutelephony/?p=3
> 
> [3] 
> http://robertmh.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/mono-is-not-a-patent-threat-for-debian/
> 
> [4] As I announced earlier in this list, Gnote is already in the default
>     install for gNewSense metad (mipsel & powerpc).  Note that at that
>     time, Mono was not an option for metad anyway, since it doesn't
>     support mipsel:
>     http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-dev/2009-05/msg00024.html
>