Submitted by If you don’t like personal, blog-style reporting, you might want to skip this item. A few days ago, during a speech at Software Freedom Day in Boston, Richard Stallman has, at least in my book, crossed a line that I thought he would never cross.
Ubuntu developerMartin Owens attended Software Freedom Day, and penned down a few words about what RMS had to say at the end of the day. When it came to Mono and C#, RMS said that while they are not a problem, you shouldn’t write applications in C#, and you also should uninstall any applications using it. Agree or disagree, but this is an opinion he shares with many others, and his concerns are certainly rooted in reality. How deeply rooted is up for debate.
But then.
The conversation shifted towards Microsoft’s new Open Source labs, and in response to a question by Owens, Stallman noted that Miguel de Icaza “is basically a traitor to the Free Software community”. He also added that De Icaza is a Microsoft apologist, hence his involvement in the new Open Source labs does not inspire confidence.
I think we officially hit a new low here. I have no opinion on the whole Mono thing, and I don’t really care much about it either, but calling De Icaza a traitor to the Free software community actually got me a little riled up. Are we really talking about the same De Icaza? The man who co-founded one of the most popular Free software projects, GNOME? Who created Gnumeric? Who set up a company which employed several GNOME developers, advancing the Free software desktop?
De Icaza has done a lot of hard work to advance and promote the Free software community, and whether you like Mono or not, it is still a completely open source project, and enables cross-platform development for those who wish to code in C#. Why doesn’t RMS deride the SAMBA guys in the same manner?
De Icaza has responded on his blog about Stallman’s words, and did so in a civil manner. “I want to say that God loves all creatures. From the formidable elephant to the tiniest ant. And that includes Richard Stallman,” De Icaza wrote, “As for me, I think that there is a world of possibility, and if Richard wants to discuss how we can improve the pool of open source/free software in the world he has my email address.”
Kudos to De Icaza for remaining civil and polite despite such a low blow from RMS. While I respect RMS for his contributions to the Free software community, I think it’s pretty clear by now that he has completely lost touch with reality. The FSF would do good to silently but resolutely move him off stage, and install a new figurehead who comes across a little more… Constructive and civil. At this rate, RMS is doing more harm than good to the Free software world.
Nothing wrong with that, of course.
This gonna be good.
I have pop-corns and soda ready.
God, I know. Before I scroll down and check, I’m predicting lots of “FOSS are commies,” and plenty of FSF bludgeoning.
Well everyone knows … hippies don’t age well. This is what you get if you have an unbalanced life. I heard one time he was looking for a wife and looking to have kids. May God help him with that, so that he can grow old happy and proud. If not, I doubt we’ve seen the last of his attacks on the rest of us.
Richard, Richard, Richard…for the love of Mike…get a decent shave and for gawd’s sake, start bathing regularly.
That was gross.
But he has disturbing trend of pimping technology where we’ll always be playing follow the leader. but at 20 paces behind.
Edited 2009-09-24 14:04 UTC
He is the very embodiment of the concept of “chasing taillights”. And consistently picks battles that he is guaranteed not to be able to win.
While I think that calling him a “traitor” pretty much completes RMS’s conversion to McCarthyism, which has been in progress for some time… I do have to wonder how well de Icaza’s efforts align with my views these days. Not that they have to. But de Icaza is not someone I look to for inspiration anymore. He’s changed a lot since his old “Leader of the GNOME project” days.
But back to RMS. Now that the blacklisting has begun in earnest… I wonder who will be next?
Edited 2009-09-24 14:29 UTC
RMS is just socially out of this world. If he had had a proper childhood free software would probably be much more advanced by now.
RMS just has this fundamentalist view and acts 100% according to it. Problem is the real world is not that black and white. That is what Mr. GNU SLASH LINUX does not get.
Miguel is very bright, but let us be honest .. He is a MS fanboy. He said things like: “OOXML is a superb standard”
Dirk Hohndel and Bob Surtor said it right at the Linuxcon: “Free software has to stop playing catch and innovate on the desktop”
Reimplementing MS tech is not the way to do it.
He copied all MS technologies of the day, back when he invented gnome, like bonobo, gconf and now mono. Gnome would be so much better without all that shit, including monoguy.
I would disagree with this slightly. Let’s drop the mostly meaningless “i” word and just say that OSS needs to create the best software, including desktop software, possible. And when it comes to creating good software, that is almost always going to be by judiciously picking up ideas that *others* have implemented, and which have proven themselves. And then adding in a very controlled amount of new ideas which are (currently) specific to the software in question. To say that the “i” word is over-rated would be the understatement of the last two decades. It’s like seasonings. A little chili powder is sometimes just the thing. But dumping in the whole bottle is probably not better. Best to stick to a proven recipe, and add controlled variations. And even then, your guests (users) might conclude that your dish is a little too salty, or sweet, or hot.
That said… mindlessly copying what a competing chef is doing is unlikely to bring one acclaim. Especially when he is your primary supplier for ingredients, and is popular enough to exert control over what diners are “used to”.
Edited 2009-09-24 15:37 UTC
Nitpick, nitpick
I think FOSS is today able to provide a very compelling package .. I just not sure Canonical or Intel or whoever are that compelling.
I will wait for Google .. they get the i word better than others.
Well said.
It should be. We can’t compromise with closed source and hardware without specs but for now we use it. However we should do something to stop this trend. The world would be only black if Stallman and FSF didn’t work hard (like many other developers). He doesn’t want a b/w world. He wants a totally white real world. This is what people do not get.
Oh… my… gods. That’s about the scariest sounding statement I’ve heard in a long time.
But a completely white world MIGHT BE NOT DESIRABLE. Trying to impose the view that it just has to be white is what makes RMS such a laughable and obnoxious character. Who does he think he is to impose his ethic values to the rest of the world? And resorting to name calling against people who don’t share his view… How sad. Apparently free software does not align with freedom of thought.
Not that I’m sure that Mono is a good thing, but if it is not, then we have to consider how bad are Samba or Wine, interpreters for .doc, .xls and .ppt files, libraries that interact with Exchange servers, VFAT readers for files in cameras and flash drives…
How delightful to see a bit of linguistic licence in use to make someone seem “obnoxious”: let’s use loaded terms like “black” and “white” and then project “completely white” onto someone’s views. Lovely! I suppose it’s a bit like sitting in on editorial meetings at Fox News.
Impose?! Richard Stallman *imposes* his values and Microsoft, I suppose, does not? Please adjust your perception of reality: millions of devices are shipped every year with what Microsoft believes you should be using.
How about you do the following:
(a) learn to read
(b) grow a pair
(c) stop sucking Stallman’s cock
Once you’ve done that you may continue posting. Until then, STFU and GTFO so that people who aren’t retarded (read: not yourself) can post comments that others actually want to read.
Wow, you the big man on the Internets! In real life, however, not so much. That you respond to fact with bile would indicate that you are the one who needs educating.
“Fundamentalist” is definitely the right word for Stallman. In the literal sense, fundamentalism is a belief that everyone else in the world needs to adopt your particular philosophy – and if only that were to happen, all of the world’s problems would disappear overnight. Basically the louder, more obnoxious sibling of utopianism.
Yes but isnt MS at the very pinnacle of the evil empire ?! No one can deny that ! MS serves MS, not people. Free GNU software serves freedom ! Do we want to be slaves of some technocratic MS abomination or free computer users ?
So fundamentalism & zealotry is justified, as long as it’s done with good intentions?
As long as their major opponent can be cast as even more evil. Interesting ethical system, don’t you think. 😉
Not so simple.
MS has a goal to increase profits but at the same time they have to serve customers to get those profits.
“In the literal sense, fundamentalism is a belief that everyone else in the world needs to adopt your particular philosophy”
Er. No. No it isn’t. It’s not that at all. Go and buy a dictionary (a _good_ one, not dictionary.com).
That sentence quite nicely defines _evangelism_, not fundamentalism, which is a much better word for what FSF does, and something many people don’t seem to have a problem with as long as it’s done through persuasion rather than compulsion. Last I checked, this is exactly what FSF does. They genuinely believe the world would be a better place if all software were free software, and they try to convince people of that, but I haven’t seen them trying to pass laws to compel it. Have you?
what about (from http://www.fsf.org/campaigns):
EndSoftPatents.org: FSF supported campaign to eliminate software from the scope of patentability through legal and legislative action.
Abolishing software patents would not compel software to be free. Plenty of people who aren’t FSF supporters consider software patents a bad idea, as does most of the world outside of the United States.
Well, depending upon what definitions you choose, “fundamentalism” and “evangelism” are orthogonal. I would say that RMS promotes his own brand of fundamentalism using evangelist techniques.
they are indeed orthogonal, and you could reasonably describe RMS and the FSF’s official position as fundamentalist (for instance, a ‘fundamentalist’ free software supporter might consider it intrinsically harmful to use non-free software – which is RMS’s and the FSF’s official position – while a ‘moderate’ free software supporter may consider it only temporarily regrettable). This is, however, not important in context. The post I was referring to unilaterally redefined evangelism as fundamentalism and then tried to use the emotional power of the word ‘fundamentalism’ to portray free software evangelism as a bad thing, which is just bad argumentation however you look at it.
Stephen’s wording may have been a bit sloppy, as is normal for casual discussion. But fundamentalism and evangelist tactics are so commonly found together that I cannot help but feel that you are quibbling a bit in making the distinction.
um. they’re two entirely different things, so no, it’s not quibbling. if steven’s argument had been that being a free software fundamentalist, *correctly defined* – i.e. simply believing it’s fundamentally bad to use or create non-free software – was a bad thing, then that’d be OK. I’d disagree with him, but it’s a perfectly legitimate viewpoint.
Equally, if he’d said that being a free software evangelist was a bad thing, then again, I’d disagree, but he would be correctly presenting a perfectly valid point of view. No problem.
However, he didn’t do either of those things. He tried to use the emotional connotations that are often attached to the term ‘fundamentalist’ in today’s political climate to denigrate evangelism. Which, as I said, is fundamentally flawed argumentation. I don’t hate the guy, or anything. I’m just pointing out that what he said was not actually _valid_, not just that I don’t agree with it.
I guess maybe where our thought-lines are diverging is that I associate a more or less equal level of negative connotation to the words “Fundamentalist” and “Evangelist”. In my experience, they travel together.
And where did I do that? I’ll save the effort of looking – I didn’t:
Note the topic – Stallman himself, and not the FSF. And note that the FSF isn’t even mentioned – in fact, it appears that you were the first to bring up the FSF in this particular thread.
I note that your post is missing the part where you state what you think fundamentalism *is* or reference a particular dictionary that contains a definition you would deem acceptable.
I’m sure that wasn’t done just to indulge in bombastic posturing, and that you’ll be correcting that omission shortly.
Except I’m talking about a mindset, rather than a practice. For that matter, how would someone even “do” fundamentalism? It’s not as if there’s a verb form of “fundamentalism” (“fundamentalize?”) as there is with “evangelize.”
I have no problem with evangelism. But when you have someone like Stallman making statements that serve no purpose but to characterize anything and anyone he dislikes as “evil” or a “traitor” – that’s not evangelism, that’s just a screed.
So someone isn’t a fundamentalist unless they try to pass laws enforcing their beliefs? That definition would exclude even many self-described religious fundamentalists.
kragil Member since:
2006-01-04
RMS is just socially out of this world. If he had had a proper childhood free software would probably be much more advanced by now.
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If he had been socially normal coming out of college he probably would have gone with the LISP machine startup companies and/or not worked in the AI lab for years. And he probably would have never quit his AI job and started GNU. And he definitely wouldn’t have been able to stay working on GNU for so many years with so little income (how much can you make selling tapes with Emacs on them?). It takes money to feed a family.
“RMS is just socially out of this world. If he had had a proper childhood free software would probably be much more advanced by now.
RMS just has this fundamentalist view and acts 100% according to it. Problem is the real world is not that black and white. That is what Mr. GNU SLASH LINUX does not get.”
Thought exercise: what if RMS had been much more ‘reasonable’ and ‘compromising’ in the 1970s / 1980s?
Er, we wouldn’t have a free software desktop. Of any kind. Because perfectly good working proprietary alternatives to everything FSF developed already existed! We had proprietary operating systems, both proprietary Unixes and DOS/Windows. They did the job perfectly well.
The current fashionable objection to RMS / FSF is ‘oh, saying proprietary drivers are always bad is just so fundamentalist’ or whatever. It seems reasonable when you can have a 99% free desktop, and the 1% proprietary piece makes it work much better than the equivalent free software piece would. But from the perspective of the FSF’s goals, it’s _not_ reasonable. And, as I said, if you think what were to happen if you were to apply this way of thinking across the board…we’d all be stuck running proprietary operating systems (or, possibly, BSD – which I don’t want to knock, it’s a great OS, but a lot of people prefer Linux, for one reason or another), because the FSF would never have had a reason to develop all those GNU tools most open source operating systems still rely on.
Why wouldn’t we have BSD systems? You think everyone now would be paying those Unix fees instead of working on alternatives?
Open source software did not begin with Richard Stallman. He is not your open source savior.
I would describe Miguel as a tech fanboy.
They seem to be rare these days but they do exist.
Your comment about him being like McCarthy kinda inspired me: http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com/2009/09/imma-let-you-finish-rms/…
This “Mono is just chasing taillights” crap is getting silly.
If you take Mono to mean “a project whose sole goal is to enable running Windows .NET apps on Linux” then yes, Mono will always be behind.
If you take Mono for what it actually is meant to be and what it is actually freaking used for, which is “a project that provides a clean, modern language on which to more efficiently develop and deliver Linux applications” then you realize that Mono isn’t chasing anything, it’s actually 20 steps _ahead_ of anything else on the Linux front.
If Microsoft came along and said, “we’re going to assert some mythical patents and Mono can’t be compatible with the ECMA CLR or class library anymore,” Linux and Mono would not be devastated in the least by it. Mono would drop the offending bits and it would _still_ be a clean, modern language with a helluva-efficient runtime library providing a ton of brand-new non-Microsoft-derived Linux-focused APIs and libraries (from POSIX to dbus to GTK to OpenGL and so on) that real applications like Tomboy or Banshee or iFolder or MonoDevelop or Unity3D or SunUO or Landell and countless others can continue to be built on top of, taking full advantage of the features of C# (or even a “very similar to C#” language, if some change were forced on Mono by MS), the high quality Mono runtime implementation, and the quality APIs and tools developed by the Mono community.
There’s no difference in theory behind a project like Mono and a project like Python, other than that Mono leisurely follows a language specification for the sake of being compatible __as a nice side benefit__ while Python just makes shit up as it goes. Oh, and Mono is way faster, has significantly better documentation, has better tools, and is already used in large-scale commercial apps (that have NO dependency on being Microsoft .NET compatible) despite having been around for a far shorter amount of time.
Honestly look around and see how many people try to use or even _care_ about using Mono as a way to run apps developed for Microsoft .NET. You just don’t see it. Mainsoft makes a business out of making it easy to get ASP.NET apps running on Linux servers and that’s about the end of it. All of the really cool users of Mono are people that are using it either because it provides a top-notch embeddable VM that blows away every other FOSS scripting engine (e.g., Unity3D) or because it provides some of the best APIs around for creating brand-new Linux-specific applications (e.g. Beagle).
The only people who are even remotely hung up on chasing Microsoft’s taillights are the people who don’t understand what the purpose of Mono is and use their misconception as a strawman argument against the Mono project.
Mono was conceived by the Ximian folks because of their experience with Evolution. They were writing big Linux desktop apps. Writing them in C sucked. Writing them in C++ sucked slightly less. Writing them in Python sucked far less in some ways and far more in other ways. Writing them in any FOSS-friendly language available was a nightmare. They saw C#. They saw it was like Java, except it fixed many of the things that sucked about Java. They thought, “it would be sweet if we had a language like that to develop in.” They thought, “we could write a language like that to develop in.” They thought, “we could write a totally new language, but then we have to solve a bunch of problems that have already been solved over and over and over” and they knew that good engineers don’t waste time resolving old problems. They thought, “if we make a C# compiler and runtime for Linux, not only do we get what we want, but what the heck maybe it’ll help bring more ex-Windows developers over to the Linux side and make the world a better place.” And, instead of sitting around bitching about all the hard work other people are doing, they went ahead and made the project. Their lives got easier, the lives of quite a few Linux developers got easier, the lives of even a number of Windows developers got easier, and the regular users started seeing some cool software that none of the Linux developers were making pre-Mono because it was such a time-consuming pain in the ass to do it before, and Windows users even started seeing more cool software because now there was this awesome tool for embedding high-performance reliable easy-to-write scripts into larger applications which made the applications more awesome.
Everyone has won because of Mono, and because Miguel and the many other awesome contributors to Mono have done something FOSS never did before. The only thing the FOSS world has that even comes close to Mono is Java, and that was only just recently Open Sourced, and Sun’s Java is actually already way behind Mono despite being far older.
So, seriously, quit with the taillight chasing crap. The Microsoft specification is largely irrelevant to just about all users of Mono, it’s not even a priority for the Mono developers, and Mono has far surpassed anything else the FOSS community has in the same field.
C/C++ are a pain in the ass to work with and are light years behind modern languages in ease of use and features, and modern VM technology is already more or less on par with C/C++, and upcoming VM technology is quite likely to exceed the performance of C/C++. Python, Ruby, Perl, and so on are all great languages for some tasks but are total whores to work in for a great deal of other tasks, and they’ll never be able to match Mono in speed (simple fact — even if you implement the same VM technology in something like Parrot as you have in Mono, dynamic typing will always be slower; even if you use the same tracing optimizing JIT to compiler both C# and Python to machine code, the C# result will need far less type guards than the Python result would… which you can even prove by just using IronPython on Mono).
The point of Mono is NOT CLR compatibility. It’s not even C# the language. The point of Mono is having a runtime and multiple languages that make developing real-world applications easy and making those applications more reliable, which frees up more developer time to work on actual features and performance rather than working on endless layers of complicated framework code or debugging stupid bugs that only exist because of poor language design.
I keep hearing this. But where are the wonderful Mono apps? Where is the surge in application development rate and quality. What I see are a few alarmingly memory-hungry apps that keep getting passed by C/C++ newcomers. Tracker (C) is moving past Beagle. Gnote (C++) zipped past Tomboy, reimplementing it very quickly. I guess that leaves F-Spot and Banshee.
There may be a good argument to be made for prototyping with Mono. But in that case… why not use Python?
If you are going to claim that Mono is ahead of anything else on the Linux front, and at this late date, it seems like you ought to have more “must have” apps to point to.
Since you have changed the backdrop from “running .net apps” to “providing yet another API for OSS”, I would say that “chasing tail lights” is not an appropriate description. “Trying to stand out in the crowd” probably is. But in that case, Mono is not doing so well. Except insofar as it has generated so much bad publicity. But I suspect that was not the goal.
Edited 2009-09-24 19:54 UTC
Mono is the slower way of running C# programming. Microsoft CLR is the fast way. So yes, Mono is playing catchup.
Mono also doesn’t seem too stable yet. I managed to segfault a simple Gtk# program that was actually example code that created a window and tree widget.
Granted, this was on Karmic.
I’ll believe the part about performance when I see it. C++ is quite ok with Qt – to the extent that I don’t see much reason to use Mono. I can see why you want to use Mono with Gtk+, but why change the language and the whole environment when just changing the toolkit will do?
Considering Perl “great” for anything raises certain concerns about your mindset ;-).
Frankly, C#/Mono doesn’t really give you *that* much over C++/Qt (or Python/Qt for smaller projects/development teams). It’s definitely worth a shot taking a look at Qt and contrasting that with what Mono has to offer before seriously considering drinking the Mono Kool Aid. Qt actually gives you significantly better cross-platform story in addition to superior performance (both in terms of memory and cpu cycles).
And for those colossal server-side behemoths, we’ll always have Java.
That being said, and to stay on topic, RMS is obviously overreacting here; he’s seeing Mono as a bigger threat than it is, if we consider actual popularity figures.
Thank you for this beautifull post.
Maybe you should take a lesson in history. RMS isn’t the first to call Icaze a traitor and he has sold out to Sun in the OpenOffice.org versus GNOME Office debat back in 2000. Yes he is a traitor as he sells his beliefs and principles for power. And for what? To be a corporate puppet? This is where difference is between free software and open source. This is where both Theo and Richard agree on. This is maybe why Debian is on of the bigger distro’s as people get fed up with corporate interests (get as much money out of your pocket in as little time as possible).
But again, based on history I would say that Icaze is a traitor and hurted a lot of peoples/developers believes and pockets. More are down the road on his conquest to push Mono forward in a way it divides communities. The Tomboy/F-Spot incidents can learn us a lot and should be seen as a sign for the future. The Silverlight/Moonlight solution most likely will divide the community in a way as seen with BSD386 a long time ago.
If people want to see what is coming then pay attention to Novell. I’m not going to repeat how they tried to sell SLES to us, but I gave me a good insight what Microsoft is up to and how it is using puppets like Icaza and Novell to get to there goal.
sbergman27: i don’t see where FSF / RMS have changed at all. They’ve always been very uncompromising when it comes to their definition of free software, and that’s entirely their right. Describing it as McCarthyism is a bit silly because FSF has no practical power to persecute / compromise anyone. All RMS / FSF is doing – all they _can_ do – is saying ‘in our opinion, these people / organizations / projects are not free software or are actively inhibiting the progress of free software’. It’s not like they have the power to stop people developing software in any way they choose, is it? All they are doing is lobbying. RMS / FSF’s belief is that the free software cause is not aided by compromise, and that’s a perfectly legitimate and reasonably well-supported position. The reason this may seem ‘extreme’ to other people is they’re working from a different perspective. if your goal is to have a working Linux desktop then rejecting things like proprietary drivers may seem ‘extreme’, but if your goal is to further the cause of free software, it isn’t. It’s just logical.
I am referring to strategy. And his strategy has changed demonstrably as his perception of his own level of power has changed.
Sure he does. Not as much as thinks he does. But all those annoying, single-minded RMS apostles out there represent power. Oh, not Microsoft-toppling power. But this is, in essence, a family argument. And de Icaza is the family member being attacked. RMS has plenty of power to attempt a “McCarthy” on Miguel.
Now, in this case, my overall views are aligned a little (a very little) more on the RMS side than on the Miguel side. I don’t really like either one of them, particularly.
But that doesn’t preclude me from condemning RMS’s latest tactic.
Well this is just too far out to believe…. RMS used to be against patents, now he is in favor of them and potential violators (Miguel) are traitors.
The RMS standpoints used to be about technology and “Fredom” and software development.
Now it is about populist ideology, envy and ki$$ing the A$$ of Red Hat.
This is where it changed and it sucks.
There is a massive political battle going on in the software development community about who can set strategies, who can make money and who is leaders and who is the followers.
The Red Hat political machine has been grinding at Novell and individual Novell employees ever since their market share started to stagnate and Novell started to grow as a effect of the microsoft agreement.
It is so “Animal farm” and “new speak” that it is not even funny and then some retard says that he cannot see that anything changed…. Just unbelievable.
What is your definition of “winning”? Perusing de Icaza’s resume, I see a lot of innovative albeit controversial work that is actually running today. Nobody is suing de Icaza. Choice prevails. So, really, what does “winning” and “losing” mean to you?
Yes.. but to call him a traitor? Them are fighting words.
IF RMS had made a principled opposition a decade ago when he was gushing over ActiveX/COM, then he wouldn’t need to resort to petty insults later on.
De Icaza is pushing and pushing to get Mono woven into GNOME. This would be a big mistake.
I’d be interested to hear RMS’s actual words, rather than this third-party summary, but if the meaning of “traitor” is “someone who pushes an outside, incompatible agenda by using the influence they gained in the free software community”, then the glove fits.
then RMS should pull GNOME from the GNU Project and be done with it if mono becomes required.
The thing that most annoys me about RMS is his inherent assumption that he speaks for all open source developers. He doesn’t. There are plenty of people out there who have a lot of different open source licenses, embrace different principles, and who (like me) simply view RMS as yet another dirty, burned-out hippie.
Edited 2009-09-25 17:34 UTC
Sorry, but he is speaking for free software developers and not for open source developers. Maybe you should looking into the difference between the two.
I actually do not like both of them, so as said before, I will watch this fight and have some fun!
But I kind of agree that Icasa is not this angel that is painted, he always defended microsoft, and for his words, it seems like NOT working on redmond is the worst thing in his life.
I’m with you on this. For me both gave their great contribution to open source on the past, but right now they could just retire..
Stallman could stop with that offensive speech and Icaza with that Microsoft worship
Stallman can’t retire. There’s no one else who’s even coming close to doing his essential work of raising awareness of problems and inciting people to campaign against them. Software patents, DRM, non-free libraries, trusted computing, binary-only drivers/blobs – it’s always RMS who’s explaining the importance and pushing people to get active on these things.
The software industry would have rolled over this movement long ago if we didn’t have RMS doing his best (and that’s a lot!) to keep the focus on freedom.
His worship had given the go ahead. Grab your pitch forks. We are going to burn some people at the stake.
PS: CNN is reporting a lost SCREW.
Edited 2009-09-24 14:12 UTC
Umm…In case no one’s ever told you, you need a torch,not a pitchfork to burn people at the stake…..
RMS drank to much of his own coolaid and turned into a fanatical nut job. He lost all objectivity and sensibility long ago.
“self-referencing is the root of all evil” – strangely Googling this phrase fetches “Atlas Shrugged” as the 7th hit.
How’s this? Because he’s *RIGHT* about De Icaza?
De Icaza has been trying to peddle his particuar brand of poison to the free software community for years now.
Now that most of the freesoftware base continues to show no real interest in it, De Icaza is trying to peddle it to the losers who flocked to the Iphone.
That you refer to software as “poison” demonstrates how completely and utterly deluded you are. Please, castrate yourself so that there’s no chance of your worthless genes being propagated further than the end of your pathetic existence.
The world would be a better place without JIT languages.
JIT has little to do with the language itself and everything to do with the implementation. Look at LLVM, they are JIT compiling C and C++.
As a side note…I have high hopes for that project. Write once, JIT everywhere.
People who have no idea what they are talking about need to keep the ridiculous statements to a minimum.
But what would I ever do, then?
Take up a hobby, maybe quilting, or wood polishing
At times like these, I just remember: RMS does not hold elected office, and does not own a gun.
Edited 2009-09-24 14:45 UTC
It looks to me like he is the classic example of a ‘liberator’ figure.
He fought the good fight with firm belief his cause was just and right.
Then he got into power. At which point it was no longer enough to shout against the opposition saying how they were wrong but to define policy and lead by it.
Free software now has a foothold it never did, even a decade ago. Large companies and Govs are open to the idea. I feel he is still trying to ‘fight the fight’ instead of diplomatically pushing their (FSF) ideals forward in a manageable and acceptable manner to help make them a reality.
“When the fighting is over, the war begins”
You’ve made an astute observation. Revolutionary leaders throughout history have frequently gone on to try to destroy the movements they championed once they rose to power. The French Revolution is a great example of this. Once the monarchists were out, the Revolution turned on itself and spent years trying to purge itself of all impurity, and subsequently guillotined many of its most loyal and valuable supporters. Honestly, I can’t think of very many revolutions that don’t follow this template.
It’s a good thing that RMS doesn’t own a guillotine.
The sensibility of a revolutionary is anathema to good governance. Linux has been to the point for many years now that it needs politicians and diplomats, not firebrands. I wish there was a museum somewhere that we could stick RMS.
Edited 2009-09-24 15:03 UTC
I wish politics were left aside, likewise with business stuff and all that shit that makes a PC (Personal Computer) less personal and more business oriented. I wish free software movement concentrated more on the people and not so much on companies, like it did in the past.
if my PC can’t fulfil my buisness needs I will spend my money (earnt via the buisness) on one that does.
PC(Personal Computer refers to having one EACH ie one per worker.
Regarding politics, it is sadly naive to think you could avoid this. Politics of one sort or another permeates everything we do. Politics and money…
I’m not sure that’s universally true. You could say that the American revolutionaries actually did a great job of transitioning to a reasonably-managed government. But perhaps you could say that the American revolution wasn’t really a social revolution since it was just the upper-class Colonists throwing off the British yoke and more fully consolidating their power.
Yes, I said I couldn’t think of very many, and while I was writing that, I was thinking that the American Revolution was somewhat of an exception, but partly I didn’t want to come off sounding nationalistic, since I’m American, and partly I started thinking a bit about the abuses that did occur. During and in the aftermath of the revolution, many, many Americans that retained loyalty to the crown or failed to express enough revolutionary fervor were quite brutally persecuted. Many lost their property and livelihood.
Nevertheless, I think it’s a testament to the personal character of George Washington in particular that kept that process from proceeding along to it’s all too common conclusion. But even Washington was seemingly in favor of various acts of brutality and public humiliation of prominent loyalists in the run up to the war. And after the war, Washington’s government violated the Treaty of Paris and did not restore many loyalists’ seized property, and furthermore allowed additional loyalist property to be taken. Likewise, a McCarthyist inquisition was instituted in the 1780s to root out and imprison loyalists.
In order for drastic political change to occur without the kind of purging and retribution that humans are wired for, it takes strong moral leadership and a commitment to some kind of formal reconciliation and amnesty process.
The interesting thing to me about the American Revolution is that, for all the reverence we Americans have for the fomenters of the revolution, how much worse today is Canada, which remained loyal to Britain, than the United States? Was there really any point to it all? Or are Canada, France, and Britain itself better off today partially because of the American Rebellion and the ideological shockwave it sent through the Western world. Something to ponder.
While I have no love for Stallman’s rhetoric (the GNU/Linux stuff is very silly) I’m amazed he hasn’t done it long before now when de Icaza was gushing over Excel, then ActiveX/COM, then .Net and then Silverlight, which we can apparently refresh the Linux desktop with and pink ponies will run free through sunny meadows as a result.
I’m of the opinion that Linus was regarding Microsoft – the code will out as long as the license is nice and clear. However, you’re not obligated to be nice to an organisation that has absolutely spat vitriol at the open source and free software movement and is actively trying to create their own version in your vague image.
The Excel clone?
Yes. The company that promised mountains, delivered mole-hills and made the open source Linux desktop a joke in it’s own bubble of hype. They did some good work, particularly with Open Office, but it was all dragged down by rhetoric.
Because they’ve written a piece of software purely for compatibility reasons because there is demand. They’re not actively recommending that everyone rewrites everything for it nor are they actively recommending and pushing new features and software that Microsoft has written that no one uses yet and doing it as a third-party proxy. The Samba guys aren’t on the board of Codeplex, as de Icaza is, which is an organisation masquerading as the open source and free software community he claims to represent.
Relationships are two-way – you give something, they give something back. That’s not happening there. The guy is a bona fide apologist now, probably always has been, which is sad considering how talented he is. I’m sure that Microsoft job that he’s always seemed to want is not far away now.
You know, I still find it astonishing that if Microsoft says what you do is like a cancer, then tries to throw a ton of patent threats at you to drag you through the floor, then creates its own copycat community and spits acid at you then that’s OK. However, if someone says that someone else is an apologist for helping Microsoft do that without anything being given back to the open source community he claims to be a part of then the sky is falling in and we’re all anti-Microsoft shills. Boo hoo.
The general rule of thumb is that if someone isn’t nice to you then you’re not obligated to be nice or even civil back until you see them jump first.
I have the feeling that RMS is right on Icaza, though the use of words actually helps the later as he can play victim and civilized while ignoring/downplaying a lot of concerns that go hand in hand with his actions.
A month ago I would have defended Miguel and by proxy Novell, but they have an unholy and extremely tight grip on the licensing of Mono. It is basically very, very scary as to the licensing restrictions they put on to the Mono runtime and how they are willing to milk the iPhone developer community for 4 times the amount that Apple will require to use Xcode and Objective-C, just to use C#. They could easily add the “static linking exemption” to the LGPL license used to the Mono Runtime, as many project do, but they want to make money – plain and simple. Very sad. Monotouch is proprietry – I’m not claiming I should be allowed to have the source for that, but I can’t create my own version, because they would force me to use a commercial license on the Mono Runtime? Sheah, right. No more mono for me on mobile platforms, and I’d think twice about using it on the Mac too – just because!
Seriously – they made a really big, big deal about the fact they can use AOT to pre JIT and make native code versions of .Net apps, but if I need a commercial license to link in the Mono runtime, what was the point? I don’t think it was worth their time.. It benefits no one except those [willing/able/stupid enough] to pay for a commercial license. As they claim the $399 is “the cheapest” they have ever commercially licensed the engine for, I really can’t imagine how much or under what terms any vernture would be forced to comply… Yes, I’m feeling a little bitter about it. Stupid corporations 🙁
That is all.
So the GPL is now “a very tight grip on licensing”! And Apple is better! Wow, reality drifting ever further…
Look – it is like this: I can use Mono to compile .Net code for free, without making that code GPL or LGPL – in fact I can license however I like. I can package up a dynamically linked Mono runtime and include it on Linux or Mac and include it in my software, without any fear of breaking the LGPL. But God forbid if I need to statically link the Mono Runtime to my app – they don’t allow me to do that – no, for that I need a commercial license? Um… okay, no.
If that part isn’t clear now, please ask more questions. This isn’t about the LGPL, it is about the fact that they have crippled Mono on purpose so as to not allow something, but then added features that are actually very interesting and exciting for .Net developers, dangling them like a carrot. That is where my problem is.
Why doesn’t RMS deride the SAMBA guys in the same manner?
Because they’ve written a piece of software purely for compatibility reasons because there is demand. They’re not actively recommending that everyone rewrites everything for it nor are they actively recommending and pushing new features and software that Microsoft has written that no one uses yet and doing it as a third-party proxy. The Samba guys aren’t on the board of Codeplex, as de Icaza is, which is an organisation masquerading as the open source and free software community he claims to represent.
Relationships are two-way – you give something, they give something back. That’s not happening there. The guy is a bona fide apologist now, probably always has been, which is sad considering how talented he is. I’m sure that Microsoft job that he’s always seemed to want is not far away now.
Great answer except one more thing. Samba is an open implementation of MS’s spec. They didn’t ASK permission, they just did it. It was cleanly reverse engineered and “legal” until Novell (the company he works for, and listens to him) threw the Samba team leader under the “patent” bus the minute they bought SuSe. It should be blatantly obvious anybody that “loves” Free Software should get the heck away from this guy. He’s taking devs away from building competing technologies like Ruby, Pyton, D-Bus, KHTML and spending the time copying whatever (mis)direction MS is printing this month.
He’s probably not “evil” but he’s a businessman trying to chase Microsoft’s coattails because their might be money there… Open Source (not Free Software) is just an means to that goal. He keeps compromising OTHER people’s project ideals (like Samba) and signing deals nobody in the community approves of (accepting that OTHER PEOPLE’s Free Software is “cheating” on IP) on a regular basis. Guys like Shuttleworth shouldn’t even be taking his calls at this point or using his products.
ACTIONS say he is an enemy of Free Software in favor of the more legally nebulous (and profitable) Open Source. It’s WAR out there. What guys like Linus and ESR don’t understand is that companies like Novell have promised to pay large corporations royalties for Linus’s or Community’s Free Software work… with the flick of a pen, somebody else “owns” their IP.
It’s WAR out there.
Get help, a life or a wife, but get away from a computer, really.
Great answer except one more thing. Mono is an open implementation of MS’s spec. They didn’t ASK permission, they just did it. It is cleanly reverse engineered and “legal”…
So if that makes Samba ok, it makes Mono ok as well.
The GP’s wording is misleading.
Samba is an open implementation of a CLOSED interface. They didn’t bother to ask, because they knew what the answer would be (no).
Mono (except for Winforms) is an open implementation of an OPEN standard (ECMA). They didn’t need to ask, because MS can’t stop anyone from implementing an ECMA standard.
As Mono will always be 2 steps behind .NET, I’m sure MS doesn’t even care about the Winforms implementation, not only because nearly everyone using Winforms is really targeting Windows anyway, and because Mono’s Winforms support will always be the part that is furthest behind .NET, and finally because Mono’s existence also gives them political cover (see judge, look at Mono, we do play nice with those FOSS guys).
Samba was never OK with MS, after all, they used legal action to try and stop Samba development later. So no, these are 2 completely different situations.
Obviously calling Linux a cancer wasn’t smart. But don’t blame all 90,000+ MS employees, realize that they’re not all out to get you, and Steve Ballmer is probably just trying to protect his livelihood, nothing more, nothing less. (And yes, I think all of us here hate software patents.) Don’t worry about it until it happens. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief that way.
Say what?? Uh, no. I have to strongly resist the urge to get preachy here, but that’s definitely not a happy way of living life. It’s sad that you got modded up so heavily (Score: 15, wow).
Calling Linux a cancer *was* smart, from a business perspective.
Nobody is blaming (or saying anything about) Microsoft’s employees! We’re talking about the company, not its people. Legally and morally these things are quite different!
What you are doing is akin to saying people who are anti-war hate soldiers. What total nonsense!
Me, I dislike Microsoft. I distrust Microsoft. I believe Microsoft would like to destroy Linux and every piece of software that allows a computer to run without requiring Windows or another Microsoft OS. Microsoft is, for this desire, in my opinion, evil.
Do I think Microsoft’s employees are evil? Well, no. Maybe certain executives (-:
So, don’t make this straw-man argument. Nobody hates Microsoft’s employees, nobody blames all of them for the actions of the company. A corporation is more than the individuals who work for it, it has a life of its own and some measure of independent will.
(I have a rationale for this absurd claim, if anyone cares to hear it. It is sufficient to say that however inaccurate it may be in fact, it is a useful metaphor which describes observed behavior.)
It may not be ‘polite’ or the accepted ‘official’ social rule, but it is a generally accepted rule. In the best philosophical world one is polite to all at all times, regardless of how impolite they are in return. In the real world when someone repeatedly abuses you, you treat them more harshly. You express low opinions when asked, you give them the cold shoulder, you avoid contact, you attribute low motives to their actions, etc., etc.. It’s not especially pleasant but it *is* done and it *is* pretty normal.
Especially in male society. If you are female I would be less surprised that you do not know this; it may be different for you.
Only saints are expected to be 100% pure and no one, ignoring the ignucious jokes, calls RMS a saint.
It’s the only way of living. If you don’t understand that then you need some serious life experience.
You give something, someone else gives something. You then give something etc. etc. There is a name for relationships where there is give one one side and all take on the other, and it’s the cause of many an abusive relationship. You can try and bee happy maintaining the status quo, until you go off the edge of a cliff.
Sounds like you’ve had a pretty bad life. 🙁
No, it’s just we’ve got a lot of basement dwellers around here who’ve had no life experience who pick up politically correct things to say and think that’s the way to live ;-).
Life, and relationships, are based on the principal of you showing something and someone else showing something back. You then know where you are. You giving all the time is merely going to kill you off. How many times can you hear “Oh, I’ll just give them one more chance?”
If you don’t know that then you have no brain I’m afraid, and you’re going to to end up with a pretty nasty life when you’ve realised that you’ve wasted your time.
Edited 2009-09-27 15:17 UTC
No arguments there mate but don’t forget all the people passing off world-weary cynicism as insightful life-experience. 😉
I look at your original post and you appear to be dismissing all the things he has accomplished for the FOSS community, rewriting it from a negative perspective. In fact from what I can see, the only thing this Miguel fellow has done “wrong” is to be employed by Microsoft! Did he spill crude oil all over pristine Alaskan shores? Did he have someone locked-up? Did he sue Mr Stallman for defamation? Did he run over a kitten in his car? No… he merely refused to dignify Mr Stallman’s rant with a response.
I would say that is a normal life. There are certain things in life you can count on, and that is being screwed over if you give people the chance to do so. Here are a couple of things that are guranteed to happen:
1.) Your “best friend” will at least try to sleep with your gf/bf wife/husband.
2.) If you have an idea, never share it until you have a working prototype/model of it to show someone. Once you share it the person you shared it with will run with it, and before you can get a working model set, you will find they have already pushed it to management and have been given a raise/promoted for it. You of course will not even be acknowledged.
That is the way life works, and to steal a line from the X-Files, “Trust No One”. If you do, you *will* be screwed, is just a matter of when and how bad.
I’m… speechless. Sorry to hear that. If we ever meet, drinks are on me.
The funny thing was that ActiveX itself was pretty much dead on Microsofts side when he started to clone it. Even when Microsoft was starting ActiveX those who knew how to deal with components only shook their head about what they were cooking (mainly the nextstep and star office guys)
It was absolutely pointless to clone it, when others already have shown how to do such a thing without breaking anyones head trying to apply it.
Microsoft now mostly has admitted that ActiveX is dead end, hence they push .Net and keep ActiveX mostly as legacy component binding intact.
The plans however were different, they wanted to bring out Windows component based, when NextStep hit the scene, how well that worked we already know.
He’s also a nut. Many visionaries are nuts. It’s his nuttiness that made him start the FSF. Nuttiness and passion. He was angry about being unable to make his printer work, and this blossomed into a movement that we’ve all benefitted from.
I admire Stallman for his contributions and his passion. I also admire de Icaza. And Raymond and Torvalds. I also admire Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Each has made positive contributions. And each has made some negative ones.
Stallman’s like the nutty uncle. Like what they said about Obama and that weird preacher of his. We just need to pat RMS on the head, tell him he’s right (just to placate him) so that he moves back onto something useful, which he will.
I love how in this country, telling the truth, makes you “weird.”
LOL.
In any case, you had some good points. And I could make a case that most of those names you mentioned are somewhat nuts too. Bill Gates suffers from Asperger’s (autism), Steve Jobs is probably OCD, etc.
It’s debatable whether Stallman’s assertion that de Icaza is a traitor is “truth”.
The fact is, Miguel has prevented Microsoft from maintaining a monopoly on being able to run C# apps. They wanted to feign openness and interoperability. Miguel called them on it by developing a Free implementation of their spec. They could hardly back down. Because of Miguel, things are slightly freer.
I don’t disagree with Stallman’s suggestion that C# should be avoided due to the iffyness regarding patents and such. However, taking a notch out of Microsoft’s stranglehold was a good thing.
I question my earlier statement. On the surface, what I said may appear to be true. But encouraging NEW software development targeting the CLR (or its clone, Mono) leaves Microsoft opportunity to pull the plug out from under us for using “their” technology that they (claim they) have exclusive rights to.
It’s one thing to use Mono as a means to transition some C# code to a Free platform. It wouldn’t necessarily be bad to have a C# (just as a language, not necessarily the standard libraries) front end to GCC (not necessarily compatible with Windows). But to encourage NEW development for this platform that is dubious in how Free it is makes me uncomfortable.
I am not surprised nobody replied to your post refuting your claim. This is exactly what worries me about Mono/CLR/.Net/C# et al. Nobody wants to come clean about the patents behind them and seem ‘eager’ to trust Microsoft that they won’t drag you to court for it.
At least that’s not the case with SAMBA.
Its almost like we have an army of traitors within the free software community who are committed to the very cause the free software movement is against!
Your comprehension skills are debatable, where did I even imply I was referring to Stallman in the opening sentence of my post?
Since you didn’t specify anyone else, I had to infer from context.
Thom, I think your comments missed the point a bit. Now I don’t agree with RMS at all, but cataloging all the things that Miguel De Icaza has done for Free Software in the past is a big part of RMS’s point. You usually aren’t considered to be a traitor to a cause unless you were at one point a major player in that cause.
Here in the US, our most famous traitor was Benedict Arnold. Every schoolchild knows that Benedict Arnold betrayed his country and helped the British during the American Revolutionary War.
But generally only students of history are aware that Arnold’s treason was so noteworthy only because he was one of America’s finest generals, and a bona fide war hero. He distinguished himself in battle and was even gravely wounded at one point. It was only after he was passed over for promotion and recognition for years, and witnessed pervasive corruption in the fledgling American government that he decided to switch sides and accept a position in the British Army. If his plot hadn’t been discovered in advance, America easily could have lost the war.
So RMS’s claim is that Miguel De Icaza was once a great hero to the Free Software movement, but now is working against it. Hence, traitor. Again, I strongly disagree.
He is not a traitor. He just copies MS technologies. The problem with this is that the rest of the community play his game, and now .Net is all over Gnome, and in the future so will be Moonlight. Good job!
But Moonlight is better than Flash! It is free software, built on free specs. Why is there not the same crusade against Flash as there is against Mono?
Hmmm…
Should it be because Flash is NOT coming from a company that has a very strong intention to crush or damage Linux as much as possible?
At least – I never heard people from Adobe say that Linux is a cancer and… well you know the drill…
The result is that I have more trust in Flash technology, than I have in silverlight/moonlight and mono. Not that strange I think…
QFT
Not sure though if I completely agree with RMS, but he has also been the first to see actions or opinions that could undermine the freedoms he aspires.
The Mono debate is an example: I believe RMS’s opinion was the following: Mono itself is a great open source tool to work with C#, but the language is controlled by Microsoft. So why use Mono for your FOSS-project?
The Mono debate is an example: I believe RMS’s opinion was the following: Mono itself is a great open source tool to work with C#, but the language is controlled by Microsoft. So why use Mono for your FOSS-project?
The answer is very very simple: it’s a matter of taste. Some people just happen to like coding in C# and they should be allowed to do that.
Fine. Use C#. But don’t use Mono or .Net. It’s one thing to use a language because you like it. It’s another to become dependent on runtime libraries that Microsoft may claim control over at a later date.
There were similar problems with Java. The runtime wasn’t free. That made “Free Software” written in Java kindof ambiguous (or just plain wrong, depending on who you ask).
As soon as Sun released Java as Free Software, this took away their potential to sue you for use of their technology in a way they didn’t like. So then it became okay (and meaningful) to write Free Software in Java.
We don’t have that with .Net. Microsoft WILL screw you at some point, when it is to their greatest advantage. They can’t claim copyright over Mono, but they damn sure will try to abuse patent rights.
For those who REALLY want to use C#, we should have a GCC front-end for it. You could use the language (the basic syntax), but you’d have to use a different, incompatbile set of system libraries. So be it.
Fine. Use C#. But don’t use Mono or .Net. It’s one thing to use a language because you like it. It’s another to become dependent on runtime libraries that Microsoft may claim control over at a later date.
AFAIK only a small portion of Mono is covered by patents and those portions are easy to leave out. So you could still code in C# using Mono and not be afraid of patents if I’m correct. It might be useful for the Mono developers to break it into two parts; the free part and the one with patent-covered parts.
Note, I don’t code in C# myself and I dislike using Mono apps because of the additional CPU- and memoryoverhead of the virtual machine. But I still can understand why other people like coding in it; it’s a lot simpler and faster to get something done since it’s a managed language and you can leave memory management and all that to the virtual machine and concentrate on the functionality of your application.
Apparently, Miguel is also pushing proprietary extensions to Mono.
Apparently, Miguel is also pushing proprietary extensions to Mono.
Many of you opposers confuse the benefits of Mono with those negative sides which come with proprietary or patent-encumbered parts; Mono is not inherently an evil thing. It allows you to code things in a language endorsed by a many developer, and it allows you to do that efficiently and rapidly. The faster and easier it is to code for Linux (or any other F/OSS OS) the better, right? And there is nothing inherently wrong in it if the same software could be ported to closed platforms too with relative easy. The more users Free software has, regardless of platform, the better for all of us.
I don’t like those patent-encumbered issues myself either and that’s why I would like to see Mono being distributed in two versions; the Free one, and the one with patent-encumbered or proprietary ones. Or make it so that you can just throw those in some directory after installing Mono and you’ll get their functionality, too. Just don’t distribute those in the default package.
Like I’ve said before, I personally wouldn’t mind a C# front-end to GCC, even if it wasn’t totally windows-compatible. Lots of people like gcj for instance.
But my point wasn’t about what’s possible. It’s about the fact that Miguel is condoning proprietary extensions to Mono. He’s saying “go ahead and write some apps and libraries that are closed-source.”
If all Miguel did was give us a free .Net and was careful about making sure as much as possible is Free, that would be one thing. But he’s not. Linux Torvalds grudgingly tolerates some proprietary drivers developed for Linus (not included in the tree, obviously). Miguel actively encourages proprietary stuff to be written for Mono.
Still, encouraging and enforcing are two very different things. It is after all up to the developer himself/herself to decide whether to write proprietary code. Miguel de Icaza may be encouraging such, but the final decision lies solely on the shoulders of the developer.
You might not agree with me, and that’s ok, but I still think you should lay blame on the one doing the final decision instead of a middle-hand. And try to remember that while de Icaza does that he is still also contributing to the Free code and hasn’t in any way deliberately hindered its development or anything.
Many Free Software purists are not very tolerant of people who are passively tolerant of non-free software.
I’m often conflicted over this. Sometimes, I need to stop screwing around and get work done, so I’ll grudgingly use proprietary software. I’ll even tolerate it reasonably well if the application is vastly superior to any Free equivalent. Sometimes, there just is no free equivalent, like VLSI synthesis tools.
The experience can range from pleasant (OmniGraffle is a fantastic piece of software, and they respond to emails within 24 hours) to being akin to having a prostate exam (ever try to get help from Microsoft with Office?).
So while I may bend my ideals for the sake of productivity or out of a preference for usability, at no point do I think proprietary software is a GOOD thing, and I certainly don’t encourage it.
When I work as a consultant on a project that’s proprietary, I mostly shut up and do what I’m told. However, I do carefully suggest the idea of releasing code as FOSS for the moral, humanitarian, and practical reasons. Companies like it when they release something as FOSS and then outsiders contribute. They don’t like it when they release something (which can be a hassle and a risk), and no one contributes anything. This is why I’m in the Free Software camp, not the Open Source camp. You don’t release your source code because you expect something in return. You do it because it’s the right thing to do.
Depends om perspective I guess.
Actually, the USofA is a bunch of traitor who left England because of taxes … You won the war of independence because the King was unsure of CANADIAN troops allegiances. Had CANADA engaged the US rebels, you would have capitulated in a New York minute. As you did everytime we fought back on your invasion and won everytime.
The USofA was a traitor to America , because they attacked CANADA , who did not attack or provoke them , we even helped the rebels , who BTW we exist today because evry single time you attacked we crushed you and took ground.
The USofA was traitor to it’s own citizen until the 1960’s , remember the civil war ? Where the American of african origins got the idea from Canadians that everyone should be free and equals. They won the war
in 1865.
The USofA are a Traitor and coward of WW1 , because they add treaty of defense with France who created and Founded the USofA , why do you call think it’s called “independence day” and not “separation day”. They joined in once CANADA and the Ally had the germans on the run.
The USoFA did the same thing in WW2 they cowardly stayed out at the beginning until the Japanese who BTW the USoFA was already attacking by embargoing petrol for there island because of Japan invasion of China ( back then elctricity and alternative where almost non existent and they burned woods on that island a long time ago.
So you see taking USofA traitor as an example is not a good thing. Please don’t take this as an attack on the USofA or it’s citizens , it’s an accurate historical perspective , instead of hollywood US myths.
Actually RMS is right and on target as usual.
GNOME was created to compete directly with Microsoft as a Free Software option to KDE who at the time was only Open Source.
BTW Miguel de Icaza created Ximian too :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ximian
Who was supposed to be “THE” commercial backer of GNOME.
Who finnaly eneded up cooperating with Microsoft on Mono/dot.net and getting bought by Novell.
Funny how until now RMS had never called Miguel de Icaza a traittor, might it be that he now works exclusively on proprietary and closed technology as is main work and contribute to Open Source when he as the time to get around to it and don’t contribute anymore to Free Software …
The proof is probably in some technology/software that the FSF is aware of and asked Novell and Miguel de Icaza who is probably the author of it to Open Source it or offer a copy under Free Software and Novell and Miguel de Icaza responded on the negative.
The only thing everyone can be happy about is that GNOME is GPL , in other words Miguel can’t close it too.
Free Software as always had a problem with the Open Source parasite who take the money they get paid to make Free Software end up making Open Source and finally decide to close it.
But they don’t call everyone traitor.
Disagree all you want,
KHTML got taken over by webkit …
Xfree is not on par with Nvidia and ATI.
GNOME and KDE have slowed down a lot.
Google used GNU/Linux and the GPL until they got money.
Mac OS X is based on BSD.
Mono is not even on par with Dot.net.
Didn’t Quebec try to split itself from the rest of Canada? Does that make it a traitor to the rest of Canada?
Then there’s the french language thing and having the entire country support both english and french to keep the pea soup eaters happy…
The province of Quebec is “THE” founder/creator of CANADA …
Yes , to some in the rest of CANADA the separatist movement look and feel like traitor , it’s a perspective. But they lost two democratic votes too …
But their is independentist and sepratist movement in all of CANADA. There is even a movement for CANADA to become a US States.
Actually there is more people that speak and write in French in CANADA and pay there taxes , then English.
But the language thing is more racism then traitor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_in_Canada
While that is total population, it is safe to assume that more than 22% of English speakers pay their taxes…
It’s an innacurate article for starter Quebec is bilingual by charter. I guess some racist had some fun with the Wikipdia article , BTW, there are French and English racist.
http://www.gouv.qc.ca/portail/quebec/pgs/commun/?lang=en
I did not mean that all english speaking people did not pay there taxes , but there is 16 million submission to Ottawa in French for taxes each year , that come from all provinces. The Conservative tried to cut Radio-Canada budget outside Quebec, and there where hundred of thousand of people who stood up against it in many provinces outside Quebec.
French isn’t a race, stop playing the race card.
Your right, we are all humans after all.
But your also wrong :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
” there is no distinction between the term racial discrimination and ethnic discrimination.”
I am not playing here, nor do I need any card.
Well seeing you’ve claimed the inaccuracy of wikipedia and then used them to support another claim, I’m going to have to do that as well.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism
* Main Entry: rac·ism
* Pronunciation: \ˈrÄ-ËŒsi-zÉ™m also -ËŒshi-\
* Function: noun
* Date: 1933
1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2 : racial prejudice or discrimination
1. I don’t make claims, I make sentence.
2. That particular article is innacurate as
you can see from an english link to an english
Quebec governement official website.
3. I never said wikipedia was inacurate entirely.
4. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ethnic
Ethnicity is not race.
Words have meaning, if you just want to say discriminatory, I would understand where you are coming from. By stating it is racism, though, you are saying that the French speaking Canadians are racially different than the English speaking which is flat out wrong.
Ethnic not Ethnicity.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Ethnicity
As you can see it’s two diferent word.
No, I want to say racism and said racism and it’s the proper and accurate english word in this case.
No, that there is ethnic racism between the two due to there history here, there are some people here who believe it’s two different race, from both ethnic background. Both are human beings as we all are.
I think most of Stallman’s critics fail to understand the man.
Richard is a provocateur. You are not supposed to like him. Richard points out flaws in our world and his delivery is intentionally grating. Our specialty is software. Our field is dominated by corporations, fads, and taking the short view on everything. Richard, on the other hand, takes the long view. He knew it would take 20 years for GNU and other free software to become hugely popular, and he was right.
His model of software development has also proven to mesh well with the Internet, and free software is found on computers associated closely with Internet infrastructure. That to me is his greatest gift to society.
Remember, Stallman doesn’t care about making friends. He is a brilliant man and he picks his issues. He is focused on software, his area of expertise. No matter how much his style may offend, we should listen. We’d be way worse off to ignore him.
Check out Stallman.org and look at all the other uninformed and provocative statements he makes on a variety of topics of which he has no specific knowledge or expertise. He is the archetypal computer hacker: abrupt, grating, socially awkward, supremely talented and supremely arrogant, utterly though unconsciously convinced that his professional expertise makes him an expert in a variety of unrelated topics.
Let’s be honest, if he didn’t have his abilities or the accomplishments under his belt, nobody would put up with his personality or braying attacks. I will always be grateful to him for his contribution to software and software freedom, but I feel no obligation to give him a free pass whenever he says something stupid or takes shots across the bow of people he feels personally threaten his political dominance in the world of Software. He is the embodiment of the FSF, borderlining on a cult of personality. Look at the people he attacks and the content of the attacks. I believe the personal and the political are not separate in his mind. I will not make excuses for his provocative attacks on people that infringe on the influence he thinks should be his, which is what I think is happening here.
Stallman has a problem, which is that when a field gets big enough, it starts attracting equally skilled people that don’t actually have an abundance of negative personality traits. Years ago you needed people like Stallman and put up with it, but in the future people like him are going to get passed over for people like Iczasa (I am passing no judgment if he is a traitor or not) who can both accomplish a goal and work well with others. This applies equally for political and business goals. In what other field could you have a political advocacy group led by a personality like Richard Stallman?
If his software model is so great then why are we not running the hurd?
Some of us take offense when he demonizes people who do not adopt his model and yet his original goal of a gnu system with a microkernel is still unfinished.
If his volunteer programming model was truly effective then he wouldn’t be running around demanding that reporters say GNU/Linux.
RMS has been historically right. I really think that open source should directly fight Ms on any ground.
If just mono was licensed under the gpl3 there would be noboby complaing, so I think De Icaza and Novell have something to hide.
He has also has been historically looney, and the “right” desitions he has made always have had side effects, for extremist MS haters his desitions will always be right, so when he tossed feminist remarks was he right?.
Is not hard to make the “desitions” he makes, everybody can, but most people are not as looney as him.
RMS = Looney with power.
“feminist remarks”
Oh, silly me, I mean sexist remarks.
Yes, yes, yes!! You hit the nail on the head – and the licensing of Mono is precisely why you are correct – though we differ on terms (as I’d like less restrictive terms personally.)
Mono is licensed under the GPL, LGPL, and MIT/X11 Open Source Licenses.
The only parts that are not is ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET AJAX, which are under the Microsoft Open License, and not in use by Mono applications as a general rule. These parts are not required to use C#, or the mono runtime.
http://www.mono-project.com/Licensing
No. RMS says things which are obvious to many, and his followers then consistently practice revisionist history to give him the credit. There’s a difference.
Edited 2009-09-24 16:36 UTC
Don’t underestimate the usefulness of stating the obvious from a pulpit.
Maybe RMS said things other people in similar positions knew, so maybe it was ‘obvious’. What makes this not pointless is that people who *didn’t* find it obvious were thereby informed.
If it’s so easy to be right the way RMS has been right, why aren’t you famous for being right? If you don’t tell anybody else obvious things they remain obvious only to you.
In the real world we would be calling him an asshole.
Ups. A bad word. But so fitting.
RMS is a celebrity wannabe.
He says things to be provocative, controversial, and to get in the news.
As you know, any news is good news… his name is out there.
The real sad thing is that he probably believes what he is saying.
Thom,
You start out admitting that RMS is giving an opinion, but then you get all pissed off because he had the nerve to talk down about Icaza? Its his opinion. And further more, like it or not, its not hard to make the argument that RMS is right. Maybe it was rude, or socially uncalled for, but hey, its HIS opinion. While RMS may be a bit loony, he usually has a pretty good argument behind his ideas.
For what it’s worth, De Icaza has done a lot of good in the F/OSS world and working for/with Microsoft doesn’t make him a traitor. A traitor would be someone who deliberately tries to undermine F/OSS projects and/or ideologies, but he isn’t doing that. He is following his own interests and there is nothing wrong with that.
As for RMS… I really deeply dislike that man. He seems like a total nutcase with a 25-foot pole up in his behind, looks like an ass and act the same way. I sometimes just get the urge to drop using all F/OSS apps just so I could avoid having anything in common with him.
Who’s software are you going to use then? Ballmer’s? There’s always an idiot/lunatic behind everything (not implying RMS is one).
Ballmer isn’t exactly an idiot or a lunatic, though he sometimes seems to play one when he wants to excite the crowds.
He just has a different perspective: he wants to make money for his company and shareholders by selling software. There doesn’t seem to be anything inherently wrong with that.
So when De Icaza and pals pander to Microsoft’s technological monopoly on, for example, the Obama inauguration coverage, he isn’t undermining “F/OSS projects and/or ideologies”? Such acts provide the figleaf for Microsoft’s otherwise unclothed arguments about not having a monopoly from the moment your PC leaves the production line.
Right. So, in your mind the notion of Free Software is firmly associated with one figure and you’ll gladly revoke those principles based on that figure’s persona. Are you sure your computing choices are actually driven by such principles, or is this some kind of libertarian (or Life of Brian) one man per movement instinct in play? Sheesh!
So when De Icaza and pals pander to Microsoft’s technological monopoly on, for example, the Obama inauguration coverage, he isn’t undermining “F/OSS projects and/or ideologies”? Such acts provide the figleaf for Microsoft’s otherwise unclothed arguments about not having a monopoly from the moment your PC leaves the production line.
So when de Icaza and pals pander to people who want things done instead of hanging on to black and white ideals and that is undermining F/OSS? The world is not black and white and most people want things that work, regardless who came up with those things first.
Right. So, in your mind the notion of Free Software is firmly associated with one figure and you’ll gladly revoke those principles based on that figure’s persona. Are you sure your computing choices are actually driven by such principles, or is this some kind of libertarian (or Life of Brian) one man per movement instinct in play? Sheesh!
No. I just dislike him.
So why does Silverlight even exist?
Why hasn’t the FOSS community provided us with a decent alternative to flash? They’ve had plenty of time to provide one.
Because it isn’t one community and people presumably don’t see the benefit. In fact, things like Silverlight do exist, at least in the open standards world: people may deride SVG and related technologies but they aren’t really so far removed from Silverlight and Flash. Moreover, things like XForms are technologically superior to the mish-mash of technologies and approaches that Silverlight and Flash or SVG and JavaScript provide. However, the open standards world is restrained by having to forge consensus and is beholden to large vehicles (open source ones, by the way) such as Mozilla.
And this gets us to the part about deploying stuff. Mozilla and Firefox have been somewhat fortunate: a grass-roots movement has ushered that software into many places, but is it as likely that a random open source project would gain enough momentum to get that level of deployment? Meanwhile, Microsoft can pretty much push out anything and see it on millions of machines, thanks to their retail monopoly.
You make a good point, but technology is only one ingredient in the success of such solutions. How Adobe has managed to popularise Flash could be informative in popularising rival solutions, though.
Remember how poorly Adobe used to support Flash? Maybe this will remind you:
http://ask.metafilter.com/45483/Flash-8-for-Linux
There has always been demand within and outside the FOSS community for an alternative to flash. The FOSS community should have produced something like HTML5 a decade ago.
That’s why the whole GPL ideology is silly. They can’t meet the demands of users but expect the whole world to adopt the GPL.
The GPL software development model does not work for most software and never will. Calling proprietary software unethical when you can’t provide an alternative is a joke. Software to some may be a religion but for the rest of the world it is a tool.
If you can’t provide a better drill then go home and try to make a new one. Don’t sit at the construction site berating the manager to use different tools when you can’t provide an alternative.
I don’t need reminding, but then I have little use for Flash myself. Java also had poor Linux support for a very long time.
There’s really a collision between open standards and what you might call “the FOSS community”. And I repeat what I wrote about large vehicles – monolithic ones, if you like – which deliver those standards. There’s a reluctance by the people actually writing the code – crucially different from “demand” – to deliver a de-facto platform for shiny Web-based applications. Mozilla have tried a few times and have had to suffer criticism about fragmenting the Web.
And what if the FSF were to propose an alternative to Flash? We see already that large companies like Google won’t fully support open alternatives like Theora (with respect to Flash video), and I imagine that any call by the FSF would be met by the usual jeering from people about them being unrealistic or “purists” (or whatever), while others demand the replication of proprietary formats and tools.
The GPL is all about giving the users control. Remember this when the day comes that someone you know has lost control of, say, the means to access their own data: it will not seem so “silly” then.
You confuse software development methodology with the ideology. Whether you believe in the supposed efficiency benefits of open source – Eric Raymond-advocated bazaar-style development – is independent of whether you expect others to share their derived works with other people, which is what the GPL is all about.
You could have said the same thing about the Free Software desktop. Apart from people who are wedded to proprietary Windows applications (referring to that issue of control, above), and apart from somewhat superficial detractors (who most likely frequent OSNews more than the average person), it’s already a better drill than the one from Redmond. Sadly, those people developing KDE and GNOME, who have the ability to make a rival to Flash, are too busy with their desktop widgets to give it a shot.
But it’s not the GPL that prevents all this from happening, contrary to what some people would have you believe.
No I don’t because the latter limits the former. The common proprietary license model doesn’t work with the GPL. For most software as soon as you give the source away you have given away its value. Only a minority of software can be sold through external revenue models.
Linux is a reliable OS but only if you leave it in command line mode. Once you start running X and a bunch applications that use competing APIs it becomes a mess. When it comes to having a reliable OS with a GUI it does not have Redmond beat.
Go look at the web standards: SVG, Canvas, Audio/Video tag, etc.
Give me De Icaza over RMS any day. I use a ton of software related to him. Gnome, monodevelop a lot of mono apps. Come on. The OS fanaticism is one of the key things holding it back.
And being non-critical is the key to be destroyed…
If you close your eyes for everything you are too blind to see anything…
I think this issue needs to be considered in the context of power relationships.
You can imagine rich people sitting about sipping tea over polite conversation gathered to watch a battle, as they converse calmly and eloquently about the courage of the battle before them and the bravery of the soldiers dying in front of them. This is the perspective of Microsoft. Those under the umbrella of power can speak with politeness and patience even if they are generals issuing orders to lieutenants of either or both sides. They own the judicial systems and exploit the inefficiency of them.
Now if peons on the field recognize that they are mere puppets dying to see which individuals in power get a higher rank among their peers, they don’t have the luxury of polite deliberation. They have to call attention to the real evil as loudly, immediately, and hyperbolically as possible. The time to bring attention is short as you could be snuffed out any minute. (Though in FOSS by patent lawsuits in an insanely inefficient legal system where inefficiency is the tactic itself.)
Interesting that Atlas Shrugged was already mentioned, Alan Greenspan was an ex-Randian similar sell out almost exactly like the Dr. Robert Stadler character in that book. I could accept Icaza’s arguments about Mono and think he’s mostly in the right on that…but joining this Microsoft open source foundation is far more dangerous and scary to me than Mono.
The peons always have the choise to go on strike instead of violence.
“De Icaza has done a lot of hard work to advance and promote the Free software community, and whether you like Mono or not, it is still a completely open source project, and enables cross-platform development for those who wish to code in C#. Why doesn’t RMS deride the SAMBA guys in the same manner?”
Really? You really don’t know the difference? You REALLY, REALLY, REALLY don’t know the difference? If not, Microsoft has truly blinded you and there is probably nothing that will be able to help you, but here goes.
The SAMBA people are not helping a Monopolist company. There, I said it. If you still don’t get it you have had your nose stuck up Bill Gates rear end for too long and you can’t smell anything that isn’t *** anymore.
Microsoft hater?
I’m against any group (company or not) that restricts choice.
Want into a computer store and try to order a computer with Linux. I’m not talking about a Whitebox store. I’m talking about stores like BestBuy, Costco, etc. Try to buy a computer with Linux on it with no signs of any kind about Windows. Can’t? There you go.
Why can’t you buy a computer with Linux on it, pre-installed, instead of Windows? It’s easy. It’s not that people wouldn’t buy them. It’s because of marketing money. Dell, HP, etc., know where their bread is buttered. Microsoft “gives” them 10s of millions of dollars a year for advertising which INCLUDES making it hard for anyone to find computers with Linux on their websites and for shipping computers with Linux to BestBuy and other stores.
“But BestBuy isn’t ordering them”, you might say. Well, it would be rather hard to order something that isn’t available to be ordered. And currently, no they are not available to be ordered by companies like BestBuy, or whatever company you like to buy your computer through, with Linux on them.
So, for people that don’t want Linux compromised, he really, truly, completely, how else can I say it, the guy IS a traitor and the SAMBA people aren’t.
Wow, are we aggressive right there! I guess you use SAMBA?
Both SAMBA and Mono allow people to use Microsoft technologies on non-Microsoft platforms. Please explain the difference to me. I’m sure Microsoft has a number of patents on aspects of the SMB protocol as well – whether the original spec came out of IBM or not.
Please explain to me how Mono is helping a monopolist company, but SAMBA is not. Oh, and please try to explain without expletives.
Let me reiterate that I don’t care about Mono, and for all I care, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean. I haven’t yet seen any Mono application worth using.
Edited 2009-09-24 15:55 UTC
Completely irrelevant. He has a point.
Samba allows people to interact with MS servers from other non-MS servers/desktops. You don’t need a MS desktop to access those files in that MS server you have, so you might as well migrate your desktops to Linux.
Mono, on the other hand, is a reimplementation of a MS technology. It pushes MS own agenda with .Net. Remember Win32 is dying and MS needs to make all the world swith to .Net. The more people making programs with .Net, the better for MS. Mono isn’t really a problem for MS, because it doesn’t implement the Windows GUI, it uses Gtk, which .Net doesn’t include. So most .Net applications are Windows only, which is good for MS. You can’t run all .Net applications with mono, so there’s no problem at all.
There.
Mono, on the other hand, is a reimplementation of a MS technology.
Samba is just as well a reimplementation of MS technology.
It pushes MS own agenda with .Net.
Samba also pushes MS’s agenda; it allows you to migrate your desktops and servers to Microsoft software while still allowing you to exchange files with non-MS ones. Using Samba helps Microsoft just as much as developing Linux apps with Mono.
Not really, with Samba you could theoretically get rid of all Microsoft products in your organization, if all you were doing was filesharing/domain control based on smb for whatever reason, etc.
The same can not be said of Mono.
Why not, why couldnt you make apps in Mono that work in Windows too? Oh wait, you can.
Because that is not what I was talking about, was it?
Bingo.
The difference between SAMBA and Mono is that people actually use SAMBA, so they conjure up all sorts of imaginary reasons as to why SAMBA is okay and Mono is bad, just to resolve their own state of cognitive dissonance.
Bingo.
The difference between SAMBA and Mono is that people actually use SAMBA, so they conjure up all sorts of imaginary reasons as to why SAMBA is okay and Mono is bad, just to resolve their own state of cognitive dissonance.
So true, so true.
Edited 2009-09-24 17:03 UTC
Geez, speaking of cognitive dissonance, both you and the GP seemed to have completely missed one crucial point: Mono has MS’s tacit, if not explicit, blessing, while Samba never did.
See my earlier post: http://www.osnews.com/permalink?386190
Samba allows inter-operation between MS and non-MS operating systems, and this issue (inter-operation) is completely irrelevant with CLR/C#. The later is MS’s answer to Java, so the more operating systems it runs on the better for them, since any energy devoted to using CLR/C# on any OS is taking away energy from Java, which is exactly what MS wants.
MS probably doesn’t really care about Java, or anything else, if its on another OS, but they do want to completely control the use of their own OS, and the existence of Java on Windows prevents that, because they don’t ultimately control Java. They do ultimately control CLR/C# on Windows, because the top of that stack is not part of the ECMA standard, e.g. ASP.NET, Winforms, etc.
Samba, meanwhile, was born in a time when MS dominated, no one was interested in using it as the GP suggests, going from non-MS to MS, in fact most were never interested in going in either direction, they just needed to be able to allow communication between non-MS OSes and with Windows. This was something MS never wanted, since by making interoperability easier, it reduced the need to actually use, or switch to, Windows, thus inhibiting their ability to dominate the software world.
Thus MS fought Samba while they welcome Mono. 2 completely different situations: Samba is all about interoperability which MS doesn’t really want, while CLR/C#/Mono is ultimately about killing JVM/Java (and in doing so, giving MS more control) which MS most definitely does want.
Incorrect. The problem with Java is that it reduces the OS itself to commodity status, so Windows becomes unimportant (not “special” anymore, as with .NET), possibly even running slightly worse than Unix (or being harder to admin, or…). So MSFT does care about Java running on non-MS platforms.
So far, Mono is mostly competing with plain old C though 😉
You either have a very short term memory, or you must be new.
Microsoft was never really happy about Mono, they went through various lengths over the years to block Mono presentations at Microsoft events. There is even a Flickr set where they are ejecting Icaza from a group picture.
Microsoft has changed since the early days when they saw Mono as a threat. And they also saw Samba as a threat.
These days Microsoft collaborates with various groups: Samba, PHP, Python and Ruby (http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33132), PHP (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/oct07/10-09ZendPR.msp…).
So you actually got your story wrong.
Microsoft 6 years ago hated everything open source. And now they are trying to find ways to work with open source communities, and even with the Linux community.
Your hate for Microsoft just blinds you.
I wasn’t talking about the “early days”.
Of course they aren’t happy with either one, they aren’t really happy with anything that doesn’t come from them, but in relative terms, Mono bothers them far less than Samba does.
They collaborate with Samba only because they have to, having lost that legal fight in Europe about keeping the SMB protocols closed.
They know they’re being watched for anti-trust behavior both in the US and Europe, this is why they don’t act like they did in the early days.
Not hate, probably just dislike, since most of FOSS doesn’t help them advance their own business agenda, but I doubt their opinion has changed any, they’re just being more careful about what they say publicly.
If these “open source communities” are part of, or complement, the Windows ecosystem, then of course MS has no problem with that, but as for cooperating with the Linux community, I’ll believe that when it actually happens.
Don’t be absurd, I don’t hate them, I just don’t trust them. I may be new here at OSN, but I also remember MS from the “early days”.
Samba also allows authentication based on Active Directory. This means you can continue using MS desktops, hell you can authenticate off of an AD Server with it.
Samba is an implementation of microsoft’s SMB protocol, and with that comes the cohabitation of two platforms. Mono does the same thing. It’s a reimplementation of Microsoft’s .NET technology to the best of their current ability.
No, he really doesn’t. Most of the post is just an attack. And most of it’s not even related to his own point. He spends a few sentances, at the begining and end, talking about Mono and Samba; most of the bulk of the post is an poorly-structured, semi-lucid anti-Microsoft rant. Let me underscore again that, for the length of the post, he only really states his point, at the beginning and end, without elaborating it.
Samba allows people to interact with MS servers from other non-MS servers/desktops. You don’t need a MS desktop to access those files in that MS server you have, so you might as well migrate your desktops to Linux.
Mono, on the other hand, is a reimplementation of a MS technology. It pushes MS own agenda with .Net. Remember Win32 is dying and MS needs to make all the world swith to .Net. The more people making programs with .Net, the better for MS. Mono isn’t really a problem for MS, because it doesn’t implement the Windows GUI, it uses Gtk, which .Net doesn’t include. So most .Net applications are Windows only, which is good for MS. You can’t run all .Net applications with mono, so there’s no problem at all.
There. [/q]
The difference, then — a point which the OP doesn’t actually make — has nothing to do with the nature of the projects themselves, but rather that Samba isn’t being used to write new software, while Mono is. Basically, then, you’re saying that Samba would suddenly be evil too, if they started trying to get new networking software to use Samba rather than, say, NFS. Or that WINE would suddenly be evil if Linux application development was actively done with WINE.
Basically, if that’s the big difference, if that’s why one project-that-re-implements-a-windows-technology is evil and another is good, then maybe that idea should have been developed in the damned post?
Edited 2009-09-24 16:59 UTC
1. Win32 api dying? everything written on Windows ultimately executes win32 api functions… Such API is, arguely, one of the bests C APIs written ever…. it is huge, it cares a lof of backwards compatibility, it covers a lot of the Windows functionality and so on.
2. Mono implements 100% of Windows Forms on top of Cairo.
3. Anyway, the nice part in Mono is not the MS part, but the new ecosystem they are building: Gtk#, Posix, their ahead of time compiler, their support not just for Linux, but for BSD, Solaris and Mac, SIMD, their programmatically callable C# compiler; and technologies like Moonlight and their new MonoTouch.
If we see just the politics on everything that occurs, the essential gets invisible to our eyes…
Technologically, Mono is a brilliant effort.
Edited 2009-09-25 03:41 UTC
Including .NET, correct. I believe the GP is incorrect here. The real reason for .NET has always been to kill Java/JVM and give MS more control over how their OS is used. Anything that becomes a “must-have” on Windows for the typical user is something that MS must control themselves, thus we’ve had IE to replace Netscape, CLR/C# to replace Java, Silverlight to replace Flash, etc.
You’re right, this is definitely arguable.
And therein lies the danger of using Mono. Winforms, ASP.NET, etc, aren’t covered in the ECMA standard, only the foundation of the stack, CLR, CIL, C#, etc., is covered.
In the long run this is an ecosystem that will always be controlled by MS, and will always be playing catch-up with what MS is doing with CLR/C# on Windows. No one seriously believes that Icaza/Novell by themselves can keep Mono in-line with MS’s Windows versions of CLR/C#. And worst of all, at any time, MS could shut them down if they wanted to, because of their implementations of Winforms and ASP.NET. Not that that is likely now or in the near future, since having Mono in existence is politically useful to MS, but in the long run, Mono’s fate is controlled not by Icaza, or Novell, or Mono’s users, but by MS. Hence the problem some have with using Mono.
Most of the time, unfortunately, politics is the essential part…
True, on technical grounds C# is an improvement over Java (like unsigned integers) and CLR has some features that the JVM should have had at the start (like dynamic language support), of course MS had the advantage of coming with CLR/C# long after Java, so they could fix the mistakes originally made by Sun.
In the real world however, technical sophistication doesn’t guarantee success. If it did, we’d all have been using Betamax cassettes instead of VHS all these years. Why not Betamax you ask? Because back then Sony acted a lot like MS does now, but since the industry wasn’t controlled by any Sony “monopoly”, it was free to go in a different direction, one which was less technically sophisticated, but at least one not controlled by a single gatekeeper…
If you’re only concerned with the Windows world then using MS’s stuff is an obvious no-brainer. For those not in the Windows ecosystem however, using MS-controlled technology makes little sense, and is inherently dangerous, because you aren’t in their ecosystem – which is the only one they care about.
Those who’ve been around long enough to witness MS’s anti-competitive and monopolistic practices for the last 2 decades or so, aren’t going to touch Mono. For most folks out there on a non-MS OS, its simply a non-starter.
Not to mention stuff like Mono.cecil and their REPL. My day job is doing ASP.net, and I’ve got mono installed as well as .net for the REPL. There is just no substitute if you want to do some quick exploratory coding to try out an idea.
Because SMB is already established; it’s not going anywhere. SAMBA doesn’t exist as a replacement for other, proper, solutions. It exists to help people caught in a stranglehold. It’s like methadone.
Mono would be fine too if it were used like this, but it’s not, people are actually encouraged to use it.
In the first case you’re simply adjusting to reality, in the second case you’re helping bringing about one that isn’t in your best interest.
Could we please not go off topic? You might just have to delete your own post… or mine. 😛
OEMs don’t sell Linux on the desktop because people don’t want it.
Most of the people I know could run Linux if they wanted to. But guess what? They have no reason to. Well all run Vista or Windows 7.
Linux as a desktop doesn’t provide enough benefits to make up for the license savings against Windows. On the server however it can be cost effective which is why OEMs like Dell and HP sell it there.
Oh? I could have sworn they make a product that is intended to be compatible with a Microsoft product, thus helping Microsoft staying in a power position on the desktop.
Exactly how is Icaza restricting your choice?
I remember a conference in Turkey couple of years ago. Miguel de Icaza was talking about Mono, and one guy asked him about licensing and asked “do you think Richard Stallman will be angry on this?”. And de Icaza replied: “He is always angry”
RMS is so focus on “Pure” Open Source Software that he has lost all aspects of proportion.
His latest rants on SaaS and Cloud Computing, and now Mono. Is just to show how stuck in the 80’s and 90’s he is. He wants to toss out any ways to improve the impression of open source software that he didn’t come up with.
He is a purist, and his opinions are out there. However, I give the man his due… and to this day EMACS and GCC for example are pretty usable, and have a big deal of quality to them. I can not say the same for the convoluted mess that GNOME is, and don’t get me started with mono. So maybe these projects would also benefit from their very own “purists” to at least give them some sort of direction.
A lot of people think that the main problem with FOSS is that they are copying other people’s technologies. I beg to differ, the main problem with FOSS is their piss poor quality and lack of consistency/standardization, mainly due to the lack of actual strong leadership/vision.
This pretty much sums up out out of touch Stallman is: he does not really use the web. He has some crazy-ass wget-to-email method for reading web content. I learned this when I was corresponding with him on some open source related topic years ago. But he isn’t really operating in the same technological reality that the rest of us are. I found this interesting article:
http://lunduke.com/?p=725
This pretty much sums up out out of touch Stallman is: he does not really use the web. He has some crazy-ass wget-to-email method for reading web content. I learned this when I was corresponding with him on some open source related topic years ago. But he isn’t really operating in the same technological reality that the rest of us are. I found this interesting article: