Hi, As you might have heard, Richard Stallman has recently written an article, positioning himself against including Mono by default, and discouraging it as a platform for developing free software:
http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono The SFLC [1] and other members of the free software community [2] have made statements backing Stallman's position. I agree with Richard that this is a serious problem which could in the future cause great harm to our community if left unstopped (I disagree, however, in the way Microsoft will use to attack us; if you want to know my own opinion, I wrote an essay about this in my blog [3]). This matter concerns gNewSense because the i386/amd64 version is shipping Mono by default (as a dependency for Tomboy and F-Spot, AFAICS). IMHO it should be considered among the gNewSense community to avoid promoting Mono whenever possible. There's a replacement for Tomboy, Gnote [4], which is almost identical to Tomboy, and there are a number of high-quality replacements for F-Spot. Fortunately, at this time the move I'm proposing doesn't involve a great loss. What does everyone think about this? [1] http://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2009/jun/29/language-patents/ [2] http://blogs.fsfe.org/adridg/?p=157 http://planet.gnu.org/gnutelephony/?p=3 [3] http://robertmh.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/mono-is-not-a-patent-threat-for-debian/ [4] As I announced earlier in this list, Gnote is already in the default install for gNewSense metad (mipsel & powerpc). Note that at that time, Mono was not an option for metad anyway, since it doesn't support mipsel: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-dev/2009-05/msg00024.html -- Robert Millan The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and how) you may access your data; but nobody's threatening your freedom: we still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all." _______________________________________________ gNewSense-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnewsense-dev
