Robert Millan schreef:
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
I don't think the free software community will get much heat from MS
about C#. Unless it starts becoming a real competitor to MS's
implementation, that is. I agree that it's not good to encourage
dependencies on C#, so I think you should open bug reports for the
applications that should be replaced, but I'd mark them as "Wishlist".
I know Gnote is a valid alternative for Tomboy, but it would have to be
backported. I don't know about alternative for F-Spot. Last time I
checked I didn't find a lot of (actively developed) similar
applications, but then I don't use that kind of software. Perhaps
someone could make a comparison of features of the available apps so it
would be easier to choose a replacement.
Are there any volunteers who'd like to implement this?
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