All GPLed Code Removed From MonoDevelop 443
rysiek writes "A few days ago, Miguel de Icaza wrote on his blog that the whole of MonoDevelop is now 'free' of GPL-licensed code. 'MonoDevelop code is now LGPLv2 and MIT X11 licensed. We have removed all of the GPL code, allowing addins to use Apache, MS-PL code as well as allowing proprietary add-ins to be used with MonoDevelop (like RemObject's Oxygene).'"
Does anyone really use it? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know I'm an old fashioned luddite (I code with nedit, gcc and Makefiles), but does anyone use MonoDevelop?
MS does free (but not open) versions of its dev tools already, and frankly if you're using Mono you're probably an MS guy who wants his stuff to work on linux rather than a *nix dev anyway. Aren't you?
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I think it would be more likely you're a Linux/Mac developer who for some reason needs to write something for Windows. If you were a Windows developer you'd probably just use MS's tools and test with Mono.
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Absolutely. I'd use Python and Qt myself. But if you wanted to write a native app for Windows and you didn't HAVE Windows (or didn't care to be subjected to it), what would you use?
There aren't really a lot of options.
Re:Does anyone really use it? (Score:4, Interesting)
wxWidgets is rather dated, though, and that's by design, making for rather awkward API. I mean, have a look at this [wxwidgets.org]:
"wxWidgets does not use templates (except for some advanced features that are switched off by default) since it is a notoriously unportable feature."
In 2009! Notoriously unportable, seriously? Basic template stuff (enough for generic containers, for example) has been perfectly portable since late 90s! But no, they don't want templates, which is why you get to write gems [wxwidgets.org] like:
I'll take Qt any day, thanks. It doesn't look any worse than wxWidgets in terms of "native" (even if it achieves that differently), but it's much more powerful, and the API is better. Now that both are LGPL'd, I really don't see any advantage wxWidgets might have.
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If Qt used real C++ instead of its own language variant, it would probably be one of the top on my list. But until then, I just can't stomach it, even though part of me wants to use it.
gtkmm can do it. wxWidgets can do it. Why does Qt need to pervert the language?
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I second the idea that Qt kicks ass. Nonetheless, the design decision behind Qt's policy of forcing the programmers to drop the STL in favour of Qt's components such as container classes and string... Well, it sucks. It imposes on the programmer a non-standard way of doing things, it is a royal pain in the ass to integrate 3rd party components that rely on the STL and it plainly sucks to be forced to use a less mature API.
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It appears you have a very odd definition of what "not forcing" means. Qt doesn't offer support in all of Qt's classes for STL containers and/or the standard C++ string objects. You cannot write a Qt app without being forced to use Qt's QString and/or Qt's containers. The only way you may use C++'s standard components is if you bring additional bloat and complexity to the application by converting Qt's data types and containers back and forth with STL's, which quite plainly sucks in multiple ways.
But then a
Re:Does anyone really use it? (Score:4, Informative)
Wha? Qt??!
You mean the toolkit that requires a goofy cfront-style precompiler and comes with their own string class? Sure, it uses templates, but it's hardly a shining star of modern C++.
Re:Does anyone really use it? (Score:5, Informative)
That's the C++ API. Which is completely and utterly irrelevant if you are developing in Python rather than C++.
wxPython API has its own flaws, which are just as huge. For example, event handling via message maps [wxpython.org], which is directly ported from the C++ API (which in turn got it from the abomination that is MFC). I mean, seriously, this isn't idiomatic Python:
A numeric "ID_EXIT" in a supposedly object-oriented framework - WTF?
Meanwhile, in PyGTK, it's all just objects as it should be, with no manually defined numeric IDs:
And PyQt is even better:
Re:Does anyone really use it? (Score:4, Funny)
C++ WxWidgets was a niche solution for a temporary problem. It's basically a portable copy of MFC with a few extra features.
I got all excited about cross-platform GUI work, bought the book, got 3 chapters in, and all of a sudden had a huge WTF moment. Seriously, it was like looking at a painting of attractive women bathing, then you realize they are guys, and they are having sex and killing each other in the most creative ways imaginable. Wondering how I misinterpreted it at first, trying to see the original conception again, and feeling suddenly awkward about the erection is about as close of a metaphor as I can give to that moment.
With scripting languages I'm sure it's all cool and stuff, but for C++ you'd be better off holding someone's grandmother for a Linux GUI ransom. Or, if you're really super crazy, try Qt instead.
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Yuo may jest about Javascript, but I really think its the future. Everyone wants easily-deployable, thin-client apps (well, everyone, I mean line-of-business people) that perform as well as thick-client apps. Now we're just about, almost, getting there with HTML5, WebGL and the like, and so a good javascript implementation could provide a nice GUI to a back-end processing cloud. .NET and similar will become obsolete if the above could be shown to be workable in practical terms.
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MonoDevelop was designed to get Visual Studio Windows developers to use it to develop for Linux, Mac OS X, and other platforms that Mono exists for.
This is because high schools and colleges teach in C# and Visual BASIC instead of ANSI C++, Java, Python, and nedit with gcc and Makefiles. The programming students can keep their Visual Studio skills and still develop for Non-Windows platforms without having to learn new things very much.
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Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsoft. (Score:3, Insightful)
No GPL? Actually is Mono really that important any more? Most new software development is going to be on iPhone BSD, Android, and Maemo Linux. Needing legacy .net is nothing anyone cares about.
I think this shows Miguell's true pawn colors.
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So you're saying you think that most new software development will be for mobile-only OSes? Mobile apps may be okay for lots and lots of things, but I don't think that mobile apps will ever completely replace the traditional desktop applications. If anything, I see home-based computing moving in the direction of more and more LAN integration and more and better multimedia capability, with the hottest toys these days being media servers, wireless networking, faster broadband connectivity and more and more
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:4, Informative)
Are you going to stop that as well?
You'd be surprised at how many corporations are going with Sharepoint, it's the silent Apache HTTPD killer and yes, it uses
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I hate to break it to you, but Sharepoint isn't an HTTP server.
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You'd be surprised at how many corporations are going with Sharepoint, it's the silent Apache HTTPD killer...
I hate to break it to you, but Sharepoint isn't an HTTP server.
It appearsAlexBirch's point missed you: SharePoint Server replaces several uses of HTTP servers such as IIS, Lighttpd, and Apache. The idea is to switch the intranet from web apps to SharePoint and reserve the web servers for customer-facing sites.
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Sharepoint is an application that runs on IIS. IIS is what is replacing Apache here. Sharepoint replaces some of the content management systems you might run on Apache, whatever they might be.
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I hate to break it to you, but Sharepoint isn't an HTTP server.
Have you got SharePoint to work with Apache's HTTPD Server? You probably just use IIS and Windows Server 200X instead of using Linux and Apache HTTPD. Just go to Dice and look for SharePoint jobs, there are tons of them and there's no way to migrate away from it easily.
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:5, Funny)
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OpenOffice.org is your TEXT EDITOR? Oh boy.
Well at least he can do his own custom syntax highlighting without messing around in the "Preferences".
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, that's a pretty decent text editor. I prefer MS Paint.
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You'd be surprised at how many corporations are going with Sharepoint, it's the silent Apache HTTPD killer
How does sharepoint compete with a web server? Isn't IIS the Microsoft competition to Apache?
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, I am surprised at how many corporations are going with Sharepoint, yet its such a pile of w*** almost *everyone* at our corp thinks its pants (there are a few corporate yes-men lackeys who 'think' its good). Nobody can find anything on it, even adding search simply means we get thousands of hits for simple terms.
I can't understand why its spreading like an unfortunate rash at a sex party. Maybe the bosses will realise how bad it is and can it after it stops being used for a few months, but its always hanging in there, someone will post a document to it and suddenly its back to being a essential tool in everyday use.
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes the world is centered around client side applications...
Mono strength is for portability across server side applications. The problem is not Mono, it is the fact the GPLv3 is too strict. It is not necessarily any point is bad but all of them together makes it too strict.
The GPL is an attempt to push an Ideal, not necessarily good policy...
I wouldn't be surprised as knowledge about open source increases that more and more pressure to not be GPL will come up.
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> ...it is the fact the GPLv3 is too strict.
GPLv2 still exists and is still used (the Linux kernel, for example).
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:5, Insightful)
saying GPLV3 is too strict when we know the specific issue at hand here, means that it's just that proprietary things can still be embedded in GPLV2 and can't in GPLv3. So when "too strict" means "you can't shove proprietary shit into a free and open system", that tells me that MS and the lackeys are having quite a hard time dealing with open source.
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So long as whatever you do is released GPL, you're fine (well, under 99% of the cases anyway). If you want to release under any other license, determining if it's allowable is a nightmare. Try to interface a non-gpl plugin with an application. There's no "easy" answer as to if you can do that. Every lawyer will say
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Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:5, Insightful)
Alas, Mono is still a part of the default Gnome distribution, just so they can have a note taking applet which takes 189MB memory (counting libraries used by it and no other process) and takes several seconds to start on beefy hardware while the C++ port of that very same code uses 5MB and starts near-instantly.
Even worse, there are folks pushing Banshee as the default music player so there's another dependency on Mono.
The sooner we get rid of Mono installed by default, the safer we'll be from this trap.
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm...I tried to verify the statement about the 189 MB and failed, but maybe I'm just using the wrong method. I did a free -m, loaded tomboy, and then did another free -m. The result was only a 10 MB change in the amount of free memory.
It's true that tomboy is slow-loading on my (relatively fast) hardware. It's also true that it uses quite a bit of disk space. I did apt-get remove tomboy f-spot libmono* && apt-get autoremove && apt-get autoclean, and that freed up 64 Mb of disk space. If you're looking at, e.g., how much you can fit on a CD-based linux distro, 64 Mb is a heck of a lot to dedicate to something that's only needed for the sake of one applet.
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:5, Insightful)
"Only" 10 MB? How utterly absurd. And yes I get that in context to the claim made by the GP you have a point. (Possibly the GP has binaries compiled with debug symbols, or possibly *you* already have over a hundred megs of mono libraries loaded for something else and dont realise it.)
But just wow, only 10MB for a silly little virtual notepad. That's 256 times the entire system memory on my first PC. Which was a much more accessible and "user-friendly" machine than you can buy today, with a good DE built right in. It appears computer science in the intervening time has been exclusively focused on driving hardware purchases...
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:4, Insightful)
Alas, Mono is still a part of the default Gnome distribution, just so they can have a note taking applet
Oh, "just" so they can have a single applet? It couldn't possibly be because they think it is a generally useful way to develop applications, such as F-Stop and Banshee?
Mono may or may not be a good idea, but you are framing your argument in an intellectually dishonest way here. That note-taking applet ("Tomboy") may be the only thing in standard GNOME that needs Mono right now, but I'm pretty sure that there will be others.
Even worse, there are folks pushing Banshee as the default music player so there's another dependency on Mono.
See? Then it won't just be Tomboy, there will be other things using Mono.
I haven't tried C#, but a lot of people seem to like it. If having C# means I get more free software to play with, I'm in favor of that.
The major argument I have seen against Mono is "Microsoft is just waiting and they will assert patent claims!!" In that case, the only thing that they can do is force people to stop using C# and Mono. In which case, all the Mono apps will be pulled or re-written. And at that point, you would have what you seem to want: no more Mono in GNOME.
That is the worst-case scenario. And I don't see it as being bad enough to try to keep people from using Mono. If people want to use Mono to write free software, that's fine with me.
I'm curious: now that Java is becoming fully free, would you support re-writing Tomboy and F-Stop and the others in Java? That way, instead of being bloated and slow C# applications, they could be bloated and slow Java applications. Would you be happier?
In my day job, I write wicked fast C code (small memory footprint, too). When I write software on my own for fun, it tends to be Python, which is even slower than C#. Do you have a problem with Python too?
steveha
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Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:4, Informative)
It's not a rumor [wikipedia.org].
Debugger (Score:5, Funny)
Good. (Score:2, Insightful)
People who want to work for/shill for/suck up to Microsoft directly or indirectly should do that.
Those who don't support that sort of thing should work to cut them off at the knees by not using their software and discouraging others from doing so.
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Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, because Microsoft is making a profit off licensing the .NET framework. Wait, you mean they don't charge a cent for it? And C# is a better language than Java, with the Mono project providing cross-platform compatibility, so Windows users have an easier time migrating to Linux if they so choose? Clearly I should listen to random /.er and forswear all use of anything that "supports" "Microsoft products" in any way, including the OpenOffice; after all, it lets people read and write Office documents, and by doing so, indirectly enables the Microsoft hegemony.
P.S. Yes, C# being better than Java is personal opinion. I've used both, Java for two years in school and one and a half years in the workforce, C# for a little under a year in school and half a year in the workforce (plus a few years of various other languages, mostly C/C++ and, yes, Perl). For developers, the lack of rigid ideological adherence to OO dogma is quite helpful; delegates for callbacks and "pass-by-reference" for arguments instead of inane wrapper classes for both (yes, pedantic types, I know it's all pass by reference, but you know what I mean), not needing to think about auto-boxing as much (since .NET collections of primitives really are primitives, not boxed primitives), operator overloading and structs to enable the creation of relatively efficient and easy to use numeric types, etc. I think both languages have merit, and I think both languages are improved by the competition (e.g. without C#, I'm not sure Java would ever have introduced generics, since it violated the spirit of OO). But I'm not going to reject C# just because MS made it.
Re:Good. (Score:4, Interesting)
.Net sucks on it's own, not because Microsoft made it. I think it's crap and I think Mono is just cross platform crap. My list of languages that suck: .Net|Mono
VisualBasic
Java
RubyonRails
All 'framework' languages that make it easy for people to crank out bloatware.
Last month I replaced 120MB of ruby dependencies with 14 bash scripts. But it seems like every time I turn around someone is presenting me with a new sack full of ax handles and asking me to alter our filesystem to support it. The current bane of my existence is an 'unsupported' gui .net app that won't run in anything except 1.49-somethingsomething.
My opinion is that how easy it is to implement your ideas is the _least_ important consideration, but so many programmers seem to think it's the only one that matters.
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Right, because Microsoft is making a profit off licensing the .NET framework..
No, but they are smart enough to know if you can lock in as many people into your frameworks ( even if its just a virtual lock due to knowledge ), it only increases market share way down the road.
You have to think of the BIG picture, not what you can see if you look around your cube walls.
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How does software running on BOTH Windows and Linux create a lock-in?
Seems to me that the lock-in is a world without Mono. Then if you .NET you are locked in to a Windows only world. They are going to .NET regardless of Mono's existence. At least with Mono users aren't locked into Windows only.
Would you rather have something like where Flash comes from? A binary that runs on both but is closed up tight? Would you rather have Microsoft implement a closed .NET runtime blob that runs on Linux instead of a
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Mono Blows (hint, where's FW 3.5) (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, if you are going to devote your life to making a C# clone on Linux, then at least quit screwing around with applications and focus on the language. I mean, come on, where's WPF? Where's WCF? Where's LINQ to SQL?
Mono, you suck.
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Tis not done yet.
WCF client and server, the subset exposed by Silverlight 2.0.
LINQ to SQL using DbLinq.
More complete 3.5 API coverage.
So they are missing stuff.
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Re:Mono Blows (hint, where's FW 3.5) (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. Imagine, an open source project cloning the functionality of a commercial product that doesn't support the latest features of the commercial product.
Yes, but the commercial product is free as in beer, and the open source product is moving to be free as in beer only, so what's really the point, except to get locked into a clone of another technology?
I mean, if you are that into .NET, why not just use Windows?
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Re:Mono Blows (hint, where's FW 3.5) (Score:5, Informative)
Please provide a link to the FSF claiming that the LGPL is "less free" than the GPL.
Are you trolling? They renamed LGPL from the "Library" GPL to the "Lesser" GPL, because they feel it is less free. It's baked right into the name that they feel it is less free.
But you asked for a link. Here you go:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhySomeGPLAndNotLGPL [gnu.org]
Just in case that wasn't clear enough for you, let me rephrase it: according to this gnu.org link, the LGPL does not protect users' freedom as well as the GPL. It does not maximize freedom as well as GPL. In short, it is less free, according to gnu.org.
Remember that GNU and FSF are all about the users' freedom. Freedom of any developer to make proprietary software is not viewed as a good thing. A license like GPL that restricts the ability of developers to make proprietary software is viewed as more free.
On the other hand, fans of the BSD license argue that it is "more free" because anyone may do anything with the software. GNU and FSF reject this idea.
steveha
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fans of the BSD license argue that it is "more free" because anyone may do anything with the software
Including... making it non-free again...
Oops.
Yeah, oops indeed. Like so many before you, you have bought into the false belief that BSD licensed code can magically become non-free in some fashion that GPL code cannot. Let's go over this again. The only one that can relicense code is the copyright holder. Even then, that will not nullify the license of code which has already been licensed and released. This is all true whether the code is BSD licensed or licensed under the GPL. You cannot take BSD, and make it non-free, as you assert. The only r
good start! (Score:5, Funny)
Now for business use (Score:2, Interesting)
Businesses really don't like the GPL. I'm not allowed to use any GPL stuff anywhere unless it absolutely, positively will never leave the intranet. However, many businesses love the LGPL. It doesn't restrict them. So, it still stays open source, and businesses will create plugins. I write open source software on my own time, so I appreciate open source, but if I was a manager, I wouldn't touch any of the GPLv2/3 programs/code ever.
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There's a huge difference between GPL tools (which we at HUGE_CORP I work for use lots of) and GPL code/components.
We use binaries only, source could potentially lead to allegations of copying. And we make sure not to use any GPL code or components in our products so that we don't need to open them.
But all-out avoid GPL? No way. We use linux as a dev platform (amongst others) and we use all sorts of FOSS tools with a huge variety of licenses in addition to some commercial stuff.
You'd be a fool to make avoid
Re:Now for business use (Score:5, Informative)
You mean the company you work for hates GPL. The last 5 I worked for, that includes fortune 100 companies like AT&T and Comcast, Loved the GPL and OSS. You should find companies that are nor run by undereducated management that is afraid of the GPL.
Re:Now for business use (Score:5, Interesting)
I really hate Slashdot moderation. This isn't a troll, it's a perfectly valid opinion and one that I agree with. What's with all the MS shills having mod points here anyway?
The last two companies I worked for (one being Intel) were also very large, and had no problems with the GPL and OSS. Intel releases tons of GPL code, and contributes tons of code to the Linux kernel (in GPL of course). Intel is smart enough to know how to use GPL code to their advantage, and not be stupidly afraid of it. My last company (I'll start saying who that was after they're at least 2 employers behind me) also did lots of Linux kernel development.
My current company isn't as smart, unfortunately. They're starting to develop a Linux-based product, but they're pretty paranoid about the GPL too, and are looking for ways to be able to use GPLed code without contributing anything back (nice, huh?). They don't seem to understand that contributing changes back means not having to maintain your own fork, which is a PITA.
Define "use" (Score:2)
I'm not allowed to use any GPL stuff anywhere unless it absolutely, positively will never leave the intranet.
If you run a publicly accessible web site on a LAMP server, the only GPL programs involved are Linux and MySQL, and no copy of Linux or MySQL leaves your server. If you run a web site, only two kinds of programs are ever "distributed" (GPLv2) or "conveyed" (GPLv3) to the public: 1. in-page scripts written in JavaScript, ActionScript, or Java, and 2. software packages explicitly offered for download.
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Is this the closing of Mono? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does this sign the closing of the Mono project? And can anyone tell me, since this fundamentalist stance against the GPL and the alleged impending patent sword hovering over the Mono users' heads, what exactly is there to attract people to adopt it as their developing platform?
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Could you please provide an example of those lots of businesses and governments that "won't even touch the GPL" due to licensing ramifications?
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My main concern isn't Mono's license by itself but the objective behind GPL purge. It is stated in the article that the reason behind it is to, and I quote:
So the Mono people are intentionally opening the doors to allow closed-source components to be a part, possibly even a fundamental part, of the whole Mono platform. I don't know how exactly is it possible t
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And by "mono platform" I mean "mono development platform". They are not the same thing.
Re:Is this the closing of Mono? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, this.
LGPL is not "closed" - you still have to release the source code if you distribute software containing LGPL components. But what version of the LGPL are we taking about here? Since it's very easy to combine or cripple the LGPL'd parts so that they either rely on propritary or patent encumbered components in a way that can't be acheived with a full GPL product. Does the LGPL v3 protect against Tivoisation in the same manner intended by the GPL3? (Yes, I could go read the license but...it's long...and I'm tired..and others already have done so!).
By the way, I'm not commenting about the suitability or preference of a particular licence - I'd just like to know what the implications are in this case.
I think it's funny (Score:2, Insightful)
Reading all of these comments and then seeing them modded as Troll or as Flamebait. When actually the comments are pretty much correct. Who really uses Mono? After all, isn't it loosely based on .NET version 1.1 still? What's the point?
For Windows-based development you can fire up Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 Express edition without paying a dime and those are based on .NET 2.0 or 3.x, correct?
Unless Mono has upped the ante and has actually moved beyond 2003-era frameworks I don't see its relevance...
Re:I think it's funny (Score:5, Informative)
They are up to 3, and have a lot of 3.5 finished, but why let facts get in the way
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you mean their experimental subproject "olive"? uh, some people might not want to run developmental crap on production systems
Re:I think it's funny (Score:5, Interesting)
Various pieces from "olive" graduated into main Mono in the past year, including WCF, LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML and WindowsBase (they are all in Mono 2.6)
The missing pieces (Workflow Foundation and Presentation Foundation) are not part of our plan.
Eternal game of catch-up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Eternal game of catch-up (Score:5, Informative)
As the other poster said, the fact that we do not have 1:1 parity has never been a problem.
Some other technologies that are subsets and are wildly successful:
* Android's Java is not a 1:1 mapping to Java either, and that has not prevented it from being successful.
* iPhoneOS is not MacOS 1:1, and yet, it is incredibly successful.
* Chrome the browser, does not have every feature of Firefox, that did not stop it either.
* JBoss is a subset of the full J2EE stack, and for years it has been wildly successful.
* Linux for years was not even POSIX compliant, and yet, many of us jumped on it, and it became wildly successful.
In Mono we implement what makes sense, and what people are actually using in day to day applications, we do this using metrics that we obtain from our Mono Migration Analysis that helps us identify which APIs are used, by how many applications and we have collected this data from some 10,000 applications:
http://go-mono.com/momareports/ [go-mono.com]
Call this the data-driven prioritization of development.
Mono was born as a technology to bring the best that .NET had to offer to Linux, this was initially the c# language and the core libraries. As time went by, Mono evolved in two directions:
(a) Organica growth: as the Mono community grew, we identify missing features, we envisioned better ways of doing something and created tools, APIs, languages and extensions that mattered to us. In this category you can find things like Gtk#, Taglib#, Cairo#, Cecil, Mono.Options, Mono.Security, Mono.Data, Mono.Math, Mono.Management, Mono's C# REPL, Mono's SIMD extensions, Mono's large array support. Mono's dynamic JIT extensions, Mono's static compiler and much more.
For instance, today, more than 350 applications on the AppStore and 10 of the top 100 apps in there are built using Mono.
(b) Better compatibility with .NET: this is a simpler process than coming up with our own APIs. The .NET APIs are documented, there are thousands of applications to test the implementation against, the community is fed directly from the largest middleware stack in the world, so it made sense for us to implement these pieces.
Is it correct that we do not have a full implementation of .NET, there are a few reasons for this, now with numerals:
(i) Some APIs are Windows specific, and makes no sense to bring to Linux, in particular things like System.Management which is a thin wrapper around WMI. Our advise: replace that code with Linux and MacOS specific code and use one or the other at runtime.
(ii) Some APIs are too larger for us to take with our current community. This includes things like WPF and Workflow. If someone steps up, we will embrace them, but until that happens, we are focused on improving the other areas that have more users and that we have more requests to implement. Additionally, the WPF "lite" is a killer stack (also known as Silverlight).
(iii) Focus, we do not want to spread ourselves too thin.
As for .NET 4.0: we are not too far from having the core be 4.0 compliant, it is a nice upgrade to the solid 3.5 release. For instance, our C# compiler is already a full C# 4.0 compiler, and we already provide features that Microsoft wont offer until 5.0 (embeddable, reusable compiler, see C# REPL).
Moonlight is behind Silverlight, but I am not driven by despair, I am driven by the world of possibility. If I were driven by despair, I would not have written a single line of code.
If Silverlight never succeeds, then who cares how behind Moonlight is. But if Silverlight succeeds, and Linux users want to access that content, but the feature is either broken, not implemented or missing in Moonlight, those users will be in a position to contribute the code, and everyone wins.
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A Prelude to Charges... (Score:4, Interesting)
By removing GPL code, the Mono team has laid the groundwork for a closed source, commercial implementation. You watch. Mono is going to become a product, something that will be an instant-cripple for any Linux distribution that comes to rely on it.
Re:A Prelude to Charges... (Score:5, Insightful)
That makes sense only if the next step in this plan is to make it work, add the features people want, and get people to actually use it.
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They will simply not package the closed source version, ship the last open source one and deprecate the use of Mono for the future. Remember: there is no lock-in with Free Software. It cannot happen, period.
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"My previous comment is null/void"
Maybe not, though. Novell is not really representative of the entire Linux and/or FOSS community. Your first comment is right - most of the community will work around and obsolete MS' work. It won't matter much that Novell provides an island for MS to piddle around on. In fact - MS' piddling may scare off some of Novell's best developers. Only time can tell - I'm just seeing possibilities here, not predicting.
This makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
So it depends on what you value more; having the software but maybe not the freedom, or not having the software.
Obviously Stallman would rather the software was never created if it wasn't open, so the GPL wins for him there.
Personally I prefer the Artistic License 2.0; all the freedom and protection of the GPL without the virality.
False dichotomy (Score:2)
And can we lose the 10 year old whining about the GPL being "viral" now please. If you don't like the license you don't have to use the code.
Without the GPL a lot of stuff would never have been opened. It still would have been written but the community would be poorer (look at linksys firmware, for instance). Maybe you would have a few less plugins, but at the cost of allowing your code to be used by commercial interests without them playing ball and releasing source back to their users.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Part of me thinks that computer languages are languages like no other and one should be able to see it and use other people's work, at the very least for inspiration. Like you can do with any other language.
Another part of me thinks that true freedom means having the choic
GPL is not "useless" (Score:2)
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Commercial interests can do the repackaging and selling thing with GPL software. They just have to play ball by opening their stuff up too.
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Given the number of people on the internet that have photoshop without any sort of license at all, one has to wonder if it would make much difference...
And in doing so allow other people with 0 investment to sell the software they worked on...
Which is exactly what they would be doing with the hypothetical GPL component we're imagining them to have included. It swings both ways.
(BTW, no I don't think that GPL works everywhere, for everything. It suits some business models and not others)
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Sorry, Miguel (Score:5, Funny)
Bill's still happily married. I really don't think this is working.
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Miguel never sees Bill's wife being Bill's butt-lick. Hopefully this crap gets thrown out of open source OS distributions, we don't need to be trying to play catch-up every time Microsoft developers have a brain fart
"Free" is relative. (Score:2)
The "free" portion of open source licenses varies. Some licences provide more freedoms to the original developer and less to down stream developers. Some provide more to down stream providers, but less to implimenters. Some provide more freedom to those that impliment, but less to the authors.
Going from GPL to LGPL doesn't mean Mono is any less "free" it just means that there has been a tiny change in who it is that experience the greatest "freedom".
Then again, this is /. the article talks about a license c
Re:"Free" is relative. (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly I could care less. The Mono guys can do anything they like. I wouldn't touch Mono with a ten foot pole, for two reasons. First of all, I see no point to using it. Second of all, I wouldn't trust Microsoft with a nickel, let alone anything I was developing.
sigh (Score:2, Insightful)
wake me up when mono is ms-patent-free
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Don't go into a deep hibernation just yet [arstechnica.com]
Re:sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
Wake me up when you demonstrate it's not (I've issued this challenge many times, and no one's managed to achieve it).
Hint: Patents are published 18 months after filing, and a patent must be filed on an invention within a year of publication, otherwise the inventor forfeits the right to patent the invention. Furthermore, patents can only be submarined if the inventor forfeits the right to file the patent overseas, something I highly doubt MS is willing to do. As such, if parts of Mono were covered by patent, we'd almost certainly know about it by now (certainly there are enough anti-Mono trolls that *someone* should've been able to come up with such a patent by now).
Removing the GPL code. (Score:5, Informative)
We removed the GPL code in MonoDevelop for a couple of reasons:
(a) to allow it to become a platform that third-party plugin and add-in developers can target.
(b) to allow us to consume open source code that would otherwise conflict with the GPL (MS-PL licensed code, Apache licensed code, and original BSD licensed code).
Notice that (a) is the norm for Eclipse and Visual Studio, and that the ecosystem of third party plugins relies on this, both Eclipse and Visual Studio would be severely limited if they limited the plugins to be all GPL licensed. As I explained on the blog post, there are current users that need to run their non-GPL code inside the IDE.
We want more third party developers to target MonoDevelop, and we want these third parties to consider MonoDevelop a platform that they can target without forcing a license on them. Similar to how the Linux operating system can run code licensed under any license.
The second reason is just a practical one. In the .NET open source ecosystem there are plenty of libraries and tools available under the MS-PL, Old and New BSD and Apache 2 licenses and we want to be in a position to use those libraries without rewriting it. We already do, and it has saved us a lot of time.
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Linus is not a lawyer, and his statements should not be taken as legal advice.
Licensing is entirely a legal issue, not a technical one, and the whole "when does linking and in what manner cause a module to be considered a derived work" question is an unsettled legal one (i.e., it has not been tested in court with regards to the GPL). nVidia's binary driver issue hasn't yet been tested because no one who has standing has been interested in suing over it. A lack of legal action doesn't necessarily mean that n
Other licenses (Score:2)
This is the sort of in fighting that hurts open source a lot. Although admittedly, I do not believe that MonoDevelop is a good program. It hardly provides anything beyond a context aware editor. The Mono projects I looked at (Gnome Do and its plugins specifically) had long since
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
LGPL *is* free software.
Re:I know it's now LGPL but I couldn't resist ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Thus begins the Free-Free Software movement.
Begins? BSD guys have been trying to get rid of all GPL (including LGPL) in the base distro for a looong time - hence the planned migration to Clang [wikipedia.org] (I believe GCC was the last remaining bit).
Re:Whining little babies. (Score:5, Informative)
You mean built on things like TCP/IP (BSD 4-clause) and Unix (ATT License) that enabled communication between networks?
Or like sendmail (BSD Licensed) that facilitated adoption of user@example.com email addresses, instead of the dominant mixed!bang!and!right%associative!email addresses and the X.400 C=US;A=IBMX400;P=EMAIL;G=firstname;S=lastname;O=engineering;OU=email;OU=internet-connectivity style of addresses?
Or like Usenet (various parts under various BSD licenses) that facilitated the exchange of information, software, and porn before the web even existed? The one that Linus posted his early Linux sources to?
Or like FTP (BSD license, and/or ATT License) that allowed archiving and known-distribution-points of software way before google made it easy to find things?
Or like web browsers (all derived, more or less from NCSA Mosaic) which was never open-source, but required paying license fees?
Or like web servers, like Apache, which had (has) a license that isn't GPL compatable?
Can you even name any important GPL software (other than emacs) that is in wide use, is important, and is non-derivitive of something already existing under a BSD or proprietatry license?
gcc: derivitive. Every company around provided c compilers.
linux: derivitive. Ever hear of Unix?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly which planet are you referring to, because it isn't this one. GPL v1 [wikipedia.org] is from 1989. Depending on exactly what you want to count as "The Internet [wikipedia.org]" you can put the start date as early as 1969 or as late as 1983. Commercialization and ISPs arrived in 1988 in the US. Cisco [wikipedia.org] provided many of the routers used (started 1984). BSD was the main OS used for TCP/IP development and research. BBN had th
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's sad that the headline here is about removing GPL code. Got a grudge against it?
Why is it sad? The code isn't closing, it's just now licensed under different (arguably freer) licenses. Unless you're RMS or one of his disciples who believes that all code must be GPL or it's not truly free, I don't see why this should make anyone sad. Free code is free code, and contrary to somewhat popular belief, the GPL does not make free code more free than it is.
Secondly, there are several reasons why a project might want to migrate away from GPL code, and none of those reasons have to have an