Secondly, Novell is a sellout. They could have stood tall and not knuckled under like Fedora and Canonical stood up for Linux. I take nothing back in that.

Thirdly, Microsoft is opposed to open source and what it stands for and has said so on numerous occasions and have actively spread FUD against it. Their recent litigation against Tom Tom shows what lengths they will go to protect their IP. By using .NET in the form of Mono then we are playing into their hands. It is not a question of IF, but WHEN they litigate, IMO.

Finally, the intent of my rant was not to educate, but to express my confusion and dismay at the inconsistencies in the way that Ubuntu is handling this.

I have no problem with Mono being available, but see no reason why I should be forced to install it in the same ways that I should not be forced to use proprietary drivers and codecs.

The fact that good applications are being written in Mono is a red herring. Tomboy may be excellent. But until this issue is made clear it is tainted in my eyes and in the eyes of many. If Microsoft came out tomorrow and said that Mono was not an infringement on their IP then I would not have an objection.

Until that time I believe that including Mono is unnecessary and individuals who use it are opening us up to unnecessary risk in the same way that Tom Tom would have been well advised not to include FAT32 file in their devices when there were alternatives.

Mono is not an emotional issue with me. Microsoft does not bother me. I don’t use any of their products and want to keep it that way. Leaving Ubuntu is not something that I would take lightly and that is emotional for me.

Ubuntu is driving me away if they continue to push Mono at me. There is talk of adding Banshee as part of their installation. I don’t like being pushed and being spun and that is why I am venting.

For now I will stick with Kubuntu.

and because we see the benefits. but we also see that the world (the software portion of the world anyway) would be a better place if more people saw this, if more people understood, if, as it were, we had greater market share. and we’re gaining.

it’s be a shame to give that up. emphasis on give, because the way we’re going it’s not somebody taking that away, we’re giving it freely.

DBO

i don’t even think they will come after canonical or distro:s themselves. they don’t want our money, they don’t want to give us licenses – for a fee or otherwise – they want to be able to say to their customers who are comtemplating going with open source solutions over their own:

“look, novell got patent protections from us – that must mean we have valid patents. we’re not going to point them out so OSS can fix them, we’re just saying. this means you would be under threat if you go with, say, X linux. so how about going with our solutions, dear CIO? or at the very least novell’s? you’d be safe then. just saying.”

it’s not a tool to hurt us, as users, it’s not a weapon to be wielded in battle, it’s a cloud of uncertainty to gain/maintain market share. at the expense of whom? at the expense of the whole OSS community, that’s who. and we’re supplying the very fuel for this, seemingly willingly in the name of… ease-of-development(?) because we say:

“hey, they’re not gonna come after us, don’t be silly – and if they do, we’ll fix it”. (that’s canonical’s stance).

i know we can fix it, or avoid it, or work around it, if it was pointed out to us, if they came after us, but that’s not what it’s for… it’s market share. it’s fud. it’s embrace, extend, extinguish.

what if someone builds something very useful in mono/c# and it’s adopted by corporations who are smart enough to go OSS, but not wise enough to steer clear of mono. perhaps they even say to themselves “hey this mono solution is cool, because c# developers are a dime a dozen, and we can grab windows developers as well as linux if push comes to shove, we can even port it to run it on windows if we wanted to move back – we’re golden.”

well, the day will surely come after the technology is adopted when microsoft will point to this cloud of uncertainty and say to that CIO “look, patent issues – go with us, we might come after you if you don’t, and that’s costly” – the CIO will shiver in his boots, as they do, and go back to MS. huge losses for OSS. it’s gonna be cheaper than potential legal wrangles.

do they need to come after us to get what they want? not at all. do they need to go after canonical, nope. we’re both safe. we’re also both losing users, and we’re losing market share, and developers, and we did it to ourselves.

would microsoft do this? would they really be so rotten? really? surely not. surely i’m crying wolf.

look at their history. please, just look.

(also consider; if the anti-mono-camp, who simply want mono out of default installs, is wrong – what have we lost? if the mono-camp is, horrors, wrong – what have we lost?)

but yeah, the anti-mono-camp just paranoid. just like every other technology/business/standard were “just paranoid” up until very the last moment right before they were usurped by MS.

Thanks, I used that link you provided in another post (in the post link that replies to DBO’s comment below). Again, I appreciate your valuable input.

VERY nice input, please can you see: Mono – Discussion With a Developer
Perhaps you and others could shed more light on this?

“Why Mono is Currently An Unacceptable Risk”
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/mono