[fab] Fwd: Mono and FC

[Jesse Keating]

Probably something we should look into and make a statement about.

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Mono and FC
Date: Saturday 04 November 2006 16:52
From: Paul <paul at all-the-johnsons.co.uk>
To: For testers of Fedora Core development releases 
<fedora-test-list at redhat.com>

Hi,

Given the decision for Novell to have SuSE killed off in much the same
way as Corel Linux was, it leaves some serious questions for FC as a
distro which includes Mono.

Currently, it is very unclear as to what (if any) patents are infringed
and as Jesse has said, they are OIN members. However, the possibility
needs to be looked at as to what should be done. There is not really a
problem of pulling Mono apps and libraries from FE, but for the likes of
gnome, there is a lot resting on C#.

Me, I'd hate to move over to KDE - I really dislike it as a desktop
environment (and no, I'm not trying to start a flame war), but if this
is the cost to keep FC untainted, I'm prepared to do it.

I personally don't believe we can trust Novell any more in OIN - I don't
know how they would behave if (say) OpenOffice caused a patent problem -
would they back MS now they have a deal in place to work towards a
plugin between their bastardisation of XML and the ODF format or would
they support the OIN and tell MS to go screw themselves (though
obviously not in words like that!). It seems to me that they may be a
very large loose cannon.

The question also of if they can continue distributing SuSE as a GPL'd
package now they have a deal with MS over patents (which goes against
the GPL and possibly gives SCO a final foothold). I don't really care if
SuSE vanishes without trace, but I do care for the longer implications
of such a deal as Novell did with MS.

I've not seen much on the Debian lists over this, but the mono lists are
very quiet; way too quiet over this - it's almost spooky.

TTFN

Paul
--
"Der einzige Weg, Leute zu kontrollieren ist sie anzulügen" - L. Ron
"Ich kann kein Science-Fiction schreiben" Hubbard; Lügner, Betrüger,
Fixer und Wohltäter zu niemandem

-------------------------------------------------------

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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