Gnome Accelerates Poisoning of Free Software
It seems like my morbid predictions that Free Software will be fatally poisoned by Mono, are becoming more and more true by the day. The next victim, apparently, is D-Bus:
NDesk.DBus (ndesk-dbus), aka DBus# or "managed D-Bus" is a C# implementation of D-Bus.
[...]
There is a lot to worry about.
Indeed, I can see in External Dependencies of GNOME 2.21.x that ndesk-dbus, ndesk-dbus-glib are "Approved".
This seems to have been requested on Nov. 16, and it got approved on Jan. 9.
Soon, it will be IMPOSSIBLE to "unMonofy" your GNOME, as once you will get rid of Tomboy, F-Spot, Beagle, Banshee, Muine, Telepathy, whatever, you won't be able to remove Mono, as it will be required as a GNOME system library!
Not counting the existing Gtk#/C#-based applications, the GNOME guys want not only to replace libdbus with ndesk-dbus, but they want to nail down everything so that the new ndesk-dbus/Mono bindings are used in as much as possible! Official plans include:
- a Gnome NetworkManager binding;
- a Gnome Power Manager binding;
- hal-sharp;
- NotifySharp as a libnotify client replacement;
- gnome-keyring-sharp as a replacement for gnome-keyring.
Let's be clear about this; Mono-isation is actually Microsoft-isation, and thanks to Gnome, that infestation is nearly complete. If something is not done to purge Mono from Free Software soon, there simply won't be any Free Software left; it'll all be Microsoft's "Intellectual Monopoly".
Powered by ScribeFire.
Copyright © 2006-2022 Slated.org
Comments
Don't Panic
I understand you are feeling vulnerable and that its hard to think straight during agony, but you will do yourself a favour if you try to get your facts straight instead of reading blogs. If one thing blogs have done, they have made information publicy accessible and hence, reduced its trust value to naught.
All the fu-sharp replaces fu means the following:
if a C# app needs to do something that fu does, then currently it has has directly open the dll and do dl_open (its called p/invoke in .Net) on them. Extremely unclean, anyone would tell you - its like modifying a binary file by vim. Instead if there was a C# library to do what fu-sharp does then the code for that app will be cleaner and less error prone. Other C apps using fu cannot fu-sharp and will continue to use fu.
Yes, it will encourage users to write more C# apps since now more and more native libraries will have C# port and hence help the cause of Microsoft ... yada yada yada ... (your arguments after this will probably be valid and you have talked about it before), but no one is proposing to write the whole of Gnome in C# (in the unlikely event that happens, even then there will be a C Gnome). In a word, there is no _new_threat_ by having ndesk-dbus or hal-sharp etc. than there was for libbeagle months ago.
BTW, have you read http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/04/1443256 and you should do good to prominently claim somewhere in your website that you dont necessarily agree with RMS' definition of "free software" (as I read in your comment to dot-net). Nothing wrong in not agreeing to him, but since most people adopt his idea of free software, you should be clear about the possible confusion.
You didn't really allay my concerns
WRT the technical aspects of .Net/Mono, yes I fully understand that the mere existence of C# code does not mean the C equivalents will somehow disappear, but the practical upshot for typical distro users is that their systems will be irrevocably encumbered by Microsoft's technology.
Are you saying that in the future, if and when Gnome has become completely overrun by Mono, that there will be an alternative (fork) that does not contain any Mono components? I hope so, because that is the only way I can see myself continuing to use it.
Not that long ago, Jeff Waugh and others made assurances that no Mono components would ever be core Gnome dependencies, and yet here we are...
It seems that Mono is slowly being squeezed in, and each time there's a new push, it's accompanied by vehement denials, but they keep pushing nonetheless. I can't help but feel this is some kind of PR stalling tactic.
WRT my ideologies vs Stallman's or Torvalds' - I have never claimed to follow either one of their ideologies to the letter, so I don't think I really need to publish any kind of retraction or clarification, but for those who may be interested, here's a summary of my principles WRT Free Software:
So in summary, I mostly support Stallman's ideologies, with the exception that he believes the best way to fight patents is to pretend they don't matter, whereas I believe in voting with my wallet and going elsewhere, sending a clear message to Intellectual Monopolisers that their encumbered garbage is not welcome.
My one and only concern is Freedom, and currently Microsoft is the biggest global threat to Freedom in the IT space. They must be stopped, broken up, liquidated, removed from existence, boycotted, depreciated from the source, and preferably prosecuted and imprisoned for life (and if that sounds like hyperbole then take a good long look at the details of their history, over on Groklaw and here on Slated Antitrust).
I do not want Mono ... or any other Microsoft technology. Period.
If the only way I can accomplish that is to abandon Gnome, then so be it. Currently, that course of action is looking more and more necessary.
I hope that's clear enough.