Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 2nd Aug 2006 06:37 UTC
After all the debate, gtk# will most likely find its way into GNOME. "The release team has completed its second meeting to try to finish the new module decisions. And, after all the long threads on d-d-l and the many discussions amongst ourselves trying to determine community consensus, we finally have the decisions. In summary: orca, alacarte, and gnome-power-manager are in; gtk# and tomboy are in, assuming the issues mentioned are resolved; sticky notes becomes deprecated, assuming tomboy issues are resolved and gets in." Update: Elijah Newren emailed me concerning an important aspect of the current decision, and asked me to highlight it. So, read more!
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Member since:
2005-07-29
Can you explain how the threat of MS litigation is an anti-MS issue please?
For one thing, Microsoft hasn't actually threatened a lawsuit against Mono. They've had very little to say about Mono, one way or the other, actually.
For another, the liklihood of Microsoft suing Mono is low, historically, as Microsoft is typically the defendant of lawsuits, not the plaintiff. (Search for STAC, Internet Explorer, SQL Server...)
Of course, past behavior is not a predictor for future behavior, just like the stock market.
Finally, nothing stops Microsoft from suing everything else in Linux, from the Linux kernel (http://www.networkworld.com/news/2004/0802linuxstu.html) to Samba to Wine to Python to Gnome to...
That's what makes patents so damaging, they can be used to target everything. Plus, lawsuits are freaking expensive, so even if there's no case they can still be damaging...
Then there's the non-Microsoft patent holders -- do you think FireFox is permanently exempt from the 'no embedding items' patent? Or the patents of search engines? Or the patents on XOR? JPEG? ...
And do you think Sun's Java is any better? Remember the lawsuit they lost against Kodak? (http://news.com.com/Sun+settles+Kodaks+Java+suit+for+92+million/210...)
What's to stop Kodak from suing GCJ, Mono, Python, or anything that makes use of an RPC-like mechanism?
In short, patents are a problem for everyone; Mono isn't a special target in this regard.
So the "threat of a Microsoft lawsuit" is anti-Microsoft because it's short-sighted. Microsoft may bring a lawsuit in the future; they may not. But assuming that they're the only source of lawsuits is wrong, and leads to thinking like "Mono is the only unsafe technology, and we'll all be safer sticking with C, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby..." which, as shown above, is wrong.
Make sure you see the forest (patents covering everything) for the trees (a currently non-existant threat from Microsoft).