Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 7th Mar 2008 21:38 UTC, submitted by SReilly
Open-source pioneer and Novell Vice President Miguel de Icaza Thursday for the first time publicly
slammed his company's cross-patent licensing agreement with Microsoft as he defended himself against lack of patent protection for third parties that distribute his company's Moonlight project, which ports Microsoft's Silverlight technology to Linux.
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Member since:2005-07-24
And you, the distros, and the other projects are free not to include their code in your Linuxes fearing Microsoft patent claims.
As the SCO case so clearly demonstrates, even an unskilled opponent can get years worth of PR mileage and FUD value out of a case which has no merit at all. SCO had no case 5 years ago, but are still making headlines, even though they didn't really own anything and we didn't copy any of what they were claiming anyway. Just imagine what a more skilled opponent, with deeper pockets, could do with Mono, where we cannot even deny that we are reimplementing Microsoft technology.
People can (and do) argue the finer points of patent law all day long. But at the *end* of the day, the battle is not a legal one. The real battle is fought on the field of PR, and has little to nothing to do with patent law, and everything to do with the public perception of uncertainty and doubt.
To a great degree, I feel the same about Mono as I do about Samba. I wish to the gods that we didn't need it but I thank them that we have it.
But... we'd be crazy to start basing any of our infrastructure on Mono. Unfortunately, with Tomboy, Beagle, and or F-spot shipping by default in some distros, it appears that the creeping Mono-ism has already begun.
And besides, there are other good reasons to avoid Mono. Yesterday, I blew away Tomboy from my largest XDMCP server because it is insane to devote 16MB per user, or a total of over a gigabyte of system ram, to a freaking sticky-note note app!
Member since:2006-01-02
Why isn't most of that 16MB shared? If mono is intelligently built, all of the core libraries and the runtime should be AOT-compiled images which are shareable. The libraries of Tomboy should also be compiled this way, so that the only private memory would be the GC segments. In steady-state operation (no one writing tons of notes and deleting them), no GCs will be happening, and most of the GC segments would be paged out.
Is 16 MB really the reference set of Tomboy?
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Member since:
2008-02-26
He is free to like Microsoft technologies and implement them. Novell is free to throw money at the projects. The developers are free to work on them. And you, the distros, and the other projects are free not to include their code in your Linuxes fearing Microsoft patent claims.
In the end it is beliefs vs practical needs. RMS and Theo the Raadt don't like the binary blobs you use for practical reasons(eg. you want 3d games). You don't like Microsoft technology, but some people will want to write word documents in Linux and compile .NET apps.