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He is the very embodiment of the concept of "chasing taillights". And consistently picks battles that he is guaranteed not to be able to win.

While I think that calling him a "traitor" pretty much completes RMS's conversion to McCarthyism, which has been in progress for some time... I do have to wonder how well de Icaza's efforts align with my views these days. Not that they have to. But de Icaza is not someone I look to for inspiration anymore. He's changed a lot since his old "Leader of the GNOME project" days.

But back to RMS. Now that the blacklisting has begun in earnest... I wonder who will be next?

Edited 2009-09-24 14:29 UTC

RMS is just socially out of this world. If he had had a proper childhood free software would probably be much more advanced by now.

RMS just has this fundamentalist view and acts 100% according to it. Problem is the real world is not that black and white. That is what Mr. GNU SLASH LINUX does not get.

Miguel is very bright, but let us be honest .. He is a MS fanboy. He said things like: "OOXML is a superb standard"
Dirk Hohndel and Bob Surtor said it right at the Linuxcon: "Free software has to stop playing catch and innovate on the desktop"
Reimplementing MS tech is not the way to do it.

He is the very embodiment of the concept of "chasing taillights". And consistently picks battles that he is guaranteed not to be able to win.

While I think that calling him a "traitor" pretty much completes RMS's conversion to McCarthyism, which has been in progress for some time... I do have to wonder how well de Icaza's efforts align with my views these days. Not that they have to. But de Icaza is not someone I look to for inspiration anymore. He's changed a lot since his old "Leader of the GNOME project" days.

But back to RMS. Now that the blacklisting has begun in earnest... I wonder who will be next? "

Your comment about him being like McCarthy kinda inspired me: http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com/2009/09/imma-let-you-finish-rms/...

This "Mono is just chasing taillights" crap is getting silly.

If you take Mono to mean "a project whose sole goal is to enable running Windows .NET apps on Linux" then yes, Mono will always be behind.

If you take Mono for what it actually is meant to be and what it is actually freaking used for, which is "a project that provides a clean, modern language on which to more efficiently develop and deliver Linux applications" then you realize that Mono isn't chasing anything, it's actually 20 steps _ahead_ of anything else on the Linux front.

If Microsoft came along and said, "we're going to assert some mythical patents and Mono can't be compatible with the ECMA CLR or class library anymore," Linux and Mono would not be devastated in the least by it. Mono would drop the offending bits and it would _still_ be a clean, modern language with a helluva-efficient runtime library providing a ton of brand-new non-Microsoft-derived Linux-focused APIs and libraries (from POSIX to dbus to GTK to OpenGL and so on) that real applications like Tomboy or Banshee or iFolder or MonoDevelop or Unity3D or SunUO or Landell and countless others can continue to be built on top of, taking full advantage of the features of C# (or even a "very similar to C#" language, if some change were forced on Mono by MS), the high quality Mono runtime implementation, and the quality APIs and tools developed by the Mono community.

There's no difference in theory behind a project like Mono and a project like Python, other than that Mono leisurely follows a language specification for the sake of being compatible __as a nice side benefit__ while Python just makes shit up as it goes. Oh, and Mono is way faster, has significantly better documentation, has better tools, and is already used in large-scale commercial apps (that have NO dependency on being Microsoft .NET compatible) despite having been around for a far shorter amount of time.

Honestly look around and see how many people try to use or even _care_ about using Mono as a way to run apps developed for Microsoft .NET. You just don't see it. Mainsoft makes a business out of making it easy to get ASP.NET apps running on Linux servers and that's about the end of it. All of the really cool users of Mono are people that are using it either because it provides a top-notch embeddable VM that blows away every other FOSS scripting engine (e.g., Unity3D) or because it provides some of the best APIs around for creating brand-new Linux-specific applications (e.g. Beagle).

The only people who are even remotely hung up on chasing Microsoft's taillights are the people who don't understand what the purpose of Mono is and use their misconception as a strawman argument against the Mono project.

Mono was conceived by the Ximian folks because of their experience with Evolution. They were writing big Linux desktop apps. Writing them in C sucked. Writing them in C++ sucked slightly less. Writing them in Python sucked far less in some ways and far more in other ways. Writing them in any FOSS-friendly language available was a nightmare. They saw C#. They saw it was like Java, except it fixed many of the things that sucked about Java. They thought, "it would be sweet if we had a language like that to develop in." They thought, "we could write a language like that to develop in." They thought, "we could write a totally new language, but then we have to solve a bunch of problems that have already been solved over and over and over" and they knew that good engineers don't waste time resolving old problems. They thought, "if we make a C# compiler and runtime for Linux, not only do we get what we want, but what the heck maybe it'll help bring more ex-Windows developers over to the Linux side and make the world a better place." And, instead of sitting around bitching about all the hard work other people are doing, they went ahead and made the project. Their lives got easier, the lives of quite a few Linux developers got easier, the lives of even a number of Windows developers got easier, and the regular users started seeing some cool software that none of the Linux developers were making pre-Mono because it was such a time-consuming pain in the ass to do it before, and Windows users even started seeing more cool software because now there was this awesome tool for embedding high-performance reliable easy-to-write scripts into larger applications which made the applications more awesome.

Everyone has won because of Mono, and because Miguel and the many other awesome contributors to Mono have done something FOSS never did before. The only thing the FOSS world has that even comes close to Mono is Java, and that was only just recently Open Sourced, and Sun's Java is actually already way behind Mono despite being far older.

So, seriously, quit with the taillight chasing crap. The Microsoft specification is largely irrelevant to just about all users of Mono, it's not even a priority for the Mono developers, and Mono has far surpassed anything else the FOSS community has in the same field.

C/C++ are a pain in the ass to work with and are light years behind modern languages in ease of use and features, and modern VM technology is already more or less on par with C/C++, and upcoming VM technology is quite likely to exceed the performance of C/C++. Python, Ruby, Perl, and so on are all great languages for some tasks but are total whores to work in for a great deal of other tasks, and they'll never be able to match Mono in speed (simple fact -- even if you implement the same VM technology in something like Parrot as you have in Mono, dynamic typing will always be slower; even if you use the same tracing optimizing JIT to compiler both C# and Python to machine code, the C# result will need far less type guards than the Python result would... which you can even prove by just using IronPython on Mono).

The point of Mono is NOT CLR compatibility. It's not even C# the language. The point of Mono is having a runtime and multiple languages that make developing real-world applications easy and making those applications more reliable, which frees up more developer time to work on actual features and performance rather than working on endless layers of complicated framework code or debugging stupid bugs that only exist because of poor language design.

sbergman27: i don't see where FSF / RMS have changed at all. They've always been very uncompromising when it comes to their definition of free software, and that's entirely their right. Describing it as McCarthyism is a bit silly because FSF has no practical power to persecute / compromise anyone. All RMS / FSF is doing - all they _can_ do - is saying 'in our opinion, these people / organizations / projects are not free software or are actively inhibiting the progress of free software'. It's not like they have the power to stop people developing software in any way they choose, is it? All they are doing is lobbying. RMS / FSF's belief is that the free software cause is not aided by compromise, and that's a perfectly legitimate and reasonably well-supported position. The reason this may seem 'extreme' to other people is they're working from a different perspective. if your goal is to have a working Linux desktop then rejecting things like proprietary drivers may seem 'extreme', but if your goal is to further the cause of free software, it isn't. It's just logical.

What is your definition of "winning"? Perusing de Icaza's resume, I see a lot of innovative albeit controversial work that is actually running today. Nobody is suing de Icaza. Choice prevails. So, really, what does "winning" and "losing" mean to you?

Yes.. but to call him a traitor? Them are fighting words.

IF RMS had made a principled opposition a decade ago when he was gushing over ActiveX/COM, then he wouldn't need to resort to petty insults later on.

De Icaza is pushing and pushing to get Mono woven into GNOME. This would be a big mistake.

I'd be interested to hear RMS's actual words, rather than this third-party summary, but if the meaning of "traitor" is "someone who pushes an outside, incompatible agenda by using the influence they gained in the free software community", then the glove fits.

The thing that most annoys me about RMS is his inherent assumption that he speaks for all open source developers. He doesn't. There are plenty of people out there who have a lot of different open source licenses, embrace different principles, and who (like me) simply view RMS as yet another dirty, burned-out hippie.

Edited 2009-09-25 17:34 UTC