Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Fedora Core 5 Gets Mono -- 9:50 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Fedora team has decided that Fedora Core 5 will include Mono, the open-source version of Microsoft's .NET. I'm really leery about this, as is Red Hat. Red Hat is concerned because they don't want to end up in patent litigation with MS (and if you don't think that's a possibility, search this site for references to SCO). I'm wondering how long it will be before Mono is a prerequisite for Gnome itself. If/when that happens, every distribution will have to think long and hard as to whether they are willing to risk having MS bust out the patent portfolio whuppin' stick on them. There's a TMBG song that has the line "Can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding." Microsoft has given plenty of reasons for absolutely no one to trust them in the open source community. I fear that this is a deal with the Devil that we will later live to regret.

I find it more than a little bit ironic that KDE used to be the one bashed for not really being open source because of its reliance on TrollTech's QT (a situation that has long since been remedied). Now it seems like Gnome is the one doing all of the questionable things. The silence from the big names in open source/free software on this subject is deafening. Of course my distro, Slackware, has dropped Gnome altogether for other reasons so I guess it will never affect me (ha ha).

News for 01/11/2006

The Haus is powered by:

All original information on this website is copyright © TheHaus.Net, 1999-2005. The use of original images, text, and/or code from this website without expressed written consent is prohibited. The authors of this site cannot be held responsible for any damage, real or imagined, which comes from the use of information presented on this site. All trademarks used are the properties of their respective owners. This site is not to be used as a floatation device (but if you try, I want a video tape of it).