Get Your Microsoft Out of My Linux

This week's article was going to be about Gnome-Do & Docky, but those programs are dead to me, as well as Banshee, Tomboy and Beagle. This is sad because I really liked Gnome-Do, Banshee and Beagle. The problem is that they use Mono, an open source implementation of the .NET development framework.

Christopher Smart has written an excellent article, Mono: An Infectious Disease about the dangers of using Mono. I encourage everyone to take the time to read this article. There are very serious consequences with allowing Mono to infiltrate GNU/Linux. Novell and Miguel de Icaza have been pushing Mono dependency into Gnome, giving Microsoft a foothold into Linux's most popular desktop environment.

An excerpt from the article:

Through the recent TomTom case it is clear that Microsoft is using patents to leverage power over open source. Microsoft knows that if they do nothing, free software will eventually destroy their bottom line. They have to do something, which they certainly are. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted, "Linux is a serious competitor" and promised that the company will outsmart open source. So what’s their game plan?

One of the ways they are trying to gain the upper hand is by introducing their own proprietary programming framework into free software, which is called ‘.NET‘. While some parts of the .NET framework such as CLI and C# have been submitted to Ecma for standardisation, others have not. Even so, Microsoft still holds patents in relation to these standards, although the company grants “licenses on reasonable terms and conditions”, but only so long as the corresponding Ecma standard remains valid. The non-standard components also pose a risk.

Microsoft has ulterior motives for wanting support for .NET under Linux. They might not be able to destroy free software, but they sure want to control it. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said: "I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows".

Mono will be the trojan horse that will add a ‘Microsoft tax’ to your GNU/Linux. I agree, Mono poses a real threat to free software. Richard Stallman said it best,

Microsoft has declared itself our enemy and we know that Microsoft is getting patents on some features of C#. So I think it's dangerous to use C#, and it may be dangerous to use Mono. There's nothing wrong with Mono. Mono is a free implementation of a language that users use. It's good to provide free implementations. We should have free implementations of every language. But, depending on it is dangerous, and we better not do that.

This is why more projects like Gnote, a port of Tomboy written in C++, need to be started and maintained. Free and proprietary software can co-exist and should, but free software doesn't need Microsoft's backhanded help.

Mono: An Infectious Disease excerpt was used with permission by the author Christopher Smart / CC BY 2.5

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