I’ve advocated many things not so long ago which I no longer do or in fact advocate the opposite. It’s just a matter of learning from new arguments and evidence as it’s presented to me over the course of time. One of the things I used to oppose was Mono, a Free Software implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework. My arguments echoed the same ones being repeatedly vocalized today by what seems to be an increasing anti-mono fervor (albeit faced with an increasing backslash as well, from what I can tell). It boiled down to the patent situation around Mono being unclear thus involving the possibility of Microsoft at some point suing those who have adopted it and causing significant damage to “Linux Desktop”. Particular action that I advocated as a result included removal of Mono and Mono based applications from Ubuntu as pre-installed by default.
I no longer believe and this is the reason as well as the biggest motivation for writing this blog entry:http://www2.apebox.org/wordpress/rants/124/
It’s probably one of the best pro-mono or at least mono-neutral arguments that I’ve seen.
I’ll also repost what I said in a recent post at LXer forums:
I used to be “anti-mono”, then became just vary of it, but right now I just don’t see a good reason to be against it and in fact deem it silly of people to ask a project which they haven’t developed to act as they please, which is exactly what anti-mono people are doing.
A project including mono by default is simply in no way equivalent to “forcing mono down your throat”. I can’t begin to express just how utterly ridiculous such a belief is. First of all it is YOUR choice to use Ubuntu (or any distro which includes mono) which by itself precludes all chance of anything being FORCED down your throat. Second of all, you are actually offered the ability to remove it and go on your marry way, which is exactly the opposite of being forced. It’s choice.
As for the purported “patent clouds” after all these YEARS of screaming about mono I think it is the FOSS crowd which takes the prize of trumpeting the *anti-Linux FUD* more than anybody else. They’ve pretty much took the few blurts by few MS execs or employees and made ALL of the publicity and fear mongering for them.
Which can only have an exactly the opposite result of what their goal is (people switching to a Free OS).
In truth, as TC points out, end users are unlikely to be affected (which is probably 90% of all desktop Linux users) and if the worst case scenario that anti-mono people so love to talk about, there are multiple levels of defense plus an option of working around it which is unique to FOSS. I mean, even if anti-mono crowd is right about everything as far as the threat goes it’s not anywhere near as dangerous as they want to portray it.
So in fact, they’re their worst enemy, not Microsoft, by far.
Well that about sums it up.