All GPLed Code Removed From MonoDevelop 443
rysiek writes "A few days ago, Miguel de Icaza wrote on his blog that the whole of MonoDevelop is now 'free' of GPL-licensed code. 'MonoDevelop code is now LGPLv2 and MIT X11 licensed. We have removed all of the GPL code, allowing addins to use Apache, MS-PL code as well as allowing proprietary add-ins to be used with MonoDevelop (like RemObject's Oxygene).'"
Does anyone really use it? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know I'm an old fashioned luddite (I code with nedit, gcc and Makefiles), but does anyone use MonoDevelop?
MS does free (but not open) versions of its dev tools already, and frankly if you're using Mono you're probably an MS guy who wants his stuff to work on linux rather than a *nix dev anyway. Aren't you?
Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsoft. (Score:3, Insightful)
No GPL? Actually is Mono really that important any more? Most new software development is going to be on iPhone BSD, Android, and Maemo Linux. Needing legacy .net is nothing anyone cares about.
I think this shows Miguell's true pawn colors.
Re:Does anyone really use it? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it would be more likely you're a Linux/Mac developer who for some reason needs to write something for Windows. If you were a Windows developer you'd probably just use MS's tools and test with Mono.
Good. (Score:2, Insightful)
People who want to work for/shill for/suck up to Microsoft directly or indirectly should do that.
Those who don't support that sort of thing should work to cut them off at the knees by not using their software and discouraging others from doing so.
Mono Blows (hint, where's FW 3.5) (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, if you are going to devote your life to making a C# clone on Linux, then at least quit screwing around with applications and focus on the language. I mean, come on, where's WPF? Where's WCF? Where's LINQ to SQL?
Mono, you suck.
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:3, Insightful)
So you're saying you think that most new software development will be for mobile-only OSes? Mobile apps may be okay for lots and lots of things, but I don't think that mobile apps will ever completely replace the traditional desktop applications. If anything, I see home-based computing moving in the direction of more and more LAN integration and more and better multimedia capability, with the hottest toys these days being media servers, wireless networking, faster broadband connectivity and more and more personal communications, including voice, video, IM, teleconferencing, etc.
The corporate network as it stands today will remain mostly the same, but with everything converging more towards service-oriented architectures, virtualization and cloud computing with dynamic, demand sensitive services and networks.
I think it's funny (Score:2, Insightful)
Reading all of these comments and then seeing them modded as Troll or as Flamebait. When actually the comments are pretty much correct. Who really uses Mono? After all, isn't it loosely based on .NET version 1.1 still? What's the point?
For Windows-based development you can fire up Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 Express edition without paying a dime and those are based on .NET 2.0 or 3.x, correct?
Unless Mono has upped the ante and has actually moved beyond 2003-era frameworks I don't see its relevance...
Re:A Prelude to Charges... (Score:5, Insightful)
That makes sense only if the next step in this plan is to make it work, add the features people want, and get people to actually use it.
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes the world is centered around client side applications...
Mono strength is for portability across server side applications. The problem is not Mono, it is the fact the GPLv3 is too strict. It is not necessarily any point is bad but all of them together makes it too strict.
The GPL is an attempt to push an Ideal, not necessarily good policy...
I wouldn't be surprised as knowledge about open source increases that more and more pressure to not be GPL will come up.
sigh (Score:2, Insightful)
wake me up when mono is ms-patent-free
Re:Is this the closing of Mono? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, this.
LGPL is not "closed" - you still have to release the source code if you distribute software containing LGPL components. But what version of the LGPL are we taking about here? Since it's very easy to combine or cripple the LGPL'd parts so that they either rely on propritary or patent encumbered components in a way that can't be acheived with a full GPL product. Does the LGPL v3 protect against Tivoisation in the same manner intended by the GPL3? (Yes, I could go read the license but...it's long...and I'm tired..and others already have done so!).
By the way, I'm not commenting about the suitability or preference of a particular licence - I'd just like to know what the implications are in this case.
Eternal game of catch-up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Now for business use (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, because Microsoft is making a profit off licensing the .NET framework. Wait, you mean they don't charge a cent for it? And C# is a better language than Java, with the Mono project providing cross-platform compatibility, so Windows users have an easier time migrating to Linux if they so choose? Clearly I should listen to random /.er and forswear all use of anything that "supports" "Microsoft products" in any way, including the OpenOffice; after all, it lets people read and write Office documents, and by doing so, indirectly enables the Microsoft hegemony.
P.S. Yes, C# being better than Java is personal opinion. I've used both, Java for two years in school and one and a half years in the workforce, C# for a little under a year in school and half a year in the workforce (plus a few years of various other languages, mostly C/C++ and, yes, Perl). For developers, the lack of rigid ideological adherence to OO dogma is quite helpful; delegates for callbacks and "pass-by-reference" for arguments instead of inane wrapper classes for both (yes, pedantic types, I know it's all pass by reference, but you know what I mean), not needing to think about auto-boxing as much (since .NET collections of primitives really are primitives, not boxed primitives), operator overloading and structs to enable the creation of relatively efficient and easy to use numeric types, etc. I think both languages have merit, and I think both languages are improved by the competition (e.g. without C#, I'm not sure Java would ever have introduced generics, since it violated the spirit of OO). But I'm not going to reject C# just because MS made it.
Re:"Free" is relative. (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly I could care less. The Mono guys can do anything they like. I wouldn't touch Mono with a ten foot pole, for two reasons. First of all, I see no point to using it. Second of all, I wouldn't trust Microsoft with a nickel, let alone anything I was developing.
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:5, Insightful)
Alas, Mono is still a part of the default Gnome distribution, just so they can have a note taking applet which takes 189MB memory (counting libraries used by it and no other process) and takes several seconds to start on beefy hardware while the C++ port of that very same code uses 5MB and starts near-instantly.
Even worse, there are folks pushing Banshee as the default music player so there's another dependency on Mono.
The sooner we get rid of Mono installed by default, the safer we'll be from this trap.
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:5, Insightful)
saying GPLV3 is too strict when we know the specific issue at hand here, means that it's just that proprietary things can still be embedded in GPLV2 and can't in GPLv3. So when "too strict" means "you can't shove proprietary shit into a free and open system", that tells me that MS and the lackeys are having quite a hard time dealing with open source.
Re:Mono Blows (hint, where's FW 3.5) (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. Imagine, an open source project cloning the functionality of a commercial product that doesn't support the latest features of the commercial product.
Yes, but the commercial product is free as in beer, and the open source product is moving to be free as in beer only, so what's really the point, except to get locked into a clone of another technology?
I mean, if you are that into .NET, why not just use Windows?
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:3, Insightful)
So long as whatever you do is released GPL, you're fine (well, under 99% of the cases anyway). If you want to release under any other license, determining if it's allowable is a nightmare. Try to interface a non-gpl plugin with an application. There's no "easy" answer as to if you can do that. Every lawyer will say something different. There's no legal precedent with regards to how non-gpl code can interact with gpl code. So the "easy" way to comply is to just license your code GPL... Sure, there are black and white compliance cases, but the vast majority that I've looked at are well in the gray area. Can you dynamically link a non-GPL lib into a GPL program? Can you dynamically link a GPL lib into a non-GPL program? What about statically? More importantly, WHY? Now, explain that to a judge who has no technical background.
Again, I'm not arguing with the ideals of the GPL, I'm arguing the ambiguity when it comes to interfacing with non-GPL code (At least from discussions and conversations I've had with lawyers and other prominent developers)...
Re:Does anyone really use it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, if you're trying to write
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:2, Insightful)
How do you know he isn't working for them already? Maybe this event is just the first step towards using the Microsoft license. It would make sense, because I'm sure Microsoft would like to get a working version of .NET to compete with everyone else.
Re:Whining little babies. (Score:2, Insightful)
The internet was basically built on the GPL, and most of the code that makes it go was built using the GPL.
eh?
Re:Good. (Score:3, Insightful)
Right, because Microsoft is making a profit off licensing the .NET framework..
No, but they are smart enough to know if you can lock in as many people into your frameworks ( even if its just a virtual lock due to knowledge ), it only increases market share way down the road.
You have to think of the BIG picture, not what you can see if you look around your cube walls.
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Removing the GPL code. (Score:3, Insightful)
Linus is not a lawyer, and his statements should not be taken as legal advice.
Licensing is entirely a legal issue, not a technical one, and the whole "when does linking and in what manner cause a module to be considered a derived work" question is an unsettled legal one (i.e., it has not been tested in court with regards to the GPL). nVidia's binary driver issue hasn't yet been tested because no one who has standing has been interested in suing over it. A lack of legal action doesn't necessarily mean that no legal action is possible. At any rate, Stallman and others seem to fall on the side that any kernel module is a derived work, which is why there's Linux-libre.
"Trivially refuted," indeed.
Re:Does anyone really use it? (Score:3, Insightful)
If Qt used real C++ instead of its own language variant, it would probably be one of the top on my list. But until then, I just can't stomach it, even though part of me wants to use it.
gtkmm can do it. wxWidgets can do it. Why does Qt need to pervert the language?
Re:Does anyone really use it? (Score:3, Insightful)
I second the idea that Qt kicks ass. Nonetheless, the design decision behind Qt's policy of forcing the programmers to drop the STL in favour of Qt's components such as container classes and string... Well, it sucks. It imposes on the programmer a non-standard way of doing things, it is a royal pain in the ass to integrate 3rd party components that rely on the STL and it plainly sucks to be forced to use a less mature API.
Re:It is so sad... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's sad that the headline here is about removing GPL code. Got a grudge against it?
Why is it sad? The code isn't closing, it's just now licensed under different (arguably freer) licenses. Unless you're RMS or one of his disciples who believes that all code must be GPL or it's not truly free, I don't see why this should make anyone sad. Free code is free code, and contrary to somewhat popular belief, the GPL does not make free code more free than it is.
Secondly, there are several reasons why a project might want to migrate away from GPL code, and none of those reasons have to have anything to do with having a grudge against the GPL. From a practical standpoint, avoiding the GPL also avoids many headaches related to source code and license mixing; this is especially important for a product which implements plug-ins since the legality of plugging some differently-licensed extensions into a GPL product is still uncertain. The GPL itself causes incompatibilities with certain licenses, so an easy way to avoid those types of problems is to avoid the GPL entirely.
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:4, Insightful)
Alas, Mono is still a part of the default Gnome distribution, just so they can have a note taking applet
Oh, "just" so they can have a single applet? It couldn't possibly be because they think it is a generally useful way to develop applications, such as F-Stop and Banshee?
Mono may or may not be a good idea, but you are framing your argument in an intellectually dishonest way here. That note-taking applet ("Tomboy") may be the only thing in standard GNOME that needs Mono right now, but I'm pretty sure that there will be others.
Even worse, there are folks pushing Banshee as the default music player so there's another dependency on Mono.
See? Then it won't just be Tomboy, there will be other things using Mono.
I haven't tried C#, but a lot of people seem to like it. If having C# means I get more free software to play with, I'm in favor of that.
The major argument I have seen against Mono is "Microsoft is just waiting and they will assert patent claims!!" In that case, the only thing that they can do is force people to stop using C# and Mono. In which case, all the Mono apps will be pulled or re-written. And at that point, you would have what you seem to want: no more Mono in GNOME.
That is the worst-case scenario. And I don't see it as being bad enough to try to keep people from using Mono. If people want to use Mono to write free software, that's fine with me.
I'm curious: now that Java is becoming fully free, would you support re-writing Tomboy and F-Stop and the others in Java? That way, instead of being bloated and slow C# applications, they could be bloated and slow Java applications. Would you be happier?
In my day job, I write wicked fast C code (small memory footprint, too). When I write software on my own for fun, it tends to be Python, which is even slower than C#. Do you have a problem with Python too?
steveha
Re:Good. (Score:3, Insightful)
How does software running on BOTH Windows and Linux create a lock-in?
Seems to me that the lock-in is a world without Mono. Then if you .NET you are locked in to a Windows only world. They are going to .NET regardless of Mono's existence. At least with Mono users aren't locked into Windows only.
Would you rather have something like where Flash comes from? A binary that runs on both but is closed up tight? Would you rather have Microsoft implement a closed .NET runtime blob that runs on Linux instead of an open source Mono?
I don't see Mono as any more evil than Wine, Cygwin, Samba, FreeDOS, or the plethora of open source programs that run on both Windows and Linux. The logical extension of "hate Mono because it provides compatibility with a Microsoft frame work" is to hate all software compatible with any Microsoft framework. You should hate Firefox, Open Office, Apache, QT, and on and on. If it runs on a MS platform it must be supporting the lock-in right?
The big picture is that Linux only is no better than Microsoft only. Interoperability between the two platforms helps both sides.
Re:Removing the GPL code. (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no way that a court would require a plugin that merely uses a published interface to be released as open source. Consider the following situation:
1) A GPLed project releases documentation describing functions that must be exported from a shared library in order for it to be a plugin.
2) Some other author decides to write a closed-source shared library that exports said functions.
3) In order to use the shared library, the GPLed product must initiate a shared library load and map the closed-source library into its address space.
Nowhere in the above situation does the closed-source project link to the GPLed code, except when the GPLed code specifically initiates the interaction. Just because GPLed code interacts with closed-source code doesn't mean that the closed-source code must be open sourced--especially when the dynamic linking is performed by the GPLed code.
Furthermore, consider a situation where there is a generic plugin interface that works for two different software packages: one closed-source and the other a GPLed. If a court says in the above situation that the plugin must be GPLed, what happens in this one? Does the logic extend to this situation?
In my mind, it ultimately depends upon who is initiating the linking. If a developer links with GPLed code (dynamically or statically), the code that developer writes must be open sourced. But any code that a GPLed project links to cannot force code that it links to to become open sourced, otherwise entire software packages could be forced to become open sourced when they did nothing except write some software that a GPL software developer wanted to use.
Re:Whining little babies. (Score:2, Insightful)
I would expect the pedantic police will be out in force to correct your usage of the word "derivitive" but otherwise your point is well made. Personnally, I don't think the problem with the GPL is the license itself. I use it occassionally even though I prefer the less complicated BSD-style licenses. My problem are the legions of Stalmanistas who attack anyone who criticizes the GPL. These same people like to point out how using software licensed any other way makes you a slave to the developer yet they drive cars made by someone else, wear clothes produced by someone else, and often eat food that is prepared by someone else. Using their arguments they are just as much of a slave to the manufacturing and service industries as computer users are to software companies. The fact of the matter is, we are all a "slave" to something. We all enjoy having our choice but some seem to forget one very important choice; if you don't like something, then don't use it. You have that choice too. And please don't argue with me because I didn't make the same choice as you. I realize that is part of human nature, but there are bigger and more important things in life.
Re:Why doesn't Miguel just go to work for Microsof (Score:5, Insightful)
"Only" 10 MB? How utterly absurd. And yes I get that in context to the claim made by the GP you have a point. (Possibly the GP has binaries compiled with debug symbols, or possibly *you* already have over a hundred megs of mono libraries loaded for something else and dont realise it.)
But just wow, only 10MB for a silly little virtual notepad. That's 256 times the entire system memory on my first PC. Which was a much more accessible and "user-friendly" machine than you can buy today, with a good DE built right in. It appears computer science in the intervening time has been exclusively focused on driving hardware purchases...
Re:Eternal game of catch-up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Does anyone really use it? (Score:1, Insightful)
A sumo wrestler on an ice cream binge is thinner than Java.
If I hear Java == JavaScript one more time I'm going to explode.
Re:sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
Wake me up when you demonstrate it's not (I've issued this challenge many times, and no one's managed to achieve it).
Hint: Patents are published 18 months after filing, and a patent must be filed on an invention within a year of publication, otherwise the inventor forfeits the right to patent the invention. Furthermore, patents can only be submarined if the inventor forfeits the right to file the patent overseas, something I highly doubt MS is willing to do. As such, if parts of Mono were covered by patent, we'd almost certainly know about it by now (certainly there are enough anti-Mono trolls that *someone* should've been able to come up with such a patent by now).
Re:Mono Blows (hint, where's FW 3.5) (Score:3, Insightful)
fans of the BSD license argue that it is "more free" because anyone may do anything with the software
Including... making it non-free again...
Oops.
Yeah, oops indeed. Like so many before you, you have bought into the false belief that BSD licensed code can magically become non-free in some fashion that GPL code cannot. Let's go over this again. The only one that can relicense code is the copyright holder. Even then, that will not nullify the license of code which has already been licensed and released. This is all true whether the code is BSD licensed or licensed under the GPL. You cannot take BSD, and make it non-free, as you assert. The only rights you have are what the license itself grants you. In the case of BSD code, you can use it in combination with proprietary code and even decide for yourself how to license your changes (this in contrast with the GPL), but it is impossible for a user to just take the code and say "hence forth, this is now proprietary code; thus, nobody shall use it except I."
If you still don't understand, I don't know what more I can do to help you.
Re:Does anyone really use it? (Score:3, Insightful)
It appears you have a very odd definition of what "not forcing" means. Qt doesn't offer support in all of Qt's classes for STL containers and/or the standard C++ string objects. You cannot write a Qt app without being forced to use Qt's QString and/or Qt's containers. The only way you may use C++'s standard components is if you bring additional bloat and complexity to the application by converting Qt's data types and containers back and forth with STL's, which quite plainly sucks in multiple ways.
But then again, if you had any experience writing apps with Qt and if you had the displeasure of having to incorporate a third party C++ component which relies on the STL you would realize that Qt does in fact forces the programmers to use Qt's containers and data structure. On the other hand, if you never had to deal with this problem then you would have no problem attempting to label that fact as bullshit.