Schmehl to Stallman on Mono …
p2pnet news | Open Source:- Debian has no plans to include the Mono programming environment in the default GNOME installation, says Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Debian developer and spokesman for the GNU/Linux distribution.
The news comes in response to the open letter written by Free Software founder Richard Stallman about the “Mono problem,” says Heise Online.
Says Stallman »»»
Debian’s decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use.
The problem is not unique to Mono; any free implementation of C# would raise the same issue. The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents. (See http://swpat.org and http://progfree.org.) This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.
This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. Free C# implementations permit users to run their C# programs on free platforms, which is good. (The GNU Project has an implementation of C# also, called Portable.NET.) Ideally we want to provide free implementations for all languages that programmers have used.
The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn’t make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.
We should systematically arrange to depend on the free C# implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing programs in C#. Therefore, we should not include C# implementations in the default installation of GNU/Linux distributions, and we should distribute and recommend non-C# applications rather than comparable C# applications whenever possible.
But Reichle-Schmehl says this isn’t the case, and the default installation hasn’t changed, stating »»»
… in answer to your open letter Why free software shouldn’t depend on Mono or C#
I like to explain a small misunderstanding that seems to have been spread pretty wide recently.
Debian has not to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy
. The default installation – or to be more precise: The default GNOME installation (there are installation media which install an KDE, Xfce or LXDE desktop by default, too) – hasn’t changed. It still installs a more or less minimal Gnome Desktop without tomboy and without mono. As far as I know there haven’t been major changes in package selection for the GNOME installation media, nor are there major changes planed.
What really has changed is that one of our meta packages, which are mainly used to install a set of packages. Indeed our meta package to install everything gnome related got a dependency on Tomboy and will indeed pull in mono, too.
That doesn’t have any effect on the default installation
(which doesn’t use that package) nor does it effect a major part of Debian’s GNOME users, who prefer to install gnome-desktop (a meta package to pull in a simple GNOME Desktop) or even the gnome-core meta-package (which installs the bare necessities to run GNOME applications). Please see the numbers at our popularity contest system for yourself.
So, Debian didn’t change the default installation
(whatever that’s supposed to be) but the dependency of a package which is used by a minority of our users who explicitly wishes to install everything GNOME related (which is to the best of my knowledge in accordance with upstream developers who added tomboy to the default GNOME installation, too).
Stay tuned.
Heise Online – Debian – Mono is not in our default installation, July 2, 2009
Stallman – Why free software shouldn’t depend on Mono or C#, June 26, 2009
Reichle-Schmehl – Dear Richard, June 30, 2009
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