Re: Gnome to be based on .NET?

[Crispin Wellington <crispin iinet net au>]

On Tue, 2002-02-05 at 02:10, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-02-04 at 04:52, Crispin Wellington wrote:
> > Theres a thread ATM on gnome-devel-list called "GNOME, .Net and Mono"
> > which you should read to get the deveopers position on this.
> > 
> > I think Miguel's getting free (as in price) and Free (as in freedom)
> > confused.
> 
> How is he doing that?  Neither Mono nor GNOME are, or are going to be,
> closed source.

open source != Free

>  X11 license is just as (well, heck, more) free as the
> GPL/LGPL GNOME uses now.

I disagree emphatically.

MIT/X
-----
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. 
-----

Where is the garuntee of Openness? I take your MIT/X licenced code,
modify it substantially, close it up and sell/sublicence it. No source
code. Your not allowed to see *my* changes.

Freedom to be enslaved is no freedom at all.

MIT/X cant even be construed as more 'free' as in price.

>  *And*, adding Mono interfaces/wrappers to
> GNOME wont force GNOME to use another license.

True. But maybe well have Mono. And then we'll have IBM's Mono (which
doesn't come with source) and Sun's Mono...

> The only issue I see is getting Mono tied into GNOME - there are lots of
> apps and such in GNOME that are GPL only, which can't be linked to
> closed source implementations/enhancements of .Net based on Mono.  Geez,
> look at that, GNOME is hindering .Net in that case, not the other way
> around. ~,^

We have a philosphical imperative to hinder .Net :)

I don't think anyone has really understood .Net yet. Everyones going on
about security, and customer trust, but MS is redefining the terms
without anyone realising.

Reading http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23715.html ... In fact
read it now if you haven't before. Sounds great hey! Security our
customers can trust. Wow I want a OS like that!

Now change one thing, and .Net becomes clear. When Bill says "customers"
he doesn't mean you and me. No. We are the product. The user of .Net is
the comodity he will sell. The "customer" is the media content owner.
.Nets customers are Time-Warner, Disney, Sony etc. When he says "a
product our customers can trust the security of" he means a system that
the content owners can deliver their copyrighted media to without fear
of copying.

Reread the article keeping in mind when he says "customer" hes not
talking about us at all. Makes sense now doesn't it :) 

Its like TV. People think the product on TV is the shows. Wrong. The
product is the viewer thats being sold to the advertisers. The TV shows
are just filler between the adds to attract the eyes 'the product'.

So when Bill says "Trustworthiness" it means "the content owners can
trust that their data wont be subverted"

"What I mean by this is that customers will always be able to rely on
these systems to be available and to secure their information." 

Secure the info from what? From the product of course.

"Availability: Our products should always be available when our
customers need them."

That is "our products" (thats us) should always be available when "our
customers" (thats the big boys) need them. Cant have a crashing
home-media station now can we :) 

"It's a fundamental challenge that spans the entire computing ecosystem,
from individual chips all the way to global Internet services. It's
about smart software, services and industry-wide cooperation."

Enter the DMCA, SSSCA, DRM, and especially CPRM here. They're gonna lock
the product(us) out of the loop all the way from the cpu to the API.

Its a beautiful plan for World Domination TM. .Net will sell the willing
eyes of the consumer to the content providers (programming their
applications in .Net) and Microsoft will act as the middle man. Passport
will be the authentication system. They'll take a cut of all the
transactions. And they'll become significantly larger than they are now.
If you thought they acted illegally in their monopoly before, wait till
you see them after .Net!

It all fits in with the X-box and paves the way for pay-per-play.

Mono will enable a customer like Time Warner to securely deliver their
media to Linux users without fear they may copy the media, or watch it
again later. The product will have to pay. They'll pay via
passport/hailstorm. Now THATS freedom.

> I don't see how it would be possible to close up or restrict the freedom
> of GNOME users.

I didn't say this. Its Mono thats not going to be free. And if Miguel
makes later GNOME based on unFree Mono, then there will just be a fork.

>  The worst that can happen is that GNOME users can be
> locked out of potentially useful and powerful software simply because
> for totally non-technical reasons.

Sounds like the whole commercial software industry. "Sorry Word X can't
load Word Y files"

> (Note: I don't really understand the
> GPL in regards to, say, a GPL -> X11 -> proprietary linkage, so I could
> be really wrong here.) 
> 
> *I'd* like to see all of GNOME switched to a more Free license, but I
> have a feeling very few of the GNOME developers agree with me there. 
> ^,^  Heck, I'll probably be massively flamed here for sharing my
> personal opinions on licenses.

I would contest the idea of a *more Free* licence. But I hope theres no
flames. Everyones entitled to their opinions, and everyone can licence
the code *they* write however they want. Users are free to use their
software the way the licence permits. Users are free to choose not to
use the software.

And somewhere in this whole swirling maelstrom, everything will work out
fine :)

Crispin