Even OpenSUSE recognises drawbacks of Mono

Even OpenSUSE recognises drawbacks of Mono

Postby Sam Varghese » Wed Jun 03, 2009 11:17 am

Mention Mono in a story and you are certain to draw two kinds of readers - the followers, those who have drunk the kool-aid ladled out by Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza, and the detractors, who realise that it could cause them patent headaches a few years hence.

Given this, I was not surprised at the fuss over the appearance of Gnote, an application for notes, which was a rewrite of Tomboy. The difference? Tomboy is dependent on Mono. Gnote is not.

(For the uninitiated, Mono is an attempt to create an open source clone of Microsoft's .NET development environment; De Icaza claims this will pull Windows developers over to GNU/Linux. Something like my great-aunt who used to claim that she was regularly visited by the archangel Gabriel.)

There was something strange about the articles that discussed Gnote; for example, "computer journalist" (his own term) Bruce Byfield wrote a piece titled Striking the right Gnote which had many more quotes from Tomboy developer Sandy Armstrong rather than from Hubert Figuiere who developed Gnote.

(What is really strange about Byfield's piece is that he quoted information about Figuiere from all over the web instead of asking the man himself. This was in stark contrast to the publicity Figuiere got in these columns - I wrote to him and found him more than willing to answer questions at length.)

Now it looks like the people who run the OpenSUSE project - that's the community GNU/Linux distribution sponsored by Novell - have themselves realised that Mono can be a stumbling block.

Nothing else can account for the fact that OpenSUSE has decided to create a port of Easy-LTSP, an application used for configuring thin clients.

Easy-LTSP was originally written in C# but, according to the OpenSUSE project "Easy-LTSP was designed to work on any distribution, but unfortunately it is not integrated anywhere other than openSUSE, discussing with the upstream LTSP developers suggested the slight reservation could be due to it being written in C#."

Easy-LTSP is being rewritten to include new features and OpenSUSE has now decided to use Python instead, "which would be easier to attract more contributors and increase possibility that users of all distributions running LTSP server can benefit from it inclusion in their preferred distro."

Miguel, looks like there are traitors to the Mono cause within your own ranks. Or is it that, just for once, commonsense and logic has asserted itself at Novell and its associates?


Article Link at http://www.itwire.com/content/view/25434/1090/
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Re: Even OpenSUSE recognises drawbacks of Mono

Postby directhex » Wed Jun 03, 2009 4:36 pm

Sam Varghese wrote:There was something strange about the articles that discussed Gnote; for example, "computer journalist" (his own term) Bruce Byfield wrote a piece titled Striking the right Gnote which had many more quotes from Tomboy developer Sandy Armstrong rather than from Hubert Figuiere who developed Gnote.


Yeah, what kind of tech journalist would talk about someone without asking them directly? Deary me.
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Re: Even OpenSUSE recognises drawbacks of Mono

Postby mdsmedia » Wed Jun 03, 2009 4:50 pm

directhex wrote:
Sam Varghese wrote:There was something strange about the articles that discussed Gnote; for example, "computer journalist" (his own term) Bruce Byfield wrote a piece titled Striking the right Gnote which had many more quotes from Tomboy developer Sandy Armstrong rather than from Hubert Figuiere who developed Gnote.


Yeah, what kind of tech journalist would talk about someone without asking them directly? Deary me.

Asking them what?

Sam's point was that they spoke to a Tomboy developer rather than a Gnote developer, about....Gnote.

Sam is a HUGE fan of Byfield, BTW ;).
"Linux: For those who understand, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not, no explanation is sufficient."
"In a state of confusion it is very clear that nothing is as it seems."
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Re: Even OpenSUSE recognises drawbacks of Mono

Postby zeke123 » Thu Jun 04, 2009 8:58 am

Christopher smart who is the newsletter editor at Distrowatch
(he is also one of the guys behind the Kororaa XGL Live CD a few years back)
has an excellent piece about mono called:

Mono: An infectious disease
http://blog.christophersmart.com/2009/0 ... s-disease/

Really worth the read.

.
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Re: Even OpenSUSE recognises drawbacks of Mono

Postby Sam Varghese » Thu Jun 04, 2009 9:14 am

directhex wrote:
Sam Varghese wrote:There was something strange about the articles that discussed Gnote; for example, "computer journalist" (his own term) Bruce Byfield wrote a piece titled Striking the right Gnote which had many more quotes from Tomboy developer Sandy Armstrong rather than from Hubert Figuiere who developed Gnote.


Yeah, what kind of tech journalist would talk about someone without asking them directly? Deary me.


Bit of ignorance showing through, Jo. Every two-bit programmer is an expert in journalism these days.

One interviews a man about software that he created and then uses just a single direct quote in the
article - compared to five or six from his detractors. Bad.

One quotes an extract from a web page and identifies the author. More than sufficient. The article is
not about that page, it is about a much wider subject. Good.
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Re: Even OpenSUSE recognises drawbacks of Mono

Postby Sam Varghese » Thu Jun 04, 2009 9:16 am

zeke123 wrote:Christopher smart who is the newsletter editor at Distrowatch
(he is also one of the guys behind the Kororaa XGL Live CD a few years back)
has an excellent piece about mono called:

Mono: An infectious disease
http://blog.christophersmart.com/2009/0 ... s-disease/

Really worth the read.

.


Nice man Chris. I wrote a long piece about him:

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/17519/1090/
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Re: Even OpenSUSE recognises drawbacks of Mono

Postby Sam Varghese » Thu Jun 04, 2009 9:19 am

mdsmedia wrote:
directhex wrote:
Sam Varghese wrote:There was something strange about the articles that discussed Gnote; for example, "computer journalist" (his own term) Bruce Byfield wrote a piece titled Striking the right Gnote which had many more quotes from Tomboy developer Sandy Armstrong rather than from Hubert Figuiere who developed Gnote.


Yeah, what kind of tech journalist would talk about someone without asking them directly? Deary me.

Asking them what?

Sam's point was that they spoke to a Tomboy developer rather than a Gnote developer, about....Gnote.

Sam is a HUGE fan of Byfield, BTW ;).


My point was, in an article about Gnote (according to the headline), there was one direct quote from the
Gnote creator and many more from his detractors at Tomboy. And Hubert, the Gnote creator, is very
quick to respond to emails, I sent him some queries and had an answer within a few hours and he was
very clear and concise too.
Looks like people are taking sides when that kind of lopsides quoting is done.
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