[Fsf-friends] KDE vs GNOME war
Sandip Bhattacharya
sandip at lug-delhi.org
Mon Oct 10 18:13:10 CEST 2005
On Monday, 10 Oct 2005 7:39 pm, Sriram N wrote:
> I'd say there's nothing wrong with developing Gnome using Mono, which is
> based upon some standards - ECMA standards. There was a lot of hue and cry
> over the patents issue, but this seems to have largely settled down. One
> can use name spaces and packages that are non-MS - GTK#, for e.g.
Being a standard is not good enough. What is a standard anyway? It is just an
endorsement by a well known, supposedly vendor neutral organization. OSI is
one, it certifies various FLOSS licenses as being OSI compliant or not. But
this "standard" is not considered good enough for FSF, isn't it?
Similarly, you need to understand the conditions under which the C#, CLI stuff
is "standardized". Check out:
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework#Standardization_and_Licensing
[2]: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2004/03/11/mono.html
Here is an excerpt from [1]:
"""
While Microsoft and their partners hold patents for CLI and C#, ECMA and ISO
requires that all patents essential to implementation be made available under
"reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms." The companies have agreed,
instead, to make the patents available under "royalty-free and otherwise RAND
terms."
"""
BTW, Aren't ISO and ITU the same organizations which doesnt provide freely
available standard documents (like IETF or W3C)?
Here is an excerpt from [2]:
"""
The licensing status of Mono is of immediate concern to most would-be
adopters. Isn't Mono at risk of being wiped out by Microsoft patents? De
Icaza explained the situation. The Mono runtime is an implementation of the
Common Language Infrastructure standardized via ECMA. Microsoft has granted a
license to use this technology under so-called "reasonable and
non-discriminatory" terms.
On top of the core system sits two stacks of APIs. One of these is an
implementation of Microsoft's APIs for user interfaces, web services, and
database access. The other stack is entirely unique to the Mono project and
includes things like bindings to the GTK user interface toolkit, the Cairo
graphics system, and Mono's own database layer.
It is conceivable that Microsoft would enforce licensing terms on the
implementation of the APIs that it hasn't submitted to ECMA. In the worst
case, says de Icaza, distributors of those APIs would need to pay fees to
Microsoft. None of this would touch the other, Mono-specific, APIs. The two
different stacks of APIs are being kept separate to account for this
possibility and to ensure that Mono is distributed by vendors such as Red
Hat, who are reluctant to take on an unknown patent situation.
"""
While there is no immediate danger, and there has been real good that has come
out of the mono project (some of the apps like Beagle have been really
good!), the fact is that the project will forever be under the shadow of M$.
I have been enamoured with the Mono project till some time back(check some of
my enthusiastic posts of mine on this list some months back). But the more I
think of it, the more I am uncomfortable with the idea of one of the two
major desktops of Linux moving on to such a wobbly scenario. As [3] points
out:
[3]:
http://www.osviews.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1395
"""
We can only trust Mono if we are convinced Microsoft doesn't have weasel room.
The current situation appears, to me, to have lots of weasel room. The
technical merits of Mono are basically irrelevant if its a trojan horse in
the long term.
"""
Do note that I am *not* questioning Mono, or asking people to drop it totally.
The OP on this list talked about KDE and Gnome, and the argument against KDE
was that it was initially based on a non-free toolkit, and people (here?)
will never forget it. But things have changed for the better - Qt is Free
now, and will always be.
But Gnome on the other hand is moving to a non-Free platform(.Net is supposed
to be a platform)!
Which situation would you be more confortable with?
- Sandip
P.S. Mandatory disclosure: I have been a long time KDE user. Some months back
when I tried to move on to Ubuntu 5.04, I used Gnome for a while. It has come
pretty much a long way. But then I took a look at the latest KDE, and was
blown away. Now I am back to KDE. While Gnome has gone forward quite some
way. KDE *seems* has gone even further ahead in both UI and stability.
P.S.2. I feel like being in a catch-22 situation. I like KDE but would not
like to develop on QT, as it is too costly for professional development. I
find Gtk+ to be affordable and Free, but dislike its decision to look the
same on different platforms. I would prefer Wxwindows (which is a wrapper
over Gtk on Linux, and win32 API on Windows) but is one of the worst
documented development SDKs. :(((
--
Sandip Bhattacharya * Puroga Technologies * sandip at puroga.com
Work: http://www.puroga.com * Home/Blog: http://www.sandipb.net/blog
PGP/GPG Signature: 51A4 6C57 4BC6 8C82 6A65 AE78 B1A1 2280 A129 0FF3
More information about the Fsf-friends
mailing list