Vindication

Stallman at the Free Software Foundation website:

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.

[...]

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.

I give up.

I’m giving up the mono-arguing game.

Apebox.org just posted the most comprehensive and best defense of mono I have ever read … and it’s still full of shit from tip to stern, but people are praising it like it was the work of Hume himself.

I haven’t yet encountered a pro-mono person that can directly address the issue without personal attacks, logical fallacies or other extraneous bullshit, and that includes the man himself on my own blog.

On the flip side, I’m often embarrassed by the behavior by some on “my side” of the issue. I do not want to be associated with that. I like to think I’ve held myself to a higher standard, and I hope I can walk away with that knowledge at least.

On top of all that, the ubuntu forums are “disappearing” threads that are critical of mono … and people seem perfectly alright with that. I spent a lot of time posting to a thread yesterday, only to come back on today to see it removed from the boards. Same thing on brainstorm with votes being “disappeared”.

Anyway, I have projects that I’ve been neglecting!

Disinformation Disinfected, pt. 3: Banshee in Ubuntu

Here, let’s take a look at one of the main things that get’s me going about mono-supporters.There is a strong push to get Banshee in as the default media player in Ubuntu. Here’s my take on that.

Earlier in the series:
Disinformation Disinfected, Pt. 2: The False Dilemma
Disinformation Disinfected, Pt. 1

Disinformation Disinfected, Pt. 2: The False Dilemma

Huzzah! Continuing the series of addressing one small point of mono misinformation at a time! This time I’ll take a look at a common defense of mono which has a few of interesting bits to it, some obvious and some a bit more subtle.

Earlier in the series: Disinformation Disinfected, Pt. 1

3 Moonlight Questions

I got into a discussion on IRC the other day with a mono supporter. One of the things that came up on a tangent was Moonlight, Novell’s implementation of Microsoft’s weapon-of-hope against Adobe’s Flash.

There are a few questions I haven’t seen directly addressed, so I put them here for your bemusement: