Well, it seems that since last saturday, Gnote is now the default option in Debian for those platforms where Mono unportability prevents Tomboy from being used, namely: alpha, hppa, m68k, mipsel, mips, hurd-i386 and kopensolaris-i386.
I explained before that I’m skeptical about whether a note-taking application ought to be pulled to the default package selection for desktop installs. But this is not what I wanted to talk about today. What bothers me is that the same person who decided Gnote is a suitable replacement for Tomboy on these architectures, also has these things to say:
GNote was written for bad reasons, without even respecting the GPL copyright requirements. But more importantly, its maintenance model is going to make it only follow behind the Tomboy lead, as any code changes in Tomboy will need to be translated to C++. It also supports less languages and less features. Furthermore, it was introduced in Debian for political reasons, by a maintainer who doesn’t use it and isn’t involved in GNOME maintenance.
It is not what he said in itself that bothers me. I put aside that Hubert wasn’t asked at all about his reasons before judging them, and the fact that those accusations of copyright violation are completely bogus, among other things.
What really bothers me here is that all those perceived problems magically disappeared when promoting Tomboy was at stake. How can we expect sane judgement here?
I suppose that if people who care about politics are “toxic”, then anti-politics must be sanity. Except anti-politics are in fact a form of politics. Twisted, I know, but that’s just like human mind is sometimes. For those who are still wondering why, this might help explaining.
Anyhow, no matter the reasons I feel it’s my responsibility to stand for this decision. I’m looking forward to a Gnote that is well tried and tested on all Debian architectures, with complete documentation and localization support that is improving every day. You too can help by trying and testing Gnote, specially on the aforementioned platforms.
July 6, 2009 at 16:10 |
Stop. Just. Stop.
And I thought Fedora development was school-yard like…
July 6, 2009 at 19:22 |
If you want to do politics, there are, um, you know, these things named political parties. They do quite a nice job as doing politics.
July 6, 2009 at 20:40 |
Why do you say that Mono is not available on kfreebsd-amd64 and kfreebsd-i386? http://packages.debian.org/sid/mono-runtime says something else and http://buildd.debian-ports.org/status/package.php?p=mono also. I added kfreebsd-* support to the packages since Mono 1.2.3.1 which was uploaded 27 Feb 2007 and the port is maintained since then. Mips should be supported around Mono 2.8 btw.
July 6, 2009 at 23:09 |
Thanks. I have corrected this.
July 7, 2009 at 09:36 |
I don’t get why anyone has to utter things like that regarding free software, be it Mono, Tomboy or Gnote alike. It’s nonsensical to beat on Gnote like that; software is free, write it for yourself or for other reasons, put it out there, let everyone do what they want.
How does providing Gnote hurt those that can’t install Tomboy? It doesn’t hurt anyone, it’s probably good for Tomboy even. The situation very unfortunate like you say.
July 8, 2009 at 08:36 |
This proves that even my beloved Debian is not immune to a certain kind of politicization.
You correctly point out… whyshould Gnote or Tomboy inserted by default at all?
I can, however, follow the distate for Mono and that it would be insane to pull in all the dependencies just for Tomboy.
So, I will continue to use Ink.app and GNUstep for my needs. And they come directly from the FSF.
July 11, 2009 at 12:34 |
[...] is meanwhile getting Gnote, a replacement for Tomboy. Well, it seems that since last saturday, Gnote is now the default [...]
July 15, 2009 at 22:40 |
Gnote is faster than Tomboy, and doesnt require a whole new set of libraries to install, plus it may be more portable. I cant see how any of that is a bad thing.
GPL is about having access to the code so you can do things with it that the original author didnt (or doesnt) foresee as a usage or goal. Linux on a mobile phone for example.
Seems hypocritical of Tomboy developers to be speaking out against the freedom that their applications license is supposed to provide.