5 hours, 23 minutes and 30 seconds is the average time it takes for a Mono apologist to scrutinize a complex legal document, determine there are no tricks whatsoever in the text or in its relationship with the patent provisions in GPL (like those we’ve seen elsewhere) and rub it in your face:
Sorry to disappoint you, but I didn’t go to law school, I just don’t know what we can expect from this announcement, and I don’t think I’m qualified to make myself a solid opinion. So what I will do is wait until a reputable, unbiased source like the Software Freedom Law Center makes a statement saying everything looks pretty nice and GPL-compatible, and then join you in your spiteful “celebration”.
July 8, 2009 at 18:14 |
Sorry for the inappropriate comparison, but calling me “Mono apologist” sounds quite a bit like the right-wing extremists rhetoric: “If you don’t agree with death penalty for children molesters, you must be a child molester.”
When will you stop your SDD campaign? When will you do something useful for Debian, AT LEAST ONCE? After your logorrhea about firmwares, we have now to live with your logorrhea about Mono. In both cases, you have done NOTHING to help with the situation, pointing fingers instead of trying to fix issues.
I presume that in 6 months you will have found another target to SDD, wasting resources in endless and useless discussions, putting people who actually do the work on their nerves, like you did with the kernel maintainers, like you are doing now with the Mono and GNOME maintainers.
The next time you find yourself a holy and sacred mission to SDD something, please wonder for at least one minute if your campaign will have any positive effect.
And yes, I am that good. I don’t need 5 hours to read and understand a single-page document.
July 8, 2009 at 19:05 |
Hi Joss,
I’m not in any “campaign”. You two said something amusing, so I blog about it.
Readers passing-by might think that I’m being harsh by calling you an “apologist”, but seeing how you deal with words like “troll”, “religious zealot”, “toxic person”, etc on a daily basis, I think your stomach can live with it just fine.
And if it can’t, well it’s never too late to take a different path.
Cheers
July 8, 2009 at 19:36 |
I don’t care of it being harsh or whatever. It’s a blog, after all. Even better it’s *your* blog.
I just wanted to point out that it is completely fallacious. As is all your SDD campaign.
July 8, 2009 at 19:45 |
Whatever…
July 8, 2009 at 19:09 |
Please Robert, stop arguing about Mono. As a Debian user (and debian-planet reader), I’m tired of all those stupid and destructive messages about this issue.
If you appreciate Debian image, please, stop this anti-Mono war.
July 10, 2009 at 14:27 |
Oh, finally a visit from the keeper of correctness. I appreciate your reminder, please don’t forget to post a similar message here and here. Thank you for coming.
July 10, 2009 at 22:16 |
“But he started being mean first!”
July 11, 2009 at 15:55 |
No, Joss. You’re the only one who gets personal here, and the sad truth is you only do it because you are unable to provide any worthy argument to the discussion.
July 12, 2009 at 00:43 |
Who cares? You will ignore any argument that is not in full agreement with yours, anyway. Furthermore, there is no point in discussing this with you; you are not interested into making Debian better, but only to attack a piece of software you don’t like.
July 8, 2009 at 21:17 |
Note also that the promise applies only to core C# and the CLI — other portions of Mono are *not* covered by the “promise”, and still subject to legal action. When somebody got this wrong on reddit, Miguel de Icaza himself jumped in to correct — here’s the post; read the title, which gets it wrong, and Miguel’s first comment (at the top of the page, as I write), which is at pains to correct it.
(It’s also worth noting that Miguel is counting on Debian packagers(!) to separate the free-and-clear portions of Mono from those where Microsoft is still reserving the right to assert patents at a later date.)
July 10, 2009 at 14:31 |
I read about it, and I think he deserves credit for that. Maybe I write a post about it later.
July 9, 2009 at 15:24 |
robret, as a bystander I too believe you are just eating up everyone’s time
July 10, 2009 at 14:28 |
Isn’t that supposed to be the purpose of a blog?
July 10, 2009 at 02:56 |
I just thought you’d be interested to know that lawyers from the SFLC have already evaluated Microsoft’s “Open Specification Promise” (OSP) and judged it inadequate:
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/osp-gpl.html
The “Microsoft Community Promise” (MCP) under which C# and the CIL are licensed is essentially the same document, with the additional restriction that in order to receive the license you are required to implement “all of the required parts of the mandatory provisions of that specification”. In other words, “partial implementations are not covered”, as explicitly stated in their FAQ.
This is of course problematic for any form of OSS development, since community-developed implementations are always necessarily partial (and therefore not protected by the MCP) before they become complete (if they ever do). What assurance do we have that mono fully implements the required portions of ECMA 334 and 335? If it doesn’t then the MCP doesn’t apply to it AT ALL, and anyone relying on mono (except for maybe Novell and its customers) are still using unlicensed, patented technologies.
Since this is yet one more significant pitfall for licensees, in addition to those already identified by the SFLC wrt the Open Specification Promise, there is little reason to think they will be satisfied with the guarantees it provides.
I certainly am not.
July 10, 2009 at 14:34 |
Hi,
I don’t see this quote in the link you’re providing. Is it somewhere else?
July 11, 2009 at 22:02 |
Hi,
Both quotes come directly from the Microsoft Community Promise webpage, rather than from the SFLC critique I linked to. You’ll find them here:
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx
October 10, 2009 at 18:46 |
But she has been more recently stressed out because of work, and rightfully so. ,