FLOSS News

Most readers of this humble blog will be very aware of my personal opinion about Mono and specifically with regards to where it should belong in Ubuntu.

Free and Open Source Software projects are built using a wide variety of programming languages. Blackduck who study this kind of thing have released some interesting data regarding the use of various languages to develop FOSS applications.

C# (the language of choice for Mono advocates) is languishing in 10th place behind Perl, Python, PHP, Java and many not insignificant others.

Last night in bed I was reading some more of a novel (Not Novell) called “The suspicions of Mr Whicher“. It’s an interesting book, based on a true story about infanticide in the middle 1800s and one of our very first real “detectives”. But I am finding it a bit on the “dry” side truth be told…

Anyway, about 1/2 way through the book I discovered something amazing. A reference to a psychological condition called:

My favourite music player has just been updated and version 1.2 released.

I picked up the story from The H where they’ve done a great job of describing most of the new features in a single paragraph.

Mono seems to be causing a great deal of debate and discussion within the Ubuntu Community right now. I’m sure it probably always has, but it definitely seems that the intensity is building at the moment.

For those who don’t know what Mono is, from their website:

Mono is a cross platform, open source .NET development framework.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I am heartily encouraged by this small snippet of news I picked up via Twitter this afternoon (thanks Roy)

From the Fedora Mailing List:

I have now changed the default panel configuration in F12 to include gnote instead of tomboy, and changed comps to make gnote default and tomboy optional.

This won’t replace tomboy in existing installations, but new installations will get gnote instead of tomboy.

This also means that gnote should show up on the live cd (where we excluded tomboy previously, due to no space for mono).

I had this thought whilst wandering down to the pub last night. It’s a very pleasant walk on a warm evening; through leafy unmade lanes in the south of Farnham and has, on a number of occasions, been inspirational.

It’s that time again

Fortunately, Mono is still quite trivial to remove and has not, apparently, increased its infiltration of the Ubuntu/Gnome code base as one might have been led to believe if you’d read this on the 1st April:

About 15 hours ago, I posted an article on how to remove Mono from Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex.

A similar thing happened the last time, when I did a piece on doing the same thing for Hardy heron.

This:

I have had a long-time problem with Mono and the Mono-based applications that, for reasons I do not understand, come installed by default with Ubuntu.

For those who don’t know about it, Mono:

provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix.

That sounds pretty innocuous on the face of it. But Mono has a potentially fatal sting-in-the-tail for some, and leaves a rather nasty taste in the mouths of many others…