NO. It’s not a road worth going down. Let’s not get into that back and forth here.

The comments post-announcement have been pretty constructive, and I’m willing to take a little beating, but let’s not turn in to BoycottNovell part 2, alright?

I told Miguel I would give them the benefit of the doubt based on this new news, and temper my future criticism in that light.

Let me ask you to do the same here. Fair enough?

I guarantee you I can match you example for example of FUD and personal attacks. Both sides are guilty as hell of it.

In fact, your second example is a perfect case in point: it is a pro-mono flame followed by an anti-mono flame.

Is that really a road worth going down?

Instead of badmouthing Novell, Microsoft, Mono, Miguel and other developers, it would have been much simpler, more respectful and certainly better for everyone if people had simply worked with Miguel to get this to happen.

What many in the anti-Mono crowd did cannot be considered criticism, it was outright personal attacks, FUD, and trolling to the ultimate degree.

Take this as an example of what I’m talking about:

http://opensourcetogo.blogspot.com/2009/06/when-zeal-becomes-zealotry-tawdry-tale.html

Same with childish articles like this one that attack Mono over what a GSoC student said (while trying to portray said student as a Mono developer which is utterly dispicable behavior):

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/26075/1090/

Note also that this student had published an apology before Sam published his personal attacks which were nothing more than an attempt to soil Mono’s name for what someone unrelated to the project said. Pathetic.

(…) Microsoft never intended to sue (…)

Largely irrelevant — the mere ability to do so gives a single entity too much power to damage Free Software. Let’s hope this Promise is properly analyzed and it comes out clean…

(…) (they didn’t just change their minds overnight) (…)

Nobody said so. Yet, assuming that this (hopefully) positive outcome would have been reached without the meticulous critique of Mono is, at the very least, naïve.

I disagree about the non-ECMA stuff, I always saw that as a major concern. But, I do acknowledge if they are split up like C.J. points out (and Miguel is saying they will be) then that is probably the best solution. This is because – assuming the behavior doesn’t just become “we will include standard and non-standard mono bits every time” or that this renders mono worthless without the non-standard bits, then that non-standard mono stuff is not trying to become foundational parts of any distribution.

I have no problems with that. I like lots and lots of potentially patent infriging projects. I just don’t want things to rely on them. If mono can do that, then hooray for mono. I don’t think that was the case before, but let me be the first mono critic to confess it looks like that is changing.

The arguments about the non-ECMA portions were never valid either because none of the Mono-based applications in Ubuntu, Debian, etc use those pieces and packages have always been split, even if the Mono code-base has not been. The work necessary to split the source code does not require any hacking (other than Makefiles).

Take a look at the Debian packages (upstream of Ubuntu). Already split up thanks to the hard work of Mirco Bauer.