Computerwolrds’ Cyber Critic posts “Stop piling on Mono already” where he manages to get just about everything wrong in the mono controversy.

It’s worth a read only if you want to see yet a tossed salad of misconceptions and poor arguments mixed in a bowl of misunderstand.

You’ll often hear mono incorrectly compared to Wine or Samba. This is the first time I’ve heard moonlight compared to Samba:

Others might argue that several of these programs, Moonlight/Moonshine in particular, make it easier to Linux users to use Microsoft-based, hence anti-open-source, software. True, but let’s get real. Samba, one of the purest of the open-source products in the long Microsoft/open-source war, has always been able making it possible for Linux users to work with Windows file servers. Microsoft’s dominance in many areas of computing is a fact. It only makes sense to me that open-source developers should work on projects that help with Windows/Linux interoperability.

There’s a lot wrong here, but the two simple points to make is that Microsoft’s Silverlight is nowhere close to the necessity that Microsoft’s file systems are; and two you do know the main man of Samba quit Novell specifically because of the Novell deal? It’s like you are crapping all over his moral stand by missing the large toilet bowl of point just to your left.

There are lots of other reasons why Samba is not like Silverlight – for example: The Samba team didn’t get all sorts of Samba-only test suites from Microsoft. The EU courts didn’t force Microsoft to release Silverlight documentation. Samba has done incredibly hard work reverse-engineering Microsoft filesystems and networking protocols, Moonlight not so much. Samba doesn’t have some sort of Novell-only “covenant” with Microsoft. And on and on.

Another reason why people grumble about Mono is that it’s backed by Novell, a company that some people in the Linux community hate because of its Microsoft partnership. But, Novell isn’t in Microsoft’s back-pocket. Faced with a dominant player in the Linux server market, Red Hat, Novell has elected to try to play the interoperability card with Windows to gain market share. It hasn’t been a rousing success for Novell, but, I’d argue it’s kept them in the operating system game with their SLE (SUSE Linux Enterprise) line.

Microsoft has given Novell about what, $542 million, now?[1] You take that much cash from someone and you are not just in thier back pocket, you are in whatever pocket they want, playing whatever game of pool they want.

Of course, Microsoft could threaten lawsuits with patents relating to Mono as well. After Peter Galli, a Microsoft support manager, publicly announced on the Microsoft Open Source blog that Microsoft wouldn’t go after developers using the “C# programming language … and Common Language Infrastructure (CLI),” in short the heart of Mono, I can’t see any court letting Microsoft’s lawyers even get their seats warmed up before tossing any patent lawsuit against Mono programmers out the door.

Consider this scenario:

Microsoft decides for whatever reason this mono experiment has gotten out of hand. It’s time to shut it down. They go into court.

“Your honor, we have tried to work with the community. We submitted a core technology to international standard bodies. However, that was not enough for some – they insisted on copying ever more of our intellectual property, expanding far beyond the standard we generously committed to, abusing our efforts of interoperability. It is unreasonable we are expected to donate every bit of our technology to our competitors, and we seek relief against this out-of-control clone project.”

Mono is done. Not only does Microsoft have a perfectly valid attack, but they get to look like the victim while doing it!

In other words, chill about Mono already people. Trying to turn Mono into some kind of free software political litmus test is a waste of time and it’s just getting people ticked off for no good reason.

I don’t think mono is much of a litmust test about Free Software. Mono supporters are almost proud of thier collective disdain for the GPL, FSF, and rms. They are much more in the Open Source camp than the Free Software camp. The watchword for most mono supporters is “pragmatism”. Every so often someone pays a little lip service to freedom or some other hippie ideal.

There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s perfectly alright to place your priorities where you see fit. I’m just saying the idea that mono is splitting “Free Software” is strange. Mono is more a wedge between the “Free Software” and “Open Source” sides of the tent.

So, to sum up, we should not be turning Mono application support into some kind of religious test for what should, or shouldn’t, be in Linux. The notion that Mono developers are somehow wicked for using the platform really needs to be dumped once and for all.

Finally, something I can agree with. So long as Mono can be shown to be safe from potential Microsoft attacks, then drive on. I think mono developers are helping Microsoft as much if not more than Linux; I think they are obnoxious and over-enamored with .NET; I think there is some wierd ass self-hating need to get validation from Microsoft in there; I think it is a tragedy that all the effort going into mono/moonlight is not going into non-Microsoft enabling project; and lots more things — but none of those are valid reasons for keeping something out of Linux.

[1] $442M in original deal. $100M more in later update. I would like to see a better, more accurate breakdown of exactly how much money has flowed from Microsoft to Novell.