Mono apologists love to downplay concerns through poor analogies. One extremely common – and highly flawed – favorite is to compare Mono to Samba.

Almost exactly one year ago, Glyn Moody wrote a nice article “Why Mono and Samba Are Patently Different“, explaining some of the differences between Mono and Samba. Of course, that didn’t stop most of the mindless repetition of the talking point, but it does serve to illustrate a common tactic of Mono apologists:

Come up with a superficial argument and just keep repeating it.

You’ll see this tactic time and time again with the Top 10 list of poor Mono arguments. For this specific example of attempting to equate Mono with Samba we have a special treat, because the founder of the Samba project has recently taken to speaking out on Mono!

We’ll take the parts we need, thanks very much

One of the things I always found offensive and ironic at the same time was Team Mono’s attempts to co-opt the goodwill of the Samba project, when the founder of Samba - Jeremy Allison – had quit Novell specifically because of the ”covenant” with Microsoft!

It seems to me to be an especially offensive combination of arrogance and distortion to attempt to not just ignore one man’s principled actions, but also attempt to co-opt his project’s good name in support of a situation he explicitly rejected! I don’t know if that particular aspect bothered Mr. Allison – I don’t know of him mentioning it anywhere – but it sure would bother me.

In any case, I first started noticing Mr. Allison’s responses directly addressing the fallacy of comparing Mono and Samba in the comments to an error-filled attack rant against RMS by Jason Perlow for ZD Net. Although it is certainly “pearls before swine” to attempt to correct Mr. Perlow, Mr. Allison does make his point:

Comparing Mono to Samba is incorrect. Samba has the PFIF agreements, see here for details:

http://www.samba.org/samba/PFIF/PFIF_agreement.html

To my knowledge Mono has nothing like this.

This is a very good point for a number of different reasons:

  1. Shows the comparison between Samba and Mono is superficial at best.
  2. The PFIF was the direct result of the European Commission forcing Microsoft to cooperate. Mono and Microsoft apologists tend to gloss over that fact, and pretend like Microsoft is “cooperating” with Samba as part of Microsoft’s “open source initiative”.
  3. Shows the fundamental philosophical difference between the projects in this area. Namely, Samba insisted on clear and unambiguous protection, while Mono continues to trumpet half-measures that can not withstand legal scrutiny.
  4. Shows that you can instantly realize anyone arguing “Well Mono is just like Samba” can be ignored out-of-hand, because they are either too ignorant or willfully deceitful to be worth engaging.

In that same vein, it’s worthwhile to take a look at a bit of the commentary on that PFIF:

I should also mention that Microsoft made a separate pledge (not as part of this agreement) to not assert any patents directly against non-commercial open source projects. Please be assured that we did not ask for that pledge, and we will not in any way rely upon it. That pledge is an example of the sort of divisive patent covenant which does not cover all users and distributors of free software. For a patent pledge to be useful it must cover all users and distributors of a piece of free software, not just a subset of the community.

Contrast this to Novell and Miguel de Icaza’s attitude where they constantly promote software like Moonlight that is only covered for Novell’s customers.

It’s also interesting to me that a “non-Microsoft friendly” project like Samba has a much better foundation for the community than a “Microsoft friendly” project like Mono / Moonlight. If Microsoft were as “changed for the better” as Team Apology likes to say, shouldn’t it be the other way around? Especially since the PFIF agreement is older than the Mono “promise”?

The Final Word?

I’m sure it’s not.

Mr. Allison has now taken the time to address Mono in more detail with a blog entry “Monomania“. I encourage you to read it.

I also encourage you to consider all the hoops that Team Mono insists critics people must jump through to criticize Mono, and how Mr. Allison surely meets or exceeds all that I have seen. Yet, I do not see Team Mono accepting his criticism, nor do I see my mailbox filling with acknowledgement that it’s not just crazy zealots that have a problem with Mono.

Why am I not seeing these things? Because Mono apologists are not honest in their arguments. They like Mono, and will make any argument they think supports it, and ignore or attack anything that they think weakens it.

It’s a song I’ve sung many times, and this latest wrinkle on Mono == Samba is just one more example of the sloppy reasoning and poor logic behind Team Mono’s defenses.

This article was also posted at The Source.com!