It’s not what you think, baby.

In a numbers-heavy blog post, Bertrand Loretz tries to make the argument that “Banshee is a GNOME Project”  and not a ”Novell project”. While I understand why one might want to distance themselves from Novell, you’re going to have a rough time trying that with Banshee.

For starters Novell owns the Banshee name, logo and icon. One might think that pretty much seals the deal?

Another point of interest is that “one of the purposes building Banshee was to showcase building an application on Mono.”

There’s also this bit right there on the Banshee “About” Page:

Novell employs Aaron and Gabriel Burt to work on Banshee.

So, just going by Mr. Loretz’s own numbers, at least 70.4% of the code contributions came from the 2 developers Novell is paying to work on Banshee.

So, Novell owns the project name and likeness, and pays for the overwhelming majority of the actual code, but it’s not a “Novell project”?

I guess this is similar logic to how the CodePlex Foundation is not a Microsoft organization?

Here’s your fries, sir. By the way, I really like to think of myself as an actor.

As far as Banshee being a “GNOME project” – Mr. Loretz’s other prong of argument - Banshee is not on the list of GNOME projects, although I’m sure Team Mono is doing everything they can to get that damned Rhythmbox off the list and replace it with Banshee.

Two for one special

There’s another nice bit of irony I ran across while visiting the Banshee page. They link to the FSF’s essay, “The Free Software Definition“. I find this ironic because Team Mono has nearly surpassed Microsoft as the most vocal and vicious source of criticism against the FSF and “Free Software”.

Predictions

Behold my crystal ball: there will be an upsurge in talk of Banshee as a “GNOME project”, “part of GNOME” and so forth. Team Mono has expressed that GNOME should be built on Mono numerous times, and they will continue to push that effort from every angle. Banshee is just another vector – not only serving as displacing a non-Mono part of GNOME (rhythmbox), but also rolling Moonlight into GNOME.

“It’s not just an app, it’s a platform”.

• Long term goal is to write the UI in Moonlight
  • Declarative UI, canvas, scene graph, and toolkit
  • Moonlight is an Open Source implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight technology … and it is awesome

“Banshee is going to do photos”

“We are re-basing the F-Spot core on top of Banshee”

And it ends with GNOME, Mono and Banshee logos.

Moonlight is of course, absolutely toxic unless you get it directly from Novell, as the so-called “covenant” specifically prohibits non-Novell distributions from distributing Moonlight. It also specifically prohibits distribution on non-PC platforms (like PDAs and so forth). The agreement – which is only with Novell anyway – also terminates on Sep. 1, 2011. And, of course it only covers Silverlight 1 and 2, both of which are already obsolete, as Microsoft has already released Silverlight 3.

In fact the Moonlight agreement is so offensive, even some high ups in Team Mono agree it is anti-community.

You want to get rid of Rhythmbox for what, now?

So there you have it – that’s what Team Mono wants in Ubuntu, by default, replacing Rhythmbox. An audio / video / picture “platform” with a built in web-browser and multiple GUIs.

This is the future of GNOME and of distributions that rely on GNOME, so don’t get all snooty just because you aren’t using Ubuntu. Layer upon layer of frameworks, Moonlight on top of Mono. One Microsoft technology stacked upon another; Microsoft development tools used in that good old fashioned Microsoft development model. Miguel told you he wanted to see GNOME 4.0 built on .NET and by god they are going to make it happen. There will be no innovation, no difference, no freedom – just slavishly copying Microsoft.

KDE peeps you are targeted in those slides too – so don’t get too comfortable pointing fingers and laughing. You can bet your bottom dollar Team Mono will be knocking on your door ever louder, ever persistant, just like they have been doing in the GNOME world.

So, all that claptrap about Banshee being the better player has been proven false. Just like the “space saving” and “Rhythmbox doesn’t scale” fallacies. At least in this case, there is a token effort by Mr. Shields to link to the Rhythmbox page. We take what small victories we can.

Here is a thread on the Rhythmbox development mailing list where they discuss being replaced, including the developer’s thoughts:

> Is it true that the ubuntu team wants to replace rhythmbox with banshee 
> on 9.10 version?
> I love your product and i don’t understand the motivations, could you 
> explain me if any?
> Has Banshee some features than Rhytm has not? Something thant you 
> couldn’t add quickly to your player before the 9.10 release?

This is true.  I can’t find any real information about the motivations behind
it.  The outcome of the decision process (whatever it was, I wasn’t involved in
any way and I don’t know how it worked) seems to be that if certain features
are implemented in banshee by some deadline, then banshee will replace
rhythmbox in the default ubuntu install.  There doesn’t appear to be any
consideration for changes made to rhythmbox during that period.

The only solid information I can find is here:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/583933.  This links to a set of bugs that I assume
must all be fixed for the replacement to go ahead.  I can’t predict whether they’re
going to make it.

I don’t have much to say about this issue personally.  I would have liked to
have been involved in the process, and I like to think I would have had some
constructive input, but ultimately it’s ubuntu’s decision.  They should ship
whatever software they feel best satisfies the goals of the ubuntu desktop.

Well, I can tell you the motivations behind it. “Get mono in there”. That’s it. Period. Now the justifications for this have moved among:

1. Rhythmbox is bigger-on-CD than Banshee would be.
2. Rhythmbox development has stopped.
3. Rhythmbox doesn’t scale
4. Banshee is wanted / Rhythmbox  isn’t wanted by the users
5. Banshee is the better application

All of which are clear lies, with the exception of #5, which is purely subjective.

It seems we are settling on the “best-of-breed” as the ultimate justification. This is a good stop if you are on Team Mono, because you can call any application the “best-of-breed” so long as you are the one that gets to decide what factors make it the “best-of-breed”.

I always chuckle around #4; Team Mono is forever chanting “pragmatism” and how “the user doesn’t care about freedom or principles”.  Yet it’s quite clear that the overwhelming majority of users do not want Banshee. So, do the users matter or not? It seems to me that how much they matter is in direct proportion to how much they support you on any specific issue.

Seriously though

If you have the technical bent, show some love to Rhythmbox and take a look at the Developers page. There is a thing called “gnome-love” bugs that are specifically identified as being suitable for newcomers to the project:

Marking a bug with this keyword means that you’re willing to help someone fix the bug, or that it should be fixable by a beginner without any help. This should ONLY be set by a maintainer or people familiar with the code base, and ONLY when it looks like a project suitable for a new developer looking for a task.

There are currently 32 bugs on the list. Maybe there’s one you can take on? Maybe there’s one I can take on?

Let’s say, just for the sake of argument that the standard bits are perfectly safe. I know there still a couple of concerns there, but put them aside for this point.

In Special

One of the things we are hearing is that mono will be clearly split into “standard” and “non-standard” bits. That’s great. Another thing we are being told about the non-standard bits is that ”nobody cares about those – they aren’t used for the apps people moan about.”

But: Banshee needs System.Data and SQLite. F-Spot needs System.Data and SQLite. I believe both of these use ADO.Net, and are in the “non-standard” bits camp.

I would suggest that Banshee and F-Spot are very much “apps people moan about.” (The other two that are hot are Tomboy and Gnome Do, which look alright in this area based on my understanding.)

In General

The problem here I’m seeing is two-fold:

1. The Community Promise has made parts of mono safer. That’s great.
2. Some people might not be clear that this is not a blanket over all mono. That’s not so great.

If mono proponents want mono critics to acknowledge the Community Promise is a positive step, they need to be honest about its limitations.

If applications are using non-standard bits of mono, it would not be honest to promote them under the argument that “well, everyone knows mono is safe now.”

I want to make this point strongly because we have lots of email showing that Microsoft internally, and a high levels, discussed a strategy along the lines of only standardizing enough of .NET to make it look good, but not enough to make it actually useful.

If major mono-based applications – the ones people are pushing to get into distributions by default – rely on these non-standard bits, then the arguments for them are not much affected by the Community Promise and they need to remain optional.