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.

Mono apologists love this one! Basically it boils down to “software patents suck because your code might infringe anyone’s patent, so every project is just as risky as mono, so don’t sweat us over patents.” Now, like all really good propaganda, this has a some core of truth: it is indeed true that software patents suck.

I despise it because not only is it dishonest, but because how easily it is tossed around by mono apologists.

I guess it’s because the argument starts of with some truth – explaining how idiotic the software patent system is in the United States – that people just disengage their brain, nod along, and agree with the entire argument.

Of all software projects, not all are equally likely to violate patents.

Both of these statements are true:

1. Project A, a large open source networking project may infringe on one or more Microsoft patents
2. Project B, a small open source ping implementation may infringe on one or more Microsoft patents

Microsoft has an Open Specification Promise on a wide swath of technologies that they promise not to sue anyone over, so long as you don’t sue them first. Implementing parts of .NET that are not part of the standard may infringe on Microsoft patents, because Microsoft was careful to limit how much of .NET they gave to the standards body. Internal emails from Microsoft show a careful deliberation over how much of .NET to standardize, and how much to make sure was protect by patents, specifically mentioning Linux and preventing the commoditization of the .NET platform.

This is true in a more general sense as well. Any software project covering a common technology like ping or telnet is much less likely to run into patent issues for many reasons: length of time technology has existed, the number of similar projects having worked in the same area without patent issues, etc.

Of all possible patent holders, not all present the same risk in likelihood of relevant patents

Both of these statements are true:

1. Mono may infringe on one or more Microsoft patents
2. Mono may infringe on one or more Dunk the Clown, Inc. patents

It is more likely that mono infringes on Microsoft patents, considering Dunk the Clown, Inc. is not the that has over 150 patents referencing the .NET framework. It is unlikely that any of Dunk the Clown, Inc. patents apply to mono.

Of those patent holders that do hold relevant patents, not all present the same risk of enforcement

Both of these statements are true:

1. Mono may infringe on one or more Microsoft patents
2. Mono may infringe on one or more Red Hat patents

It is more likely that Microsoft will attempt to use its patents against the mono project, than it is that RedHat will. Sure, Red Hat might go crazy insane and declare some sort of war on mono. Also, I might get invited over to Scarlet Johansson’s place for drinks and a night of passionate lovemaking tonight. /brb

Of those patents that are enforced, not all are as likely to be valid

Both of the statements are true:

1. Mono may infringe some random “one-click-shopping” patent, and it turns out that patent is valid in a court of law.
2. Mono may infringe some Microsoft patent, and it turns out that patent is valid in a court of law.

There are some things you can do to defend yourself if someone goes after you for patent violation. You can show prior art, for example. However, .NET is unquestionably a Microsoft technology. It is not unlikely that Microsoft holds valid patents covering .NET technology. While Microsoft certainly holds many patents that are invalid for a host of reasons, it is foolish to think that they don’t have some valid patents, especially on a technology they created!

Of those patents enforced and upheld, not all are as easy to workaround

Both of these statements are true:

1. Mono could be found infringing a minor Microsoft patent, easily worked around.
2. Mono could be found infringing a major Microsoft patent, required substantial changes.

I don’t know if you could say which of the two is more likely, but it is true that we know Microsoft carefully considered what to keep out of the standard, and discussed preventing the commoditization of .NET. It is not unreasonable to assume that patents underlying important concepts that would require substantial changes protect those areas that Microsoft considers crucial to keep proprietary.

Summary

I would love to think this would put this argument to rest, but I know it won’t. The truth of this argument is that although all projects do face some risks, all projects do not face the same risks. Anyway, at least next time Team Mono whips this one out you’ll be ready.

2009-Jul-6 Update: Upon personal request from the author I have removed the cached copies, and am just quoting the body of the article here, without links and personal identification.
What follows quoted is the original text of the author:

Fuck you, Richard Stallman and other GNU/Trolls
Published by admin on June 28, 2009 in Uncategorized
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This is a response to Richard Stallman’s article http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono

Disclosure: This rant doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that I intern at Microsoft and that I am writing an extension to the MonoDevelop project. It is a rant to express my core belief that freedom is open to interpretation. I believe viral copyleft licenses like GPL are evil, and I believe that software patents are more evil. While I’m new to the mono project, it aligns perfectly with my vision that they key for great programs is interoperability and ease of development.

Why am I writing this? I feel hurt when fear mongering assholes focus so much energy on bringing things down rather than really constructing anything. You never see any real open source developer complain, that’s because they’re too busy writing awesome code.

On Patents and the FUD:

* There are two kinds of open source users in the world – People who love open source, and people who hate microsoft and proprietary software. I’m part of the first, which one are you?
* I know NOTHING about patent law and how dangerous having these applications on your machine can be. In other words, I know as much as you do about all of this
* Most open source softwares replicate some features which may be patented. Do you think there won’t be patent issues over Openoffice or Gimp which replicate commercial software’s functionality.
* A mentor of mine told me that patents are to prevent companies from getting sued, not to sue companies.
* You don’t want to keep a free implementation of a language on your machine, but you are okay with downloading off bittorrent and aren’t worried about getting sued.
* GNote represents the limit of FUD to me. Tomboy is awesome and Sandy Armstrong doubly so.
* I’m no expert on patents, but “There might be risk” sounds just like “There might not be risk”. At the end the question is whether it’s finally worth it.
* Please read Jo Shield’s article if my intellectually devoid rant hasn’t convinced you.
* Roy Schestowitz (of boycottnovell.com) is a dick. Period. I would never respect anyone who spends more effort spreading fear and bringing things down rather than contributing anything significant.

On Mono and C#:

* Have a look at gnome-do, which runs on mono(http://do.davebsd.com). That thing you’re feeling when you open the link is pure undiluted lust lust.
* Firefox has 80,000 lines of code. The MonoDevelop project has 800,000 lines. The Mono project (just mono) has 8 fucking million lines, let’s not forget the debugger, compiler and gtk# bindings. (ohloh.net)
* I have met the nicest and most helpful people I know on the Mono project. Even the most busy and experienced of devs (hello mhutch and lluis!) take time off to help (and spoonfeed) me whenever I need.
* C# is plain awesome. I used to think it was bloated and MS specific  (just like most of you), but an awesome standard library, coupled with type safety, innovative features and tight IDE integration make it a killer platform for development.
* I could go on about how blissful an experience it is to write code in a full featured, statically typed language. But you’re too full of propoganda to listen.

My thoughts on the GPL:

* “Freedom or Death” is not freedom. Wikipedia defines freedom as “Freedom is the right to act according to ones will without being held up by the power of others.” How am I even remotely free if I *have* to license all my code under GPL if I use GPLed libraries? Isn’t the right for a person to release liberal or proprietary software come under his/her freedom too as long as it’s not harming anyone?
* I want the freedom to use the BSD or MIT license in my projects. I’m preventing from even referencing GPL libraries (not LGPL) while I’m trying to make open source software available. How is this fair?
* People need proprietary software for their livelihood. Yes dual licensing or selling GPLed code is possible – but maybe not completely feasible. A developer hoping to make a living from small games cannot use GPLed libraries because that would violate the law.
* If Richard Stallman had to make a living from writing software rather than whatever he does, I’m curious how much of his code he’d really open-source.
* I believe that projects can open source re-usable components (google => protocol buffers, facebook => thrift, microsoft => asp.net/mvc).
* I will never shun anything because it’s proprietary licensing.
* While I prefer open source projects like everyone because you can take a look at the inner working, there are only nine projects who’s sources I have truly looked into with good depth.
* My idea of freedom includes the freedom to make it proprietary. It’s your code, you can do what you want with it. I prefer releasing under MIT/X11 license and that’s my choice.
* While the GPL is all about choice, it doesn’t give me any real choice. I *have* no choice
* Ironically, mono is largely GPL/LGPL as well.

My thoughts on interop and Dev productivity:

* Stop thinking about Microsoft for a second. They aren’t going away anywhere and no amount of software hippies are going to stop them.
* Open source isn’t going anywhere either. Nowhere but above and ahead.
* The mono project allows you to rapidly develop applications using a standard statically typed language and be assured of it being cross-platform.

Yes, I’ve written a little bit of code and put it out there. My new project attempts to bring Mylyn’s functionality to MonoDevelop and so far it’s pretty okay. And yes, I am an ardent vi user.

Update:

Some very nice person wrote out an entire response to my post, pointing out where I’m wrong. You can find it here. I am grateful as he/she clarified that Open Source is different from Free Software. For some reason, I can’t seem to read that much text without it being punctuated by images or code blocks.

Anyways, I repsonded and will cross-post here (man I haven’t typed this much plaintext in a while)

Thank you for englightening me. I have not the patience or the caliber to respond, and so I will concede defeat.

I have nothing to say. I honestly never did. I’m an obscure Indian student, and like writing some code now and then, playing my guitar and enjoying my college years.

Unfortunately I’m a nice person who believes in the kindness of humanity. I am never worried about patents or companies or FUD. This was nonsense to me a few months ago.

I too thought the Mono project was something bad and evil like everyone else. There was one project which I tried to hack on and contribute and really liked the Mono stack.

Unlike most of the philosophies of the GNU project, I don’t say that some things are right and some things are wrong. I feel everything is right, some are more right than the others.

What hurts me is that the linux community is at war from the inside over a core project that’s so old and mature, it’s not going to go away. Nobody wants a compromise, and flames fly left and right.

If you really like a project and want to contribute in the future to it, and someone like rms, who everyone looks up to tries to cripple it by flagging it as dangerous. Then you’ll know how I feel, let alone the people who *really* contribute to the project.

Please realize that beneath all this patent nonsense, there are *real people* who are caring enough to passionately contribute. Miguel de Icaza has been writing open source code before I even knew what computer was, and he’s still ready to answer any questions I have on IRC.

This passion to help the rest of the world without getting anything back, is almost like philanthrophy. You see it in every project, you see it in Wikipedia, you see it when people get together to work on a cause bigger than themselves.

That, to me is the spirit of Open Source – not a License or a set of rules.

Unfortunately I can’t give you answers, world peace, a solution to this whole patent issue, give rms a girlfriend (or give rms a mrs.).

Luckily, I have the next best thing for you. Here’s metallica’s “creeping death”:

Here we have a … gentleman … (a Microsoft intern and MonoDevelop contributor, in fact) expressing his “personal opinion”. Oh my, how droll! Let’s see what this bastion of rational thinking and considered opinion offers:

I believe viral copyleft licenses like GPL are evil, and I believe that software patents are more evil.

Alright! First off, my man you are an intern at a company renowned for not only using software patents aggressively, but also continues to lobby countries that do not have US-style software patents to get on board with the patent program. By your own arguments, you are working for an evil company. You’re not off to a good start, scooter.

I got a considerable bit of email from people carefully pointing out all the tiny little crevices I’m wrong in.

News flash, sparky: they aren’t “tiny little crevices”. You are piloting the Trieste straight to the floor of the Mariana Trench of Ignorance.

But wait! Here lies a noble soul:

I understand what free software and open source is and was going to use part of my first paycheck to get a student membership into the FSF.

I doubt you did understand, nor do you now, but I bet you’ve learned something. I don’t understand exactly what this means, though? You were going to get a membership? Is that before you realized that the GPL was “evil”? I mean, where you just going to join the FSF so you could whip out your member card and pretend you were some sort of hip “Open Source Dudez”? Because the FSF has pretty much always stood for the same things. GPL being one of them. So were you joining an organization you didn’t really understand, or is this something that you have recently changed your mind on, now that Stallman has laid out an entirely rational argument?

Oh, and there’s this:

People take this as an attack on the GPL or RMS.

Well, in fairness you did start off originally with “Fuck you, Richard Stallman”. It wasn’t really much of a stretch to take that as an attack. Oh, and the bit about the GPL being “evil”. A bit attack-ishy, that, as well.

But let’s get that good old-fashion reasoning! Let’s see why the GPL is “evil”:

2. I wanted to use some technology for a startup with me and my friends but that would be invalidated in terms of the license.

So, you wanted to take someone else’s hard work and profit from it, and not have to recompense them or the community that provided it. Well, guess what, the GPL prevents that – it’s sort of one of the major points of the GPL. You basically want to steal from the original programmer. In this situation there was something “evil”, but it was not the GPL. You’ll fit right in at Microsoft!

A gross ignorance of Free Software, Open Source and GPL permeates virtually every sentence of the blog, and The Mad Hatter handles the rebuttal quite well, but let’s take look at one more note of interest:

While I’m new to the mono project, it aligns perfectly with my vision that they key for great programs is interoperability and ease of development.

This is probably a lot truer than he or the mono project realizes. Time and time again, the arguments of “practicality” and “don’t concern yourself with politics” and “I’m not going to worry about that” roll off the tongues of the mono apologist. There are other important considerations beyond “interoperability” and “ease of development”.

More on that later!

Say you go into a convenience store and you shove a .357 Magnum in the guy’s face and demand his money. You have used a firearm aggressively. It doesn’t really matter that you didn’t pull the trigger – it is still armed robery.

So, when Microsoft command says things like:

We should look at even patenting the things we do add to help Office.

- Bill Gates, 1998

[On being told of the free Star Office]
An interesting development…
At some point we will have to consider the patents they violate.

- Bill Gates, 1998

Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open. Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

- Bill Gates, 1999

What do we want in cameras for metadata and UI? What do we want relative to device discovery? (hopefully patented stuff).

- Steve Ballmer, 2003

We’ve had an issue, a problem that we’ve had to confront, which is because of the way the GPL works, and because open-source Linux does not come from a company — Linux comes from the community — the fact that that product uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders.

- Steve Ballmer, 2006

If a customer says, Look, do we have liability for the use of your patented work? Essentially, If you’re using non-SUSE Linux, then Id say the answer is yes…I suspect that [customers] will take that issue up with their distributor. [Or if customers are considering doing a direct download of a non-SUSE Linux version] theyll think twice about that”

- Steve Ballmer, 2006

If anybody thinks open-source alternatives are free, I guess as they say, you can see me after class. [...] I will tell you that in any comparison that you would do of Windows with Linux, which is an open-source alternative, we will prove to you that when it comes to total cost of ownership our stuff is more economical, whether it’s the other patent-licensing costs that you might have to pay to use open-source software, which is kind of a big unknown right now [...]

- Steve Ballmer, 2007

Then that is Microsoft using patents aggressively.

I’m not sure why some people want to act like just because Microsoft hasn’t done the worst thing possible it means they aren’t doing anything bad at all – but you’ll see this defense a lot from mono apologists (and Microsoft apologists in general, for that matter.)

Here’s the thing about that:

I didn’t go out and ask for mono or Moonlight; I didn’t order out to get Microsoft stuffing all up in my GNU/Linux turkey.

In fact, everything was pretty much just fine until you showed up knocking at my distribution’s door, covered in the offal of the sacrifice of integrity, wiped a bit of Ballmer’s love juices off your chin and said: “Right then, give us a kiss.”

Oh-  and despite being told to go away time and time again, you just keep knocking.

Mono apologists don’t get to pretend that people being wary or critical are acting irrationally. To be cautious concerning Microsoft not paranoia, rather it is understandable, indeed crucial. It is 100% the apologist’s burden to explain and convince the community why they should buy what you are selling.

That you’ve been at it for ~9 years now and people still aren’t buying is your failure – and speaks to the value of the wares you are peddling.