Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

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Monday 6 April 2009 15:39, by Rahul Sundaram :: #

For Fedora, we had to remove tomboy from the live cd due to lack of space. Unfortunately, Gnote probably won't be a good replacement since it would pull in the gtkmm, boost and other dependencies. Have you considered Vala or PyGTK instead?

Monday 6 April 2009 15:57, by Chris Lord :: site :: #

Cool stuff! It'd be even cooler if you uploaded some screenshots somewhere, for us lazy people...

Monday 6 April 2009 16:01, by G :: #

Kickass, well done, and thank you! Next, please port MonoDevelop. ;)

Monday 6 April 2009 16:01, by hub :: #

@rahul: no to both quesitons. PyGTK is a big runtime too. I'm trying to save space.

@chris: take a screenshot of Tomboy :-) There shouldn't be any difference.

Monday 6 April 2009 16:32, by Rahul Sundaram :: #

Well yes, PyGTK might be big (I doubt it is much bigger than gtkmm, boost and other dependencies) but it has other advantages such as already being available by default in most live cds and lots of other applications are using it already. Applications using gtkmm are relatively rare (inkscape being a notable exception) and thus usually not in the livecd's

Monday 6 April 2009 16:44, by schmichael :: site :: #

Wait... this wasn't a joke? Why do people hate Mono? Its exceedingly free and of excellent quality. Who cares if you don't like Novell? You don't have to send them a dime to use Mono.

Monday 6 April 2009 17:14, by Vadim P. :: #

@schmichael: where are you thinking? Who else besides Novell makes Mono? Who else besides Microsoft makes .NET and advances C#?

I don't care about the ethnics of those two corporations in this case, I care that 2 groups are having control of over 90% of the whole thing. I feel much safer it if was not such a monopolized effort - at least it would guarantee a more safer future. For one, there are zero such worries when using C, to bring my point (no the point is not to compare syntatic differences of C and C#).

Monday 6 April 2009 17:21, by uastasi :: #

Made a PKGBUILD for ArchLinux -> aur.archlinux.org/package... , I'll go testing asap.
Greetings

Monday 6 April 2009 17:25, by Andreas Nilsson :: site :: #

Since you're a Abiword developer, any plans to turn this into a word processor rather than a note taking app?
I already have a cool, easy creation, instant save note taking app, but I'm still missing a word processor one.

Monday 6 April 2009 17:31, by Vadim P. :: #

Doesn't compile on Ubuntu Intrepid. Boost too old? paste.pocoo.org/show/1113...

Monday 6 April 2009 18:57, by David :: #

I'm having trouble getting this to compile. These are the compiler errors:

notebooks/notebooknoteaddin.cpp: In member function ‘void gnote::notebooks::NotebookNoteAddin::update_menu()’:
notebooks/notebooknoteaddin.cpp:168:36: error: expected primary-expression before ‘*’ token
notebooks/notebooknoteaddin.cpp:168:38: error: ‘oldItem’ was not declared in this scope
notebooks/notebooknoteaddin.cpp:168:59: error: ‘BOOST_REVERSE_FOREACH’ was not declared in this scope
notebooks/notebooknoteaddin.cpp:168:61: error: expected `;' before ‘{’ token
make[2]: *** [notebooknoteaddin.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

Monday 6 April 2009 19:04, by hub :: #

@vadim: yes, boost is too old. I'm working on removing this: I was too eager and cut corners, and I didn't check which version BOOST_FOREACH appeared.

@rahul: FWIW, gnome-system-monitor already depends on gtkmm. As for boost, at runtime, boost::filesystem is only 100KB. boost::regexp is 1MB. Maybe it is time to split the boost runtime package...

@schmichael: you see evil where there is none.

Monday 6 April 2009 19:05, by hub :: #

@David: same problem. Being worked on, see above.

Monday 6 April 2009 20:22, by Vadim P. :: #

Great, thanks. Your blog doesn't have an email subscription, mind making a new release with that fixed? Kind of hard to check up on.

Monday 6 April 2009 20:24, by hub :: #

@Vadim: yes there will be a new release. I don't overwrite release. Never.

Tuesday 7 April 2009 03:31, by guest :: #

@schmichael: freedom aside, gnote starts up a lot faster than tomboy. even this is a good reason to continue development of gnote.

@hub: how do you intend to sync changes from tomboy to gnote? once every stable release of tomboy or sth like that?

Tuesday 7 April 2009 23:23, by Miguel de Icaza :: #

Vadim, You might not be familiar with how open source work, but no single company can "control" code that has been open sourced.

Mono is open source, you can take its code and shape it, move it and turn it into anything you want. You can fork it today and call it whatever it is that you want to call it. For research, education or commercial uses.

This in fact has been done plenty of times. The C# compiler is frequently forked by language researchers or by people embedding the code as a REPL in their applications. The class libraries are routinely copy/pasted in other applications when running on things like the Compact Framework (we use MIT X11 for those) and chunks of our code have ended up everywhere, including Google's GData libraries.

As for direction, you are also mistaken, Mono like any other open source project takes direction from members in the community. If we only had Novell interest's in mind we would not support half of the platforms that Mono supports and we would not merge a lot of the code that is contributed as it has no benefit for Novell as a company or Novell's business plans. We integrate those because Mono, first and foremost is an open source project.

We do apply the same common sense that is applied in every other open source effort: we do not merge just about any patch, we carefully review the patches, we make sure that it does not affect existing applications, we try to create code that is backwards compatible and so on.

But if anyone happens to disagree violently with it, they could just take the code and run with it. We in the Mono project believe that we need to strike a balance between taking external contributions and keeping the core consistent.

That being said, if you rather run C++ code, more power to you. But the statements about "control" are incorrect.

Wednesday 8 April 2009 01:51, by Just a reader :: #

> If we only had Novell interest's in mind
No Miguel, of course you also have Microsoft interest's in mind. After all that's why they're paying you some nice millions, isn't it?

Wednesday 8 April 2009 06:37, by Flavio :: site :: #

@Miguel
"Mono is open source, you can take its code and shape it, move it and turn it into anything you want. You can fork it today and call it whatever it is that you want to call it. For research, education or commercial uses."

That's what Hub just did with Tomboy. The power of open source!
Maybe Hub's and Vadim's perception (and many other's too) about Mono is wrong, but how to tell for sure in a software market where the "patent terror" reigns and everyone is scared about using patented mouseclicks and buttons?

Wednesday 8 April 2009 07:42, by Vadim P. :: #

@Miguel: By "controlled by one group", I mean that practically nobody else but Novell are working on it (if that is not so, then the PR could use some clear up). Should Novell stop funding its work, the majority of the work will simply stop. Sure, people will continue, but the efforts would be greatly reduced as working a full day on something vs a few spare hours does yield different results. I've yet to see another company jump into developing the Mono stack seriously too.

Despite all the patches, Mono does seem to be lagging behind the main group who is powering the work on the windows stack of C#.

So to me, it still looks like one kid is trailing ahead with another one trying to catch up. But, I did look at Vala recently, and while it doesn't fit me (yes, similar reason, just one group atm and rather immature at this point + non-compiling example code), I do appreciate the syntatic beauty of C#.

Wednesday 8 April 2009 13:07, by Miguel de Icaza :: #

Vadim, you clearly have not spent any time in the Mono groups as Mono receives contributions from several companies that have driven its direction for years.

Independently of the individual contributors and open source efforts like the database providers for MySQL, SQLite and Postgress these are some companies that contirbute to Mono, these are the ones I can think of from the last year alone that have contributed code and specs:

Mainsoft (mostly web and database work).
Unity3D (JIT, AOT, languages)
Interactive Supercomputing (CLI)
Broadcom, Sicortex and its subsidiaries (MIPS)
IBM (PowerPC and S390 support)
Intel (JIT, class libraries)
RealTime Worlds (SIMD)
Microsoft (test suites for Silverlight)
A handful of gaming companies that want to remain anonymous (JIT, appdomains, classes)

Mainsoft was probably responsible for half of the entire server stack in Mono alone and have 27 developers with SVN commit access for example.

So the only reason you have "yet to see another company jump into developing the Mono stack" is because you just do not know much about the Mono world.

As for your comment about trying to catch up. You also seem to not remember that both GNU and Linux started in this exact same way. There were already established players in the Unix space both for the tools and the kernels and both efforts were created not because there was already a technology, but because we wanted to have an open source implementation of these technologies, even if that meant that we were using worse tools at the time.

Of course, if you just arrived to the open source scene, you do not see things from the perspective that having open source equivalents is important. I have because I have been working on Linux and GNU even before Linux had a working network stack, back in those days there were other more complete systems, but I chose to use Linux and GNU because they were free software products.

Wednesday 8 April 2009 16:05, by gnui :: site :: #

Miguel, don't you and Ballmer got a golf game you're missing?

Wednesday 8 April 2009 17:14, by Paul :: #

I agree with Vadim and others. I do not use Tomboy specifically because it is Mono based. I also like Debian because they do not install Mono by default.

Miguel you can try to push this idea that Mono is not joined at the hip to Microsoft but no one is believing it. No one will ever believe it unless they are being paid to believe it. I don't think you or Novell has ever given 100% assurances (legal guarantees) on future patent issues with Mono on anything other than SUSE which I also wouldn't use.

Do you honestly believe Microsoft will just let everyone migrate to Mono and ditch windows and loose all those server sales without a fight? I'm talking end game here. They will work to ensure you are always many steps behind.

Personally I think Mono is a complete waste of time. If I want to use .NET I use Windows. Their implementation is already massively better than yours and you will be playing catchup forever because they write the standard and they will always release some new thing. I would have to be mentally retarded to recommend Mono to a client.

I think if had you started out with the premise to maybe only implement the C# language alone, without .NET and everything attached to it. Then people would have been more open to it. Patent issues aside. You know building a Linux C# community built on Linux native technologies only.

Anyways to each his own :)

Wednesday 8 April 2009 20:02, by Rex :: #

@Miguel -- The problem is in the patents. When Microsoft signs, in blood, that it will not sue anybody implementing or using any of its patents that might be in mono, then I'll give it some consideration. However, given your buddy Balmer's continuing diatribes and hatred for that virus, Linux, I'll steer clear of the obvious traps, like mono.

Frankly, I believe you sold out. So FSCK you.

Wednesday 8 April 2009 20:42, by tomek-k :: #

Miguel et al.,

Face it - there are people who are disgusted by all those Microsoft+Novell attempts to "take over the world" (jeffreystedfast.blogspot.... just to quote one of yours). And in some parts of the world it IS about software patents (US, any one? the recent push for software patents in EU? anybody heard of that?). You all can promise that you won't sue, but hey - we all heard about the TomTom's case! It WAS about Microsoft's software patents (among other patents). So cut that bullshit about "not suing open source for Microsoft's software patents infringement" in .NET/Silverlight - they sued about some trivial algorithms in FAT so they are likely to sue about their very complex media codecs if someone refuses to pay royalties for distributing Moonlight...

Don't get me wrong - I'm totally aware that it's just a business for your company (Novell, Xandros, Microsoft, you name it), and business is all about earning money, and so on... But your money is your problem, not ours. Just don't expect all people from outside your company to be concerned about your company's money, about your company's existence even. You're not the center of the universe, and will never be.

Wednesday 8 April 2009 21:07, by jaebird :: #

How about a little perspective. I find it disingenuous that people single out mono when it comes to sw patents. We all know the patent system is broke. Yet we live in fear of it. There are so many ridiculous sw patents out there you simply cannot write anything non-trivial and be absolutely sure you have not violated patents. Perhaps there are "valid" patents that MS owns with regards to .NET that are not covered under "royalty-free". And just because they are "valid" doesn't mean that there isn't prior art or a way around them. But, look at it another way, if MS has violated someone else's patent in .NET, who is going to be sued first (hint: deeper pockets)?

So anyone using any framework to do their development has the potential to be a patent infringer. From a technical standpoint there should be a lot of prior art (java, delphi, ruby, python, qt, etc). The draw of .net, is that c# and the .net framework put a nice unified dev platform at your fingertips...and no, i'm not talking about visual studio :)

btw: the real "scary" patent parts of .net are windows forms, ado.net and asp.net, none of which we use in our cross-platform application.

I think people should take a look at the mono project and learn about what the real issues are before engaging in a self-righteous attitude that _they_ are not violating patents (how much money would they wager on that). Does that mean MS won't sue? No, but I can get sued by another driver on the highway just the same.

Ok, I'll quit...don't want to sound reverse-self-righteous :)

Jae

PS: I did not get paid to do this post.

Wednesday 8 April 2009 21:42, by Vadim P. :: #

@Miguel de Icaza: OK, thanks for the explanation.

As I've came to Linux when it became usable for the common person and better (ubuntu 7.04), I personally will wait out when Mono is caught up too (for app development. As a user, I'd jump the brige when something with equal functionality but better speed & runtime size comes along ie this). But it is more assuring to see that it has a more secure future than I originally thought.

Wednesday 8 April 2009 22:45, by hub :: #

Enough. Comments closed.

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