Checking them logs

For a long time, I would get a bit of traffic now and again from the Wikipedia page on Moonlight, as someone had placed my exceedingly brilliant analysis of 10 Problems with the New Moonlight Covenant.

Today I was looking through the logs and it struck me I haven’t seen any Wikipedia traffic of late, so on a lark I went to the site and saw someone had (anonymously of course), removed the link to my site, with the following “explanation”:

The Source and BoycottNovell are not trustworthy “news” sites and are known to be anti-Mono/anti-Novell propagandists.)

Note that same users edit history; every edit (excluding a handful back in 2008) is a .NET/Mono-related topic and in every case that I bothered to look at are all non-factual and (in wiki-speak) non-NPOV edits.

Especially devious is how this individual edits articles to downplay patent concerns for Mono, while emphasizing the issue of patents for Portable.NET.

Gotta let people know where they can get that “IP peace of mind” I guess.

umad?

This is just more of the same from Team Apologista. I’ve said multiple times that the number one thing that soured me personally on Mono was the dishonesty of its promoters – the more I learned about Mono and Moonlight the more offensive I found their arguments and actions.

It’s one thing to betray the community and work up an end-run around the GPL. It’s one thing to turn on Free Software and carry Microsoft’s water. It’s a whole ‘nother thing to be devious and deceitful about it. (Although I’d argue you need the qualities in the last bit to do the actions in the first two bits.)

Lying, personally attacking  and attempting to simply silence critics are both so rampant among Mono Apologists – and so rarely condemned or even corrected – it’s easy to think such behavior is not only approved but encouraged.

An interesting note

As an aside, this is another nice example of the favorite standby of Team Apologista: the ad hominem. Some people absolutely adore trying to discredit the message by attacking the messenger. It’s a tactic with a long and proud history, so I guess they are just going with what they feel has the best chance of success.

Because I guarantee you that addressing the argument is scary as hell to them.

Awhile back I saw this sort of thing play out much more candidly than usual on Reddit: read if you want to see someone lead off the attack ad hominem, when corrected (by directhex!) shrug it off by asserting “they are all the same as far as I am concerned”, and then finally admitting that the exact same information from someone else would be acceptable.

It doesn’t work like that people. Facts are facts, regardless of where they come from. And if you reject facts simply because you don’t like who is delivering them that is a personal failing on your part.

For the record

I’ve never edited any Wikipedia article related to Mono or Moonlight. I didn’t reference my site from the article, have no idea who did, don’t care to know who did, and don’t care if the reference is restored or not.

Here is my favorite bit from RMS:

RMS: You shouldn’t write software to use .NET. No exceptions.

The basic point is that Microsoft has patents over features in .NET, and its patent promise regarding free software implementations of those is inadequate. It may someday attack the free implementations of these features.

This is no reason not to write and distribute free implementations such as Mono and DotGNU. But we have to keep in mind that using and distributing these programs might become dangerous in certain countries. Therefore, we should minimize our dependence on them – we should not write programs that use those features.

Mono implements them, so if you develop software on Mono, you are liable to use those features without thinking about the issue. It is probably the same with DotGNU, except that I don’t know whether DotGNU has these features yet.

The way to avoid this danger is not to write programs in C#. If you already have a program in C#, by all means use a free platform to run it. But don’t increase your exposure to the danger – don’t write additional code in C#, and don’t encourage people to make more use of C# programs. We need to guide our community away from dependence on an interface we know Microsoft is in a position to attack.

This perfectly illustrates the difference in approach from Team Apologista.

Consider:

Promises Promises

Team Apologista refuses to honestly acknowledge that the patent promise covering .NET is insufficient. In fact, a favorite tactic of Mono Apologists is to mention some other technology (usually AJAX or FTP) and then pretend the Mono situation is similar to AJAX, and so if one is opposed to the former, they must also oppose the latter, or are ignorant/hypocritical/whatever.

The truth of the matter is that .NET is NOT under the same “promise” that these other technologies are, so this ruse is dishonest inaccurate. Shockingly, Mono apologists continue to use this faulty “defense”.

Additionally, much of .NET (and corresponding portions of Mono) are NOT covered by any promise whatsoever – and despite Team Apologista’s occasional concession on this point (often with vague promises to “split” Mono into “covered”/non-”covered” portions), I feel it is not unfair to say Team Apologista downplays this distinction.

Furthermore, the covenant covering Moonlight is even more troublesome than that covering the ECMA-approved bits of .NET, yet I do not see a clear difference in promotion or eduction on these issues from Team Apologista. Again, to be polite, “downplaying the problems” is a fair characterization.

RMS points out that “if you develop software on Mono, you are liable to use those features without thinking about the issue.” But I think it’s more than that – I think Team Mono has intentionally obscured the facts to make it more difficult to think about the issue. It goes beyond counting on people being too lazy/uninterested to examine things right into deliberate misinformation.

Dependency Hell

Team Apologista actively promotes Mono/Moonlight for Mono/Moonlight sake, increasing dependence on Mono (and by extension, Microsoft’s goodwill).

The entire path into GNOME for Mono is entirely based around a simple note-taking application! Pure insanity! Even if one accepts the argument that a note-taking application is so important that a desktop suite simply can not do without one, the answer is not to roll up one that requires an otherwise useless and seperate framework to support it, and further not to do away with it immediately once an acceptable replacement exists.

The foolishness, technical idiocy, and blatant transparency of the Tomboy debacle in GNOME combined with the latter retarded arguments that “oh well, now that Mono is in there, might as well bring in even more Mono apps” is clear evidence that something’s rotten in the State of the Art over at Team Apologista HQ, and immediately and conclusively puts to the lie any technical-based argument in support of Mono.

There are many more (thankfully, less sucessful) attempts to increase Mono dependency in GNOME and in major distros. Usually taking the form of simply rolling out yet another implementation of existing application functionality – but this time written in awesome Mono – most of these projects have failed to gain footholds. It doesn’t stop Team Apologista from trying, though. Desktop Search? Need it in Mono! Torrent client? Need it in Mono! Photo editor? Need it in Mono! Media Player? Need it in Mono!

Why the need to re-create everything in Mono?

To go back to RMS’ point: “Don’t increase your exposure to the danger.”

Often it’s something I don’t agree with —  which if I then comment about I am taken to task by Ubuntards who regard the slightest deviation from official dogma as unacceptable — but in this case I’d like to point out a couple of bits of recent Ubuntu news that I actually like:

Ubuntu Assurance

Canonical has a Ubuntu Advantage Assurance program that will “take care of intellectual property (IP) infringement legal claims brought against customers in their use of Ubuntu”.

So long as Mark Shuttleworth sticks to his guns and recognizes Microsofts “IP claims” as “racketeering”, this program is a good thing.

It shows that Canonical is willing to put money on the line that Linux users need not worry about Microsoft’s IP FUD, and stands in stark contrast to Microsoft collaborators like Novell who strike secretive deals and then leverage Microsoft FUD against other Linux distributions.

There is a dangerous side here, because this program is only good so long as it operates without any sort of agreement with Microsoft. I expect we will see Microsoft come after this program from a couple of different angles as Canonical increases its corporate presence.

Out, damn’d F-Spot! Out, I say!

Word on the street is F-Spot is out and Shotwell is in for the next release of Ubuntu.

It’s always been obvious to me that the so-called “best-of-breed” Mono apps were anything but, and it’s nice to see that Team Apologista spin isn’t getting the job done any longer.

It’s always struck me as seventeen kinds of absurd that a simple note-taking application can justify bringing in a huge run-time framework – and the after-the-fact rationaliztion of adding more Mono apps “since we’ve already paid the price” was a PR dance worthy of Team Apologista’s Redmond Puppet Masters.

Of course, Mono infestation is not purely an Ubuntu problem – GNOME has deep shame staining its hands in this matter as well – but because Team Apologista has targeted Ubuntu so hard, it’s significant -and encouraging – to see their efforts fail.

I first caught wind of this from I’Been to Ubuntu:

F-Spot has been voted off the island by developers at UDS this week. The Mono application will be replaced by Shotwell, written in Vala. Since the only other Mono application I see in the default install is Tomboy, would it make sense to conspire to kick Tomboy Notes off the show next week and Mono off the CD the following episode?

I’d like to find the discussion and “official” documentation behind this.

I think there’s that new brain game, gbrainy,  in by default as well?

I’m not as optimistic that if Tomboy were the only app it would lead to Mono removal – after all, Team Apologista used Tomboy as sole justification for Mono inclusion for a long time. 

Furthermore, when you consider the personal vilification of GNote’s originial developer by many of the same people, I think it is quite clear that a certain segment (the majority?) of Mono supporters are not arguing from a rational position.

Instead, I predict they will both resist replacing Tomboy with GNote, as well as continue to attempt to replace existing FLOSS offerings with Mono-encumbered “alternatives” (a la replacing Rhythmbox with Banshee). I also expect the most trivial programs to slide in (like gbrainy) , so Team Apologista can pretend like Mono is a valuable framework.

People see that including an entire framework for the sole purpose of supporting one trivial application (like sticky notes) is ludicrous on its face, so don’t expect Team Apologista to let things get back to that state without a fight.

Let me state up front one of the reasons I hate Twitter is because it is so ill-suited for any real communication. There are a very limited number of things Twitter works well for, but explaining an idea with any nuance is certainly not among them.

I hate to read too much into a tweet because everyone is trying to make a point in so few characters that I’m not sure if the person is aware of problemd and is just ignoring them  out of space considerations, or if they are ignorant of the problems, or they have proposed solutions, or what.

Joe Hewitt Speaks – People Listen

Joe Hewitt – of Firefox and Facebook fame – went on a Twitter rampage, summarized in this TechCrunch story if you want to read more. Here I’ll just focus on a few representative tweets:

Redirect your hatred of Flash to the W3C, whose embarrassingly slow pace forced devs to use a plugin because the standards were so weak.

Also, I am looking at you, developers who bitch whenever a browser offers “non-standard” but innovative APIs.

Browser makers need to go nuts with non-standard APIs and let the W3C standardize later. Waiting for the committee to innovate is suicide.

We’ve already been down this road once. It lead us to websites that wouldn’t work across browsers. I led to those little “Best viewed in:” buttons. It lead to faking user-agent strings. It lead to dozens of plugins to view a single site as designed.

We are still suffering under the fall-out of this approach, albeit to a much lesser degree every year.

I can’t imagine anyone – save proprietary software houses who want to try to take over the web again – advocating a return to this environment.

I want to stress that Mr. Hewitt is not advocating moving forward, he is advocating a return to how we did it in the past.

We begin to see the core of Mr. Hewitt’s thinking:

@ppk Yes, exactly. I’d rather developers had forced users to launch different browsers instead of making watered down x-browser sites.

Basically boils down to “put the burden on the user”. I couldn’t disagree more strongly with this way of thinking. As a Linux user, I know that the odds are “launch a different browser” will turn into ”just run IE in Windows”, and – poof – we are back in 1998.

Even if you accept that Mr. Hewitt has identified a real problem (“Standardization moves so slow it hinders innovation”), I do not think he has identified a real solution (“Let’s go back to how we used to do it.”)

There may indeed be problems with the W3C et al. and how long it takes to get standards out – no small amount of which is due to corporations gaming the standardization process by the way - but I can not accept that the proper answer is to abolish or ignore standards.

A better solution might be for standards bodies to speed up delivery of standard. Or, for corporations to quit hamstringing the decision making process. Or, for corporations to stop trying to inject proprietary technology all over a standard. Or, for standards to be released incrementally. Or, a combination of the above and probably a dozen other things I haven’t even thought of.

I hope though, that a careful consideration of Mr. Hewitt’s tweets reveals a “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” mentality that would nullify all progress we have made for standards acceptance on the web and return us to the dark days of the Browser Wars.

It is in this context that Mr. Hewitt made one additional tweet:

If CLI was the ECMA standard baked into browsers instead of ECMAScript we’d have a much more flexible web: http://bit.ly/sLILI

Miguel de Icaza Speaks – Microsoft Smiles

You don’t even have to read his blog entry to know how Mr. de Icaza reacted.

Recall Mr. de Icaza’s earlier lament:

I still believe that Microsoft lost a great opportunity of having .NET become the universal runtime of the net, and they could still have the best implementation.

Well, dry your tears for Ballmer, Miguel, because here’s a way you can give Microsoft back a “great opportunity”: stick Microsoft .NET inside Firefox!

I am absolutely fascinated by the idea and I only regret not having come up with it. We have been too focused on the Moonlight-as-a-plugin to take a step back and think in more general terms: how can we use the ECMA CIL engine for *all* applications without a browser plugin.

[...]

The only question is what browser to target first Firefox or Chrome.

(Just in case you didn’t know, “ECMA CIL” is originally “MSIL” as in “Microsoft Intermediate Language”, terminology still in quite popular use.)

Seeing the future

This entire situation is quite illustrative in one sense, because it yet another example of Team Apologista’s modus operandi:

Ignore any existing similar technology in favor of the Microsoft offering. Just like Mono rejects efforts like Vala and Java in favor of implementing patent encumbered Microsoft technology, CIL-in-a-browser rejects Google’s NaCl and Mozilla’s XUL.

People are certainly free to reinvent the wheel, it’s just laughable that Team Apologista insists on always doing it, and always doing it with Microsoft technology.

Expand Microsoft lock-in. This is part of the “lock-in” problem: generally speaking, Microsoft technology is designed to work as smooth as possible with other Microsoft technology, and as difficult as possible with non-Microsoft technology. This means that once you start down the road of using Microsoft technology it becomes ever more difficult to step outside of that ecosystem.

Thus, Team Apologista must constantly replace other parts of the development ecosystem with the Microsoft solution. If you learn a Microsoft language (C#), you can’t be using a non-Microsoft language in your browser – have to get C# in there. And that means implementing .NET in your browser. So it goes.

Move from Opt-in to Opt-out to No-opt. Everyone in the world who deals with telemarker calls or shovelware on new (Windows) computers (or uses Facebook and cares about privacy) knows that “Opt-In” is far more preferrable to the user than “Opt Out”.

So, the defense that “if the user doesn’t want Mono they can just remove it” is bogus from the start – “Opt Out” is always the defense offered by those peddling things no one wants. It becomes more bogus when non-Mono apps are replaced by Mono apps, and it explodes in a mushroom cloud of nuclear bogosity when you start sticking it in their browser.

Miguel de Icaza has proven over the past decade from day one that he intends to make .NET ubiquitious – if he gets his way it will be a crucial component of your desktop, your application choices, and even your web browsing experience.

UT: Richard M. Stallman had criticized Miguel de Icaza for his participation to Open Source Lab which has been founded by Microsoft. What do you think about that? And in the context of this subject how do you evaluate Mono Project.

MZ: Miguel and I have met, but I don’t know him well enough to comment on his motivation for doing this work. I don’t know that Richard does either. I will say that I think it’s shameful when members of our community are publicly attacked in this way, rather than opening a dialog to discuss the problem and its resolution.

With regard to Mono, I think it is a valuable piece of free software for us to have. However, there are risks involved in choosing the .NET platform to develop free software, because it is under the ultimate control of Microsoft. Microsoft could take advantage of this to attack free software in various ways. This would be a logical act of self-preservation, and consistent with their previous actions and statements of intent.

Paragraph the First

I’ll overlook the first paragraph, mainly because I don’t feel like opening that can of wormy bullshit again.

Paragraph the Second

I am quite surprised to see that - excepting the first sentence - Mr. Zimmerman and I are in perfect agreement here.

There are risks in choosing the .NET platform to develop free software. And I am pleased that Mr. Zimmerman realizes that is exactly what Mono is: the .NET platform (albeit a gimped and tail-lights chasing stepchild implementation).

I also greatly appreciate Mr. Zimmerman’s points :

• Microsoft is in “ultimate control” (despite Team Apologista’s desperate protestations)
• Microsoft has multiple ways to wield .NET offensively
• It would be logical for them to do so
• they have acted similarly in the past
• they have said they would act similarly the future.

Raising questions

All of which raises some interesting questions … which only a preternaturally insightful commentator such as myself could dare answer:

Q: Will Team Apologista now attack Mr. Zimmerman for being a “zealot”?

A: No. They may say more context is needed, though.

Q: Will Team Apologista acknowledge any of Mr. Zimmerman’s points as being valid?

A. No. Again, more context is a good go-to here.

Q: Will Team Apologista call the exact same points made by someone else “hate-filled”, “paranoid”, “zealotry”, or “poo-poo-doo-doo head-y”?

A: Yes, yes they will. Surprisingly, there will be no requests for more context at this juncture.

And of course there’s one major question:

Q: If Microsoft is in ultimate control of a platform that presents risks and is recognized as a logical vector for them to attack as they have in the past and said they will in the future, why the hell are you promoting it ?

A: …

Sorry, folks, even Your Trusted Author can’t come up with a good answer for that last one.

So I was quite happy to receive an email that contained the following:

[W]hen I read your new note, it almost seemed like you were “celebrating” what happened. Having many people’s passionate work invalidated due to some silly rule is sad – regardless of who it affects – at least for me.

I’m only concerned that you might start writing your work in the “Us vs them” format which is available aplenty elsewhere. All that said, this entire incident reinforces whatever I’ve read about Free Software and hopefully might convince other developers to jump in as well.

This is valid criticism. I take pains to avoid simplistic “us vs. them” ranting, and I could have came off as “celebrating” Apple’s decision because I was being a bit tounge-in-cheek there.

Let me expand my thoughts just a bit and see if I can’t un-tarnish my otherwise sterling track record!

Tough Love

There are two lessons of value that I see in Apple’s move (and the response to it):

1. It exemplifies the faults of a proprietary ecosystem, which us “freetard zealots” continuously point out.
2. It illustrates an amazing amount of hypocrisy in ”Open Source pragmatists”.

The first is so obvious (and acknowledged in the writer’s commentary), that I see no need to belabor the point here.

The second is more of interest  (as I do so love calling out hypocrisy in others, having none in myself), so let’s dive in!

Illustrating Hypocrisy

Restricting Freedom

Why is it acceptable for Apple to strictly limit user freedom and not developer freedom? One needs a very finely honed argument indeed to split that hair!

If you accept that Apple is perfectly within their rights to restrict users – indeed, that it may make good business sense for them to do so – then you must accept that also applies to restricting developers.

Playing the Minority Card

I consistently hear arguments about how “only a tiny minority” of users care about things like Free Software. As if that excuses the obligation to do the right thing.

Now though,the Minority Card is in a different hand. Only a tiny minority of iPhone developers use a non-Apple toolchain. By the same logic, Apple should not have to concern themselves with supporting this small and noisy minority.

Pragmatism over Idealism

Unless you are prepared to make the argument that Apple is intentionally trying to hurt itself, then you must acknowledge Apple thinks it has very good business reasons to restrict “metaplatforms”. Apple is just being pragmatic.

That’s the problem with “being pragmatic” – your “pragmatism” and someone else’s “pragmatism” might not line-up.

Writing code to someone else’s standards

This is the one that is most interesting to me; it is perhaps a bit more subtle than the other points. Consider this often quoted bit from former Microsoft Evangelist James Plamondon:

Every line of code that is written to our standards is a small victory; every line of code that is written to any other standard, is a small defeat. Total victory, for DRG, is the universal adoption of our standards by developers, as this is an important step towards total victory for Microsoft itself: “A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software.”

Team Apologista might not understand this, but Apple does.

If Flash/.NET/Whatever dominates Apple development, then Apple is no longer in charge of their own platform. Adobe is. Or Microsoft. Or Whoever.

Who do you pull for?

It’s a bit like being asked who one is pulling for when two teams you despise are playing. The answer: injuries.

I don’t care that developers for a restricted platform are themselves in turn restricted - seems like sauce for the gander to me – but I do appreciate the inconsistencies the situation brings up, especially among that segment that likes to pay lip service to Open Source.

I see the entire situation as “How dare you do to us developers what we are together doing to the users!” Hey, Mr. Developer, you want Freedom? How about developing for a platform that offers Freedom?