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2008 in Review, Surveying the OS Landscape
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| In the Linux world, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's SUSE Linux
| Enterprise Server continued to dominate the enterprise Linux market place.
| Novell continued its strategy of dancing with the devil by agreeing to take
| up to $100 million of Microsoft's closed-source-derived money in exchange for
| support coupons to give away or sell to its customers. Lower down the Linux
| food chain, Canonical released Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition — codenamed
| Intrepid Ibex — in October. This is available in tandem with its
| longer-supported "Gutsy Gibbon" server OS, released in April.
`----
http://www.serverwatch.com/eur/article.php/3791441
Recent:
Mono 2.0 has been released. So what?
,----[ Quote ]
| As Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza, the head of this project, has been
| blathering on about Mono for years and years, one did not expect that this
| announcement would have any more traction than the grandiose announcements of
| previous releases.
|
| Mono, after all, is a project that tailgates APIs from Microsoft, and its
| development and adoption increasingly makes those who use it open to patent
| infringement claims by Microsoft.
`----
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/21138/1148/
Why Mono and Samba Are Patently Different
,----[ Quote ]
| Samba grew out of a classic hacker's itch. Its creator, Andrew Tridgell,
| wanted to connect his PC to a departmental Sun machine, and knocked up a bit
| of server code for the latter to make that possible. It was only later that
| he discovered – to his amazement – that his program also worked with PCs
| running Windows.
|
| This meant that Samba, running on GNU/Linux, could function as a file and
| printer server for Windows users, which was why it became one of the first
| free software programs to find its way into enterprises, since it was
| effectively a drop-in replacement for more expensive Windows-based solutions.
| In other words, Samba is a free implementation of some protocols used by
| Windows, and was created so that free code could be used instead of
| Microsoft's.
|
| Now consider Mono. Like Samba, it aims to reproduce functionality available
| on the Windows platform, so that people can use free software instead: a
| laudable goal in itself. But the end-result, which depends on Microsoft's
| work, is something that encourages developers to write *yet more* code that
| uses Microsoft's approach. In benighted countries where software can be
| patented, this means that any patents that Microsoft has in the .NET
| framework are like to apply to any code developed with Mono. Like an
| infectious disease, the intellectual monopoly is spread wider.
|
| [...]
|
| This is what makes Mono so dangerous: developers that use this framework are,
| in fact, helping to disperse the poison of Microsoft's intellectual
| monopolies across the free software ecosystem. I'm sure that's not the aim of
| the Mono developers, who doubtless have the best of intentions, but sadly it
| is the inevitable result. And that is why developers and users need to be
| warned off Mono in a way that is not necessary for Samba.
`----
http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=1380&blogid=14
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