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Why free software shouldn't depend on Mono or C#
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| Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake
| of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a
| risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage
| its use.
|
| The problem is not unique to Mono; any free implementation of C# would raise
| the same issue. The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force
| all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents. (See
| http://swpat.org and http://progfree.org.) This is a serious danger, and only
| fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take
| precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.
|
| This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. Free C#
| implementations permit users to run their C# programs on free platforms,
| which is good. (The GNU Project has an implementation of C# also, called
| Portable.NET.) Ideally we want to provide free implementations for all
| languages that programmers have used.
|
| The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other
| applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too.
| That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using
| them is taking a gratuitous risk.
|
| We should systematically arrange to depend on the free C# implementations as
| little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing
| programs in C#. Therefore, we should not include C# implementations in the
| default installation of GNU/Linux distributions, and we should distribute and
| recommend non-C# applications rather than comparable C# applications whenever
| possible.
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http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono
(Last modified 2009-06-26 05:43 PM)
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