2009 may not be the year of Linux on the desktop, but surely can be appointed as the year of Mono.

David Siegel, creator of GnomeDo felt constructive enough to share 5 easy steps to create a viable alternative to Mono.

1. Create a mailing list where people interested in replacing Mono and/or Mono-based applications can subscribe. A quick perusal of Google Blogsearch, Reddit, Digg, and Slashdot will turn up many vociferous individuals who appear to be willing to contribute. These people need to start working together instead of participating in the same fruitless arguments over and over again.
2. Interview stakeholders. Figure out why developers like me are using Mono; I love Mono and would be happy to tell you why.
3. Conduct a competitive analysis, evaluating Mono and technologies like it. Look at C with GObject, Qt, Etoile, GNUStep, Squeak and others. Document the strengths and weaknesses of these tools for creating Linux applications. How complete are they? Are they actively developed? Why do developers pick them? Why are they popular or unpopular?
4. Using this competitive analysis data, decide on the best existing alternative to Mono.
5. Using the data about why developers choose Mono, begin to address the deficiencies in the chosen alternative. The mailing list subscribers from step 1 should be eager to help — get them involved writing documentation, reference applications, libraries, and new language features.

It’s disappointing to see how much David misses the point. Other than marking everything against Mono as non serious, he just tackles the technical issues under this premise:

Recently, the noisy debate over whether Mono poses a real threat to Linux has gotten even noisier. I’m not a lawyer so I’m not going to comment on matters I don’t fully understand

Maybe he’s right when he says that people who don’t like Mono are not organized enough. Should we create some drawing ? Will that help people to understand ?

*** The issue with Mono is not technical ***

Sure we’d love to interview you coding starlettes about how much you like the beloved Mono, and yes, create mailing list and all that stuff. And stop talking about it and hey! creating a new language to replace it (how nice. Btw Vala, anyone ?)

But, ultimately, those 5 steps are just 5 ones to flip a burger and shift the discussion from the licensing side, to the technical side.

But here’s the good news, I feel constructive enough to give the Mono community 1 easier, single step to get everything done. And if you do, you can keep the Mono (how cool!).

Pressure Novell and Microsoft (as some of you work in both the companies) to change the agreement to look like this:

Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Google and its affiliates hereby grant to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this License) patent license for patents necessarily infringed by implementation of this specification. If you institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the implementation of the specification constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses for the specification granted to you under this License shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

Is that easy. Everybody wins. Even Microsoft.

If you don’t, don’t expect concerns to go away anytime soon. Doesn’t matter what the Ubuntu policy is, that’s not just a Canonical issue. It’s everybody’s.

2012 will be an interesting year. Then we laugh.

[image credits]

Windows users should be ware of the Berlusconi virus. It’s claimed to be stopping all processes

Hint: processo is the italian for “trial”.

In Europe Windows 7 will cost 41% to 100% more than in the US.

Thanks to Microsoft for keeping everyone happy:

• MS can recover the cash from the last EU anti-trust bill
• Linux will get a big push
• The EU anti-trust will have new excuses for a new bill

A new cycle begins ! Thanks Microsoft !

I’ve just come across this mockup for Gnome 3, and I find it pretty cool

Not that everything is desiderable but you can find some clever concepts in there:

• colored decoration basing on the application (so alikes look alike)
• notice how the maximized window contains the systray.
• easy and drag and drop based minimize and move-to-desktop.

Notice how the maximized window includes the systray

What do you think ?

This comes from the Fedora planet, more specifically AdamW:

I may be missing something here (be great if I am), but it seems to me that the content of the Ubuntu Wiki - which contains some great stuff - is not licensed under one of the common ’shareable’ licenses, like CC, GFDL or OPL. Neither the front page nor any of the several random pages of content I checked has a license declaration that I could find, and the “Legal information” link in the footer takes you to the general ubuntu.com legal info page. So as far as I can tell, the license on that page - which is basically “for anything other than personal non-commercial use, apply to Canonical” - applies. That’s a bit unfortunate, and against the open source spirit of collaboration, if it’s true. I had a couple of people check my sanity on this one, and asked in #ubuntu-doc, and no-one could find anything to the contrary.

I got onto this by looking at the Ubuntu debugging procedures page, which is great. We’re looking at improving the Fedora wiki pages on what information to include when reporting bugs on particular components, and it would make sense to just re-use the Ubuntu community’s work here rather than spend time re-do it all ourselves which could more usefully be spent elsewhere. But if I’m right, we can’t.

If anyone knows that I’m wrong here (or can explain why there isn’t a less restrictive license, if I’m right), please do comment. Thanks!

That’s pretty odd, and I’m sure Canonical will clear up the issue pretty fast once they become aware of it. They demonstrated they’re able to correct their own mistakes.

Here’s just one more guy waiting for the issue to be solved in favor of our beloved fedora friends.

I’ve been notified that Solang *can* work on Fedora 11.

_Hicham_ put it on his repository. Fedora users, for further informations, check out this page:

http://hicham.iblogger.org/?q=node/1

Ironic announcement from Luca Falavigna to announce that Solang is now included in Ubuntu Karmic Koala repositories.

Ho deciso di scendere in campo…

Per partecipare alla crociata contro Mono. Il primo passo è fatto !

Translation:

I decided to step on the battlefield (cit. expression used by Silvio Berlusconi to announce his involvement in politics 15 years ago)

…to partecipate to the crusade against Mono. The first step is done !

This is (probably) a pretty ironic reference to the fact that Solang got misunderstood as a f-spot port by a leading italian blogger. But it’s not.

By the way, it’s a great news! The screenshots look promising !

Macslow, who is working on notifications,  recently posted some screencast of his last progresses.

The first image shows a colored title bar upon every notification. While the chance to display the urgency of notifications has been discussed, this work is just meant to be useful for debugging - at least for now.

The urgency bar will be displayed only in beta releases, to help the tester to debug and test how each applications uses notifications and spot possible abuses.

Having a bar looks similar to my interactive notifications concept. The purpose is very different, though.

Full video

The second video shows, other than a (what I believe is) a bugfix in the progress bar, a proximity fade mechanism. If you look the picture above, you’ll notice the notification started fading before the mouse got over it. Thumbs up, one thing I wished and never asked.

Full video

The last video shows blurring capabilities. Pretty nice, I’m unaware of the intended applications of such concept. Any clue, anyone ?

Full video (9 Mb!)

PS: The videos are hosted on Mirco’s website, but I can easily mirror those if hotlinking is not ok.

Really, you wouldn’t dare..

• rickspencer3 proposes pulling the gimp from the CD:
  • It takes up a lot of space that we need for couchdb, etc…
  • F-Spot has key features, like crop and red-eye removal
  • It’s a power user tool, users shouldn’t stumble into it
• Discussion points brought up that
  • The gimp currently uses 26 megs of space, 20 of which are documentation, which could be moved online
  • The gimp, though not totally user friendly, is very useful, and does not require “importing” to edit

ZOMG !

No offense to Rick Spencer but.. How reasonable is the rationale behind this ? That f-spot is enough ? Enough for what ? For laughing ?

How do I scale an image in f-spot ? If there’s a way, I have not been able to find it (same for red eyes). How do I annotate an image (putting text somewhere) ?

Yet people ask “Gimp is cool but.. should it belong to LiveCD?” I’ll give you a better question: what should belong to the LiveCD ?

Removing GIMP from the LiveCd fully defeats the showing off purpouse of the LiveCd and leaves you without any handy tool to perform even basic manipulation on images. Now, it can be just me, but I can’t find anything useful in that regard inside Jaunty’s f-spot.

I can’t see how f-spot belongs to the live cd more than the Gimp. And sure the Gimp UI sucks (at least, I hate it. Not that I love f-spot’s though) but it can take burden of tasks that nothing else provides. Should we leave our users without even basic image manipulation, just like OS X users ? Shouldn’t Ubuntu be better than that ?

Resolution

The following decision has been taken:

• The current plan of record is:
  • Keep the gimp in the default install
  • If we need the room, switch the gimp to online only documentation
  • If we still need the room, kick it out altogether

Sanity prevailed. Sort of. I mean, I’m happy with at least the first two points of it.

I hate bringing up the old Mono issue (and my prophetic joke) every 2 minutes, but.. if you need space, why not strip 50mb of run-time ? How come it’s desirable to replace Rhythmbox with Banshee (based on minimal feature difference) and then having to strip the Gimp ?

An emergency plan would be to strip Mono, replace Banshee with Rhythmbox, replace Tomboy with Gnote (about which many untrue things have been told) and f-spot with gThumb or Solang (which is promising) and gain 40-50 mb of disk space. Not stripping the Gimp.

This is not out of Mono hate, is out of need.

I’ve been warned by Jono that the Satanic issue with Canonical is solved. Now, that’s fast !

Heya everyone,

OK, I checked into it and I have managed to clear this up. Some kind of mistake occured and the Ubuntu Satanic Edition folks should not have got that letter. I spoke with our trademarks folks and they will be sending them an explicit trademark license as their merch is clearly under parody, which we are indeed cool about in the trademark license. Rock on!

Speaking of rock, can we change it to Ubuntu Metal Edition? I would install it…

Hope this clears things up, thanks folks!

Jono

Thumbs up to everyone ! Thanks Jono !

Update: I’m surprised by the number of people talking about Satanism. Ubuntu SE is about bad music and parody, not religion.