Solving the Mono Problem

Alan Lord grapples manfully with Mono:

The nasty taste which has always ‘ever-so-slightly’ tainted my use of Ubuntu is that Mono is there only to support applications written in languages and for platforms which are basically Microsoft’s. It encourages software development using systems that are based on technologies almost certainly encumbered by a whole raft of M$ patents. To my mind, there are many great non M$ languages and architectures out there which are almost part-and-parcel of Linux programming and I see no need to bring .NET, ASP or even Visual Basic to my desktop. If I want to write an application, I could use PHP, Python, PERL, C, C++, Java and, of course, many others. Why do I need to endorse and encourage the proliferation of non-free software by relying on M$’s IP and the smell of their stinky patents?

Interesting discussion of what happens when you rip Mono out of Ubuntu: nothing, it seems....

Licence to Thrill

As I've written elsewhere, licences are not peripheral to free software, they lie at its very heart. So argy-bargy over the new draft of GNU GPLv3 was bound to bring some interesting further developments, and that's what we have here:

the strategy of the FSF is simple (I am paraphrasing here, nobody said these exact words to me):

1. FACT: we simply could not get GPLv3 out with the ASP provision or it would have been DOA. It is hard to disagree...

2. TRICK: we are creating another specific license that includes the ASP provision (AGPLv2) and we added in GPLv3 that the two will be compatible. The end result is license proliferation, but not license incompatibility which is the key issue.

3. GOAL: GET AGPL TO BE THE REAL NEXT GPL

How the Stacks Stack Up

The ever-interesting Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who goes back a long way in the free software world, has a fascinating article about a comparison of two application stacks, one open source, the other from Microsoft. The results were surprising:

The tests showed that such vanilla LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/PERL) stacks as SLES (SUSE Enterprise Linux Server) 9, Zope, ZODB, and PHP and a pure LAMP based on SLES, produced "C" results. They weren't bad, but they weren't anywhere near as good as an out of the box .NET stack based on Windows Server 2003, IIS (Internet Information Server), SQL Server 2005, ASP (Active Server Pages), and SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

The results mirror those of the Mindcraft tests back in the late 1990s, when GNU/Linux found itself whupped by Microsoft. But the consequence was a range of improvements that soon took free software past Windows. However disappointing the current outcome for the stack tests may be, I'm sure that the same will happen here.

Remember: every bug report makes open source stronger, and the same goes for adverse benchmarks.