Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/05/03/mono.html

Both RMS and
I
have been critical of Mono, which is an implementation of
Microsoft’s C# language infrastructure for GNU/Linux systems.
(Until recently, at Novell, Miguel De
Icaza has led a team of developers working on Mono.)

Most have probably heard
that the
Attachmate acquisition of Novell completed last week, and
that reports
of who will be fired because of the acquisition have begun to
trickle. This
evening, it’s
been reported that the developers working on Mono will be among those
losing their jobs.

In the last few hours, I’ve seen
some
folks indicating that this is a good outcome. I worry that
this sort of response is somehow inspired by the criticisms and
concerns about Mono that software freedom advocates like myself
raised. I thus seek to clarify the concerns regarding
Mono, and point out why it’s unfortunate that these developers won’t
work on Mono anymore.

First of all, note that the concerns about Mono are that many Microsoft
software patents likely read on any C# implementation,
and Microsoft’s
so-called “patent promise” is not adequate to defend the
software freedom community. Anyone who uses Mono faces
software patent danger from Microsoft. This is precisely why using
Mono to write new applications, targeted for GNU/Linux and other
software freedom systems, should be avoided.

Nevertheless, Mono should exist, for at least one important
reason: some developers write lots and lots of new code
on Microsoft systems in C#. If those developers decide they want to
abandon Microsoft platforms tomorrow and switch to GNU/Linux, we don’t
want them to change their minds and decide to stay with Microsoft merely
because GNU/Linux lacks a C# implementation.
Obviously, I’d support convincing those developers to learn
another language system so they won’t write more code in C#, but
initially, the lack of Free Software C# implementation might impede their
switch to Free Software.

This is a really subtle point that has been lost in the anti-Mono
rhetoric. I am not aware of any software freedom advocate who wants
Mono to cease to exist. The problem that I and others point out is
this: it’s dangerous to write new code that relies on technology that’s
likely patented by Microsoft — a company
that’s known
to
shake down
or even sue
Free-Software-using companies over patents. But the value of Mono (while
much more limited than its strongest proponents claim) is still apparent
and real: it has a good chance to entice developers living in a purely
Microsoft environment to switch to a software freedom environment. It was
therefore valuable that Novell was funding developers to work on Mono;
it’s a bad outcome for software freedom that those developers will lose
their jobs. Finally, while perhaps some of those developers might get jobs
working on more urgent Free Software tasks, many will likely end up in jobs
doing proprietary software development. And developers switching from
Free Software work to proprietary software work is surely always
a loss for software freedom.

Update (2011-05-04):
ciarang
pointed out to me
that Mono
for Android is proprietary software. As such, it’s certainly better
if no one is working on that proprietary project anymore. However, I
would make an educated guess that most of the employed Mono developers at
Novell were working on the Free Software components, so the above analysis
in the main blog post still likely applies in most cases.