After reading this news

http://www.osnews.com/story/21660/Mo...sktop_Install_

I don't understand what is going on with this issue.

What is Mono? And why does Mono contributed problems among Debian Foundation's decision makers?

Debian is famous for switching from GLIBC to Embedded GLIBC because of Ulrich Drepper.

Will Ubuntu have disputes with Mono vs. Debian fights?

Mono provides stuff like .NET (C# etc.) - Proprietry Microsoft Technologies. This essentiall means code written in .NET languages can be run on Linux. The problem being a philosophical one, really, not to mention the Microsoft licencing saying it cannot be used in projects such as Mono in commercial use, where Debian thrives.

The major, major problem: Tomboy. Tomboy is note making software and is written in C#. Now that Debian has decided Tomboy should be a major part of Debian GNOME releases, Mono has to be included (And the 50mb of other dependencies) in Debian releases. Its a good point to learn about the Microsoft Patent Argument, too; or Gratis v Freedom even.

Mono is .Net and C# ported to linux and there really aren't any Mono issues with Debian, there are quite a few programs in the debian distro that use mono. Ubunutu installs a bunch of Mono based programs also so there isn't an issue there either. The article you linked is more about whether a mono based program should be included as part of the default gnome install, which imho is kind of silly to worry about 50 extra mb when gnome already is a bloated warthog and pulls in hundreds and hundreds of megabytes already. Plus that "extra space" is a one off penalty you can then install any of the other mono based programs without incurring that again.

http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page

You miss the point, the problem is the philosophical reasons behind making a mono based programme an actual Debian GNOME dependency, because of the Microsoft Patent issue, the openness of .NET and .NET licencing.

The problem isn't the space, nor is it the fact that this is somehow new.

I don't think I missed the point, Mono as it currently stands is licensed lgpl/gpl/x11 (with other options avaialable) and it re-implements something that has been sent to an open standards committee. Microsoft doesn't have any control over Mono. It certainly can choose to make it self completely incompatible with Mono. Take a look at the mono FAQ especially the Microsoft section.

http://mono-project.com/FAQ:_General

From the bug report they linked to as proof of the mono conflict in Debian the only real Comment I saw was along the lines of. 'Are we sure we want to include Tomboy in the default install ? It's dependencies including Mono are ~50 MB'

Most of the rest of the report was epiphany vs. Iceweasel, and Abiword vs. OOo. which was a much longer more intense discussion.



Then the second link to "why mono doesn't suck" http://www2.apebox.org/wordpress/rants/124/ is from a Debian mono developer.

Looks like OS News is just following the example of the big news companies and trying to make it sound like a huge conflict when in actuality theres nothing much going on.

http://pkg-mono.alioth.debian.org/

The real conflict appears to be a couple developers of separate projects jockeying to get their app as the default note taking app.. I don't see any surprise there either. If I wrote an app I would want mine to be preferred over another. My app not having a ~50 MB dependency would certainly be worth mentioning.






Maybe their next headline will be "Windows is better than the inferior alternative of Linux". that should be worth some hits for a headline like that.