Is KDE dead ? Was Re: Stable Release Updates

Rahul Sundaram metherid at gmail.com
Tue Mar 23 21:37:04 UTC 2010


On 03/24/2010 01:26 AM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 March 2010 19:21:59 Robin Laing wrote:
>   
>> On 03/13/2010 08:34 AM, Mail Lists wrote:
>> It will be interesting if
>> Mono is pushed into Gnome to the point that RedHad cannot work around
>> it.  Could KDE become the default Fedora desktop?
>>     
> Forgive my ignorance, but what is the story about RedHat, Gnome and Mono? 
> Specifically, what is wrong with Mono being in Gnome and why is RedHat working 
> around it?
>
> I would appreciate a link to something informative on this topic.
>   

There is no obvious link that explains everything so let me add my
thoughts.  Just to be clear, the following is merely my personal opinion:

 GNOME as a project has always had a strong ecosystem of library binding
in various languages and several apps have been written using them. 
Python,  Vala, C++ and Mono are among the popular ones.   Despite the
fears raised here, there is no strong move towards Mono within GNOME and
although there are a number of popular apps written in Mono including
F-Spot and Banshee and several GNOME oriented distros include such apps
by default ,  Tomboy is the only official GNOME module that is written
in Mono.

Red Hat has been averse to Mono which in my understanding is atleast
partly due to patent concerns.   This has been explained in more detail
at  http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono,  While this has been a
controversial topic, the patent concern is readily acknowledged even by
strong advocates of Mono.

"Microsoft has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot because of constant
threat of patent infringement"  - Miguel De Icaza

http://www.sdtimes.com/link/34203

Such concerns resulted in Fedora not including Mono for several years. 
This changed in part after the OIN agreement.

http://gregdekspeaks.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/fedora-and-mono-and-oin-clarifications/

Red Hat has continued to not include Mono in RHEL however.

Due to various concerns,  Fedora has continued to steer away from Mono
apps by default however.  Beagle was the default search engine for
sometime in Fedora before it was dropped due to poor upstream
maintenance and performance issues.  Tomboy was replaced by Gnote (which
I maintain in Fedora)  as the default note taker in Fedora 12 due to
space constraints in the Live CD and Shotwell replaces F-Spot (and
Gthumb) as the default photo organizer for Fedora 13 for similar
reasons.  I don't think there is any real issues to be worried about here.

Rahul


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