Alex Hudson

The new covenant covering Novell’s Moonlight is up, and unfortunately it looks like people who weren’t happy before still won’t be happy. In a lot of ways, this is the classic caught between two stools situation: one side wants to give up as little as possible, the other wants something as unambiguous as possible.

So, what are the problems? Jason from “MonoNoNo” gave his thoughts here. While I disagree with much of his analysis – e.g., the Media Pack issue is essentially irrelevant for free software users, and the GPLv3-hate is also basically not a problem – many of the points raised are valid. I don’t think they make Moonlight non-free itself, but they prevent people re-using the code, which is not ideal.

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It has been interesting watching the debate around Mono over the past few months. As essentially an independent observer – albeit one who has used Mono and can almost code C# – I couldn’t help the sneaking feeling that somehow, some of this was being orchestrated behind the scenes.

Particularly on the “anti-Mono” side, it has been pretty clear that an agenda of agitation has been in effect, with various distributions being prodded into making statements either way and various “users” kicking up stink on mailing lists – not least a certain infamous blog writer being caught red-handed whilst goading people on to write angry letters. I don’t know if speeches like Stallman’s were co-ordinated – I suspect more likely happenstance – but it all seemed very well timed.

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