Firefox and Moonlight (Mono) "Free Software" Status?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 09:36:34AM +0100, Ron Yorston wrote:
> "Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> >On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 03:28 +0100, Keith G. Robertson-Turner wrote:
> >> Why are you still shipping Mono?
> >
> >Apologies in advance, I cannot be overly specific about legal issues.
> >Red Hat (and I) are aware of your concerns around mono, and after
> >discussing this in depth with Red Hat Legal, we have no immediate plans
> >to remove mono from Fedora.
> 
> Never mind the legal stuff, is there any technical reason for having
> Mono in the core distribution?  (Or in the distribution at all.)
[...]

In the distribution at all to give people choice.  You could make the
same argument for other minority languages or applications, OCaml for
instance.  Maybe we should remove any amateur radio software or
electronic CAD or 2D games or support for Norwegian language users.
All of those are minorities.

As long as there is someone willing to support a package and there are
no legal or packaging problems, we should have it in.  One thing that
Debian has is a huge range of very obscure packages.

> With Java itself now Free Software why bother with Mono?

.Net/CLR potentially has better support for functional programming,
although unfortunately there are no mainstream free languages out
there which exploit this (see my signature however).  There are also
various fairly minor but technically useful improvements in the
bytecode, eg. Java has an annoying limit on the size of methods and
doesn't allow you to jump between methods (meaning that tail-call
optimization can't be done in many useful cases).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my OCaml programming blog: http://camltastic.blogspot.com/
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