Suite à la décision de Debian d'inclure Mono dans l'installation par défaut de leurs distributions et pour aider à la diffusion de Tomboy, un gestionnaire de prise de note développé en C#, Richard Stallman prend la parole sur le site de la FSF et nous met en garde.
Pour Stallman, il est dangereux de dépendre du langage de Microsoft et le problème ne se pose pas uniquement pour Mono, mais pour toute implémentation libre basé sur ce langage.
Pour lui, le danger est que Microsoft en arrive à breveter toutes les implémentations à base de C#, et que "seuls les imbéciles n'en tiendrait pas compte jusqu'au jour où cela arrivera".
"On ne dit pas que l'implémentation de C# est une mauvaise chose", mais que les programmeurs devraient écrire des applications dans un autre langage comparable aux applications de ce langage, et ne pas décider d'inclure ces programmes C# dans l'installation par défaut d'un système GNU/Linux.
La chose est on ne peut plus claire, reste à savoir quelle sera la réaction de Debian et autres distributions libre.
Why free software shouldn't depend on Mono or C#
by Richard M. Stallman
Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use.
The problem is not unique to Mono; any free implementation of C# would raise the same issue. The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents. (See http://swpat.org and http://progfree.org.) This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.
This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. Free C# implementations permit users to run their C# programs on free platforms, which is good. (The GNU Project has an implementation of C# also, called Portable.NET.) Ideally we want to provide free implementations for all languages that programmers have used.
The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.
We should systematically arrange to depend on the free C# implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing programs in C#. Therefore, we should not include C# implementations in the default installation of GNU/Linux distributions, and we should distribute and recommend non-C# applications rather than comparable C# applications whenever possible.
Source
by Richard M. Stallman
Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use.
The problem is not unique to Mono; any free implementation of C# would raise the same issue. The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents. (See http://swpat.org and http://progfree.org.) This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.
This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. Free C# implementations permit users to run their C# programs on free platforms, which is good. (The GNU Project has an implementation of C# also, called Portable.NET.) Ideally we want to provide free implementations for all languages that programmers have used.
The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.
We should systematically arrange to depend on the free C# implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing programs in C#. Therefore, we should not include C# implementations in the default installation of GNU/Linux distributions, and we should distribute and recommend non-C# applications rather than comparable C# applications whenever possible.
Source
Envoyé par deadalnix
