FWN/Beats/PlanetFedora

Planet Fedora

In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General

Karsten Wade presented the position for relicensing the Fedora documentation (wiki, docs.fedoraproject.org, upstream guides at fedorahosted.org) from OPL to Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-Share Alike (BY SA) 3.0.

Paul W. Frields outlined the (shortened) development process and schedule going forward for Fedora 12. The feature freeze (July 28) rapidly approaches!

Steven Fernandez asked "Is Red Hat really an Open Source company?" Steven explained the background behind the post: "This question keeps cropping up every once in a while on different LUG lists where I lurk. It is a fairly established fact now in the FOSS world (or for that matter in the software world) that businesses can be both Open Source as well as commercial (ie: for profit). However, the specifics of the mechanism for doing this is still not well understood."

There was a bit of discussion in the blogosphere around Microsoft's recent decision to apply their Community Promise (covenant not to sue) to the C# language specification and Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). Ismael Olea excerpted an excited e-mail from the fedora-mono mailing list. Not everyone was quite so optimistic however.

Michael DeHaan reminded us that only the core language and libraries are covered under the promise, and notably absent are some of the components that would make it useful including Windows Forms and ADO. Michael added "My long held theory is that mono was never to be considered a legal threat, it is a tool to be used in a strategy of erosion … insert a compelling technology, then provide a migration path by adding on proprietary extensions. It erodes Linux and it erodes OSS… and advocacy for it, even in purely legal/ethical ways, using just the free bits, and so forth, help enhance that position and acceptability."

Alex Hudson pointed out that "this is going to have a surprisingly negative effect within the community, however. It validates the arguments of people worried about Mono, and this proposed split of Mono into “Standard bits covered by MCP” and “Other bits not covered by MCP” is actually going to fuel the flames: inevitably, people will assume the non-MCP bits are a total patent mine-field, no matter what is actually in that area. Parts that people are quite happily shipping right now - such as ASP.net - will be targetted next by people “anti” Mono. And for the parts covered by MCP; well, I expect not much to change: certainly, it’s not likely to convert many people to Mono."

David Woodhouse

Michael DeHaan

Vincent Danen

Mohd Izhar Firdaus Ismail

Chitlesh Goorah

Scott Williams