What the fucking fuck, Novell, Gnome and Ubuntu?
I swear that GNOME and Novell are trying to make desktop Linux Microsoft's bitch. Using the Silverlight Declarative UI stuff in Banshee? That's Microsoft patent central, and it's not covered by Microsoft's covenant not to sue, or even its agreement to license its patents under RAND terms. Microsoft could sue users and distributors of software using this at any time, both for damages and an injunction to cease use. (The Mono supporters would, of course, claim that Microsoft is made of kittens and rainbows and love, would never do such a thing, and anyone who says otherwise is being paranoid. Never mind Microsoft's long and sordid history, or its very public threats to use patents against Linux a couple of years ago - they've changed now, honest!)
Plus, reading between the lines, media players are just the start - Gnome and Mono plan to rework the entire Gnome desktop around Mono.
As to why Ubuntu is making Banshee the default media player? Like most of the Mono apps included by default, there's not even anything particularly special or popular or great about it*, and even now the Microsoft patent promise doesn't cover it. (I mean, I can understand Novell - Microsoft paid them a lot of money, and partnership with MS can often seem like a great option right until you wind up with a dagger protruding from between the shoulder blades. If you look at the history, it's impressive how many companies thought this time would be different.)
Finally, the personal attacks from Mono supporters seem to have become really, really vicious of late. I suspect the attempt to do something about Richard M Stallman's sexism might be one of them, unfortunately.
* Poor memory usage isn't surprising; Mono's garbage collector sucks and is stuck in the 60s design-wise. In the next release, they plan to upgrade it to one like Java 1.2 (which was released in 1998!) Also, a Linux music player that doesn't automatically add new tracks to the library, in this day and age?
Plus, reading between the lines, media players are just the start - Gnome and Mono plan to rework the entire Gnome desktop around Mono.
As to why Ubuntu is making Banshee the default media player? Like most of the Mono apps included by default, there's not even anything particularly special or popular or great about it*, and even now the Microsoft patent promise doesn't cover it. (I mean, I can understand Novell - Microsoft paid them a lot of money, and partnership with MS can often seem like a great option right until you wind up with a dagger protruding from between the shoulder blades. If you look at the history, it's impressive how many companies thought this time would be different.)
Finally, the personal attacks from Mono supporters seem to have become really, really vicious of late. I suspect the attempt to do something about Richard M Stallman's sexism might be one of them, unfortunately.
* Poor memory usage isn't surprising; Mono's garbage collector sucks and is stuck in the 60s design-wise. In the next release, they plan to upgrade it to one like Java 1.2 (which was released in 1998!) Also, a Linux music player that doesn't automatically add new tracks to the library, in this day and age?