Mono, Tomboy, .NET and my mistake

My Mother told me something a long time ago, if you are wrong and you made a mistake this is not something to be ashamed of as long as you admit you did.

So maybe it is time to admit it for some parts. I am talking about my post on Mono/TomBoy and how it tangles in .NET into mainstream Linux. After posting this blogpost it took some time for Google to pick it up and tell people the page was out in the open. However after it did I was contacted via a comment by the lead developer from the Tomboy project.

Sandy had to state some things about my post and I am glad to have received this update. It might changes my opinion on some parts however not in all. Sandy stated the following:

1) Mono does not depend on any .NET or any Microsoft code. It is a free software *reimplementation* of the .NET runtime, framework, and languages. All of the code you need to run Tomboy (for example) is 100% open source and free software, and totally compatible with the GNU GPL. Richard Stallman agrees with this and has stated it before. So you are more than welcome to download the Mono source, and tweak the runtime or change the C# language or do anything you want! :-)

Agreed, you are completely right and I was wrongly informed that some parts of Mono where closed. I did already know that the complete sourcecode of Tomboy was opensource and could be changed however I was under the impression that some parts of Mono where still closed and under control by Microsoft. So I have to change my opinion on this based upon the information from Sandy.


2) Richard Stallman's main complaints about Mono that I have heard are the following:
a) Because Mono is a reimplementation of .NET, and Microsoft decides what is in .NET, you could say that Microsoft indirectly influences what ends up happening in Mono.
b) Microsoft has a lot of patents on a lot of things, and Stallman is concerned that there might be patents that affect Mono.

So, Stallman's argument against Mono is not about having the source, or it not being free software, or anything like that. It's more of a political and philosophical thing.

Lets not keep us at the statement given by Stallman. My own opinion is that as a patent might (read might) be end up in mono it can influence Tomboy so one should not take this risk. Maybe I am a purist like Stallman that might be the case. However this is my opinion. So as I stated in my previous post I would like to be able to pack my stuff and go to a island and be able to do whatever I like. So even if I have all the sourcecode I can still end up in a situation where a ship comes to my island and tells me I am doing illegal things because I am tinkering with patents by Microsoft. To prevent this one should pick a language in which this will never happen.

It might be a political and philosophical discussion however I think we have to have this discussion to be able to think about what we do allow in mainstream Linux and what not. Currently I am under the impression that we should prevent this wherever we can to protect the purity of Linux. In my humble opinion we should try to prevent it from happing that anything which potentially can harm the free form of linux ends up in a Linux distribution.

So I might have made some mistakes and I hope I have corrected them in this post, I might have been not to clear on some points and I hope I have corrected them in this post and I hope some people would like to comment on this post so we might be able to start a discussion on it. This is because I have the feeling this is a discussion we will have to have to decide what to do with those political and philosophical implications of opensource.

No .NET in Linux

Richard Stallman has opposed against a single app, Tomboy, which has become part of the current unstable release of Debian Linux. Reason for this is that it is depending on MONO. Mono is a cross platform, open source .NET development framework and his concern is that Microsoft might someday stop with .NET and as MONO is depending on .NET also all the applications build with MONO are depending on it and so are depending on a Microsoft. His statement is that all that is in Linux should be open and by this all the source codes should be available which is not the case with .NET.

Richard is seen as one of the most brilliant people in the opensource world however also seen as one the hardliners in the opensource world who is not willing to make any compromise on his thoughts of what opensource is and should be. Some people think he is reacting to strong and state that he has become to much of a hardliner. I do however agree with him on this. Linux should be complete opensource and by adding a application like Tomboy we are compromising to this thought. Linux should be a platform that you can change to your liking and by having a dependancy to closed source you loose this ability.

In my opinion you should be able to pack linux on a laptop, get all the sourcecode, and move to a deserted island and be able to do anything you like to it without having the need to contact anyone. Complete freedom and not depending on any other person. By adding tomboy to it you are depending on Microsoft and to the thinking of Microsoft. If you need a function changed in .NET for some reason you will have to wait until Microsoft decides to do it, if they ever do it. And not only is this the case with .NET it is also the case with for example C#.

it is not a issue of opposing against a language, everyone should pick the language he or she likes to use. It is opposing against mixing licenses in Linux. As Mono is depending on .NET and .NET is not GNU/GPL compliant it should never become part of a linux mainstream release. If you really like it you should have the option to implement it however I would vote against it as it is not GNU/GPL compliant.

If you coding in for example Python and you need a special part of the compiler changed for some reason you do have the ability to go to the Python website, check the sourcecode, change it and make you own version. That is complete freedom as it should be. Not many people will do it however you do have the option if it is really needed. As some person from the US army once stated about systems that would make it to the battlefield, “if we can not hack it we do not pack it” and that is a very true statement. If you do not have the option to make modifications to it when the situation calls for it it is useless.

So, placing Tomboy in Debian and by this making yourself depending on Microsoft is a very bad move. Richard can be seen as a hardliner however I can only agree with him on this part.

Linux find command

sometimes finding out the way a Linux or UNIX command is working can be fun. For example I have been looking into the way how the find command is working and I have had a lot of fun with it. find can give you a great option to locate exactly the files you want and with the pipe options in Linux you can get exact that output you want and need.

The reason for me to look into the find command was a interface at a server at a customer. The interface consist basically out of remote servers who place files with FTP in certain locations. On the server side we have a couple of processes scheduled looking for files in certain directories who will process and delete the files. The processes run every 10 minutes, as we have some files that can be large the processing can take some time so files can be at the location for some time. However, never longer than 1 hour. So what we want the administrators would like to have is a system that looks for files older than 1 hour because this can indicate a interface that is stuck for some reason.

As we maintain a large number of servers and interfaces this can not be done by hand and has to be automated. The solution is to schedule a scrip that will look for the files and send the output every hour via mail. Even in the cases no files older than 1 hour are find a mail should be send because this is a trigger to see if the check has run.

First is to find out how you can locate files older than 1 hour. We will be using the find command for this. We will use the following command:

find . -type f -mmin +60

find is the command to find files. the “.” indicates that you want to look in the current directory. than we have the “-type f” option. “-type” allows you to set what kind of files you are looking for. f states that you are looking for regular files. If you for example are looking for directories you can state d and if you are looking for a link you can state l. for the complete list you can refer to the man page of find.

We also states -mmin +60. This indicates that you are looking for files older than 60 minutes. You can play with +60, if you are looking for files for example that are NOT older than 60 minutes you can state -60 instead.

Now we do not want the standard output because we do want to have more information, somewhat like the output we get from the ls command. For this we can do a “internal” pipe to the ls command with the -exec option. for the -exec we set ls -la so we get all the ls output. The command will look like this:

find . -type f -mmin +60 -exec ls -la {} \;

However this is still not what we want because we only want the filename and the time it is created. currently we get something like:

-rw-r–r– 1 jlouwers staff 0 Oct 11 11:14 ./x
-rw-r–r– 1 jlouwers staff 0 Oct 11 11:23 ./z/x

So we have to change the output and we can do this by using awk. We have to pipe the output from the above command to awk and than make sure we only get what we want. And what we want is filename and time. nothing more. So we can do this by using awk. According to the UNIX manual pages AWK is a pattern scanning and processing language… simple told.. it is a damn handy tool to make stuff look like the way you want it.

We pipe the data into the following command:
awk ‘{print $8,$9,$10}’

which makes the complete command look like:
find . -type f -mmin +60 -exec ls -la {} \; | awk ‘{print $9,$10}’

and the output will look like:
11:14 ./inbound_225/225int_inb.txt_65466
11:15 ./inbound_225/225int_inb.txt_65467
11:25 ./inbound_225/225int_inb.txt_65468
11:23 ./inbound_256/256int_inb.txt_43221
11:24 ./inbound_256/256int_inb.txt_43222

One last thing you might want to add, if you are running the command on a directory and you do not have access to all sub-directories you might end up in a situation where you get access denied errors in your output which can disturb your checks so you can pipe all the error messages to /dev/null . You can do this by editing the command that it will look like the command below:

find . -type f -mmin +60 -exec ls -la 2>>/dev/null {} \; | awk ‘{print $8,$9,$10}’

A lot more options are in the find command, you have however to check out the manual and have some fun with it while trying.

Sun Solaris manual pages

We are now providing again a option to check UNIX manual pages from our website. Special thanks to the University of Alabama, University of Athens, SGI and the University of Southampton.

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TEDx in Amsterdam

TEDx is coming to Amsterdam. Very exciting to have a TEDx event in Amsterdam. TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design.

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