Mind Poison

The Gnome language wars have started up again after a good 9 months of nothing happening. Havoc Pennington posted yesterday saying that Red Hat simply cannot ever ship Mono, due to pre-existing legal reasons that they can't talk about, and are having a hard time working around. That is the sort of thing that is hard to verify, but it's quite possibly true (Red Hat has made lots of deals with software and hardware vendors, and you can easily see some agreement being made or some code being shared that has tainted Red Hat somehow in this issue).

So Miguel de Icaza, helpful guy that he is, responds saying "Hey, too bad for them. They can just not ship the Mono stuff when they ship Gnome!" Wow, you'd love that wouldn't you? Red Hat is your biggest and really only competitor for [essentially] control of desktop Linux, and if they can't ship a good deal of the Gnome platform, you're more than happy to hear that, aren't you? You love the full-time programmers they've had hack on Gnome for years and years on GTK, Pango, Cairo, Mozilla, and so forth, and you're more than happy to just screw them over and be The One. Your concern for the community and your commitment to the spirit of freedom and sharing of open source has truly touched me.