"Open" is a word too important to apply merely to source code. Although open source code is important to free and unfettered computing, openness encompasses far more components of a computing system. Adrien Lamothe explores other degrees of openness and their implications.

Novell’s Mono 1.2 Press Release mentions that the project adds support for Windows Forms.

That was fast. I’m neither a Microsoft nor a Novell customer. Now I’m curious, though; does this software infringe Patents #6,920,461 and #6,959,294? (Note that, at least per my reading of the former, Microsoft has only patented the interface.)

(Note two: if you might work on Mono or a similar project in the future, and if U.S. patent laws apply to you, erase the fact that I mentioned those patents from your head entirely. Then contact your representative legislators to complain that a single sentence I wrote here may make you liable for treble damages someday.)

As hard drive capacities outstripped CDs and DVDs, hard-drive based backups became necessary. (I know y’all tape backup fans are still out there. You may have your cumbersome, slow, unwieldy, mechanically clunky tape backups with their even slower, more cumbersome restores. Kthxbye). For my clients I am very diligent and make sure they are well-protected. But for me- well, you know how it goes.

I set up my customers on nice SATA RAID boxes with automated rsync network backups. Users have access to their own data so they don’t have to pester hardworking admins when they want to recover files. Fling Samba into the brew for an EZ cross-platform backup server.

For my home network I have not been so diligent. My home LAN is constantly in a state of chaos, because it’s both my work and test lab. I’m trying out new distributions, new applications, new hardware, and new ways of doing old things. So obviously good backups are more important. I didn’t want to set up a backup server like I do for customers because I’m short on space. So I’ve been limping along with a random assortment of backups to DVD and USB sticks, and remote backups to a friend’s server.

Well you know the saying- too soon old, too late smart. I was surfing on Newegg.com and had a blinding revelation- standalone backup drives. Duhh!!! I says, whacking my forehead painfully. So I got a nice deal on a SATA enclosure and a 250-gig SATA hard drive. I can plug it in to a USB port or use the SATA connector. Nice!

So it was all of ten minute’s work to partition and format the drive, and get a nice rsync server going. It performs nightly backups, then I have cron jobs to shut down everything that doesn’t need to be running. No point in being a watt-waster.

I still make hard copies of important documents, and have offsite network backups. So even if some redneck meth-head (of which there are many out here in the sticks) (but fortunately it’s OK to greet them with loaded firearms) rips me off I’ll still have my data. I make Mondo operating system images to DVD every so often in case I need to perform a bare-metal restore.

So $110 and ten minutes’ labor saves space, my data, and my time. Not a bad deal. Fast, cheap, and good- see, you can have all three!

I can’t find the original GNOME announcement from August 1997 in comp.os.linux.advocacy, but I did find an interesting thread on Desktop Options. My, the changes since then.

Update: As Jeff Waugh mentions in the comments, the GNOME project as a whole has not chosen to use Mono as the foundation for the project, nor is there any indication that they will. I just found it interesting to see how some things change yet other things don’t in nearly a decade.

As I recall the GNOME announcement–and as the FAQ quoted at the top of the thread indicates–there were severe questions about the redistributability of applications built with QT:

Why don’t you just use/contribute to KDE?

KDE is a nice project; they have good hackers working on it and they have done a very good job. Unfortunately, they selected the non-free Qt toolkit as the foundation for the project, which poses legal problems for those desiring to redistribute the software.

Over nine years later, is it too much irony to wonder when someone will start a new project, with a FAQ reading:

Why don’t you just use/contribute to Gnome?

Gnome is a nice project; they have good hackers working on it and they have done a very good job. Unfortunately, they selected the patent-encumbered Mono toolkit as the foundation for the project, which poses legal problems for those desiring to use the software without paying royalties to Microsoft through Novell.

Disclaimer: I use GNU/Linux, but use neither GNOME nor KDE as my desktop environment.