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I feel like I’m missing some context here. Is this a “free as in take this puppy” situation? How do the wine developers benefit from this?
by rickcarlino 2y ago
I feel like I’m missing some context here. Is this a “free as in take this puppy” situation? How do the wine developers benefit from this?
- minkles 2y agoI think it's just hurting someone at Microsoft less if they give it a home that isn't /dev/null. Edit: quick hat tip to Mono.Cecil which I've used a couple of times to crack .Net components to bypass licensing code. It's not that we didn't pay for them but we couldn't be bothered to deal with license deployment and maintenance.
- jcims 2y agoHow has ’free as in puppies’ not reached its rightful place on the podium?
- spiderfarmer 2y agoBecause nobody wanted to maintain it.
- karmajunkie 2y agoi’d upvote this twice if i could…
- ragebol 2y agoI'm not a dog person: a puppy would be a burden (financially and time-wise) and provide me barely any fun.
- yathern 2y agoI think that's the intended implication - that it's "free to a good home" - meaning any new owner takes on a lot of responsibility.
- bmacho 2y agoThat's what ’free as in puppies’ mean. Free software is typically described as "free as in freedom" or "free as in free beer". (This is probably a limitation of English tho, my language has 2 different words for permissions and costlessness.) GP above proposes the "free as in puppy" variant, which means that it is a burden of maintenance. I can't recall any real examples for this.
- jcranmer 2y agoIf you want to be pedantic, English does have distinct words for the two connotations of free--"liberal" and "gratuitous". Although it should also be immediately obvious why those words aren't preferred either: "liberal" also has several other connotations (to the point that a "Liberal Party" could be almost anywhere on the political spectrum), while "gratuitous" tends to lean more towards "unnecessary" than "free of charge" in common parlance.
- School-Cotton 2y ago> English does have distinct words for the two connotations of free--"liberal" and "gratuitous". Sorry but no it doesn’t. These words have the other meanings you mentioned, but they don’t include either of the meanings of “free”. If you said you were giving away “gratuitous software”, native English speakers wouldn’t know what you were talking about. The only way to understand it would be to realize that those words are etymologically cognate to words in European languages that do have those meanings.
- prewett 2y ago"Gratuitous software" would be excessive and unnecessary software. Which I think a lot of commercial (particularly "news") websites qualify for, and "modern" websites in general. NPM makes it easy to just install something, which requires all kinds of other things, which duplicate each other, etc. Strangely enough, I think the LaTex distribution qualifies, too. I tried to install it recently, and it wanted 1 GB of disk space! That's multiple times the size of the entire system disk when LaTeX was created... Sooner or later a lot of the web is going to run on WASM, at which point we'll have a virtual machine running in a user program running on an OS which incompletely virtualizes the bare machine (hence why we've ended up with WASM). Extra gratuitousity if the browser is an Intel binary being run on an M* processor via Rosetta translation... Maybe eventually we'll realize that the OS needs to provide a full virtual machine, complete with window to draw in, filesystem isolation like Plan 9, etc. But, inertia will probably make it take while.
- kelnos 2y agoTo be fair, "free as in beer" doesn't work for a lot of people who don't drink (or do drink, but don't like beer). I don't think we're going to come up with a one-size-fits-all slogan...
- willhslade 2y agoFree food? Organic vegetable stew?
- ktm5j 2y agoWhat's your point? Don't take the puppy if you don't want it.. not everyone has a use for this software either.
- bawolff 2y agoI love this. Definitely using this next time someone tries to guilt me into becoming maintainer of some abandonware foss project.
- matthewbauer 2y agoI guess this is in the context of "free as in beer" and "free as in speech".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- codersfocus 2y agoWhite elephant has usually been the go to animal for this kind of idiom
- langcss 2y agoPlease tell me there is a separate French word for free (as in puppies).
- nashashmi 2y agoIt should be a “free for adoption” idiom
- zerocrates 2y agoWine has (or used to have anyway, not sure if it still does) a version of Mono it used to run .NET stuff within Wine; I'd assume this has to do with that, that they were relatively alone in having a continuing interest in the Mono codebase vs. the dotnet core stuff.
- dtquad 2y agoMicrosoft's own FOSS multiplatform implementation of the .NET runtime is now much more performant and feature complete than Mono. However Mono is easier to embed into other applications and easier to port to new platforms. That is for example why it's used for the .NET/Blazor WebAssembly stuff. Microsoft still maintains their own fork of Mono for this specific use case. Mono also implements some of the legacy Windows Desktop GUI frameworks like WinForms and WPF that Microsoft never bothered to port to their new .NET runtime. This is probably why the Wine developers might be interested in Mono.
- Phrodo_00 2y agoMono also supports winforms. I don't think they're supported in dotnet (but there's libraries for Gtk, although you could also use Vala with a bit extra effort).
- neonsunset 2y agoA shoutout goes to a project that aims to simplify CoreCLR embedding UX to prevent the issues stemming from embedding legacy Mono: https://github.com/StudioCherno/Coral https://github.com/StudioCherno/Coral
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lloydatkinson 2y agoWinforms and WPF are both very maintained and supported for .NET 8 on Windows, to clarify. Good cross platform desktop frameworks include Avalonia.