November 18th, 2008 by Rolf
I have played around with digikam and F-Spot (for the non-Linux crowd – these are image administration programs with database, tagging, simple edits and so on.) I like F-Spot more – it integrates perfectly in my Gnome Desktop. (Digikam is great too – and I would prefer it if I would still use KDE.)
There was a lot of controvery about Mono, the programming framework that is used in F-Spot. It uses the C# language and the free parts of .NET, both Microsoft technologies. And of course there are fears about patents, lawsuits and becoming contaminated by the Dark Forces.
After some reading I think it is not EVIL and I can use it, but perhaps you have a different opinion?
Not evil just taking the easy way out.
Not evil at all,
in fact we should base on the same reasoning and start an alternative DRM project
Hi Rolf
Isn’t mono also included in Hugin?
I believe Mono, like all closed source programs is potentially evil in that you never know what it includes. In particular, I would never trust Microsoft (all their recent tricks re OOXML etc ) as they also put things in their operating system etc that you wouldn’t want on your PC – so why shouldn’t they put something into technology that could be used on Linux? Even if it is ‘innocuously’ monitoring some aspect of your usage.
At the moment I don’t knowingly use any product that contains mono.
Accordingly to what is said on the wikipedia entry for Mono, the license of the Mono dependencies for Microsoft (the shared sources) can greatly vary (reminds me the creative common license) .
The point is to know what are the licenses implicated in Mono and if those licenses can be changed to a more closed license on a already published version of the application.
Even in Mono itself, there are things to look at. In the LICENSE file in the tarball, it is specified, for the virtual machine, that :
This code is dual licensed under the LGPL or commercial licenses.
The LGPL ensures that Mono can be used in most scenarios, but
gives Novell the flexibility to relicense the code for
embedded systems, static linking or commercial settings where
the LGPL can not be used.
That means this code can be relicensed on the fly, and that’s a potentially problem.
There is C# compiler included in Mono, and it is under GPL and MIT X11 licenses, so I suppose you can make binaries without needing any MS code (but the libraries, of course) and it won’t be relicensed (since GPL’ed).
But it’s important to note that, even in a GPL license, the future of any application isn’t securized. You can release a version of an application in GPL and release the next version as closed sources (providing you keep distributing the part of the code that was GPL’ed).
A last word : this insecurity isn’t really an issue for you, as a user. If the openness of Mono is compromised, you can switch to an other application. This mostly is a concern for the developers that may have to rewrite their app from scratch if they want to keep on date and the sources turn suddenly closed (which is not likely to happen).
“I believe Mono, like all closed source programs is potentially evil”
I believe, people who spread FUD are practically evil.
http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing
@Rolf
The FAQ clearly states: “For Linux server and desktop development, we only need the ECMA components, and things that we have developed (like Gtk#) or Apache integration.”
These are covered by patents, but, as it is states, third party implementations can be done on “royalty-free and otherwise reasonable and non-discriminatory terms” basis. I don’t see how Microsoft could possibly either sue F-Spot’s or Banshee’s developers or even users or legally stop their development.
Apart from that Mono is just a good tool to solve real life issues. If someone uses it as a pitchfork in flamewars, that’s another story
Ok, then I’ll continue to play with it, but leave the mask an surgical gloves off.
IMO F-Spot is Evil(tm). When I tried it it went and changed loads of timestamps inside my exif tags completely on its own. I uninstalled it as fast as I could, and if the f-spot devs had been close by I would probably have kicked their asses for making a program that destroys people’s time stamp data without warning.
I would do the digital equivalent of kicking them and file a bug report.
I’ll keep an eye on my tags. Up to now I am just working with copies. But I like it – cool to have RAW and JPEG and the edited versions in one spot.
I don’t think it’s a bug. I’m pretty sure it tried to do something smart, but once some developer implements some “smart” feature that as a consequence destroys user data without warning then that developer can’t be trusted again. Destroying users’ data is the single worst thing a program can do (with the exception of data-shredders, of course, where the opposite is true). Extreme care should be taken to prevent such a thing. The f-spot devs didn’t, and as such they are simply not trusthworthy of data of any importance. (Destroy my data once, shame on the devs. Destroy my data twice, shame on me.)
Btw, I wouldn’t even have noticed that f-spot modified the images if I hadn’t backed up some of the images before. After running f-spot I noticed that my backup software listed loads of modified images that I knew that I hadn’t modified. (Unfortunately I had a bunch of images that I hadn’t backed up yet, so I couldn’t get back the data that f-spot destroyed inside those images.)
@Marcus: F-Spot does not modify files unless to tell it too. F-Spot has an option in the Preferences dialog to write metadata to your files. Which is disabled by default. And whenever you do edit an image, F-Spot makes a copy of the original and modifies the copy.
@Rolf: The DevelopInUFRaw extension is fantastic!
Yes, I tried that.
> F-Spot does not modify files unless to tell it too. F-Spot has
> an option in the Preferences dialog to write metadata to your
> files.
Yes, I did indeed select that option. It said that option was for storing tags and descriptions (and it’s quite sensible to store such things in the photos themselves). It did NOT say that that option would cause f-spot to modify DateTimeOriginal (which should never, ever be changed anyway). (IMHO not even DateTime should be changed, but I can understand that some people might disagree on this particular point.)
Sounds like it would be nice if someone would write a “safe usage” guide.
..jim
Apparently there’s a bug report about it (bug 454082 on bugzilla.gnome.org (for some reason the blog won’t let me add a comment with the direct link to the bug, so you have to go there yourself)).
This bug, which causes loss of data, has been sitting in the f-spot bugdatabase for way over a year already, apparently being completely ignored.
Actually the same bug has been in the f-spot database for almost 3 years, with the ID 332025.
Seems to be a sad story.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=332025
As long as it works, and benefits photography on Linux, I could care less about legalities and philosophies.
> Is Mono evil?
Well, it looks very much like Microsoft’s normal “embrace, extend and extinguish” tactics, which are evil, but as long as care is taken not to fall into the trap of using Microsoft’s non-ECMA extensions I think it’s relatively harmless. AFAICS F-Spot doesn’t use any such extensions, and I can only hope that it won’t in the future either.
You might be open for Microsoft suing your a$$ off, though, unless you are using Novell’s versions that are under their (evil) cross-license deal with MS. However, MS won’t do anything unless you really threaten them (unlike Apple, which is evil to the core (pun intended)).
> You can release a version of an application in GPL
> and release the next version as closed sources
> (providing you keep distributing the part of the
> code that was GPL’ed).
Not true. Any part intrinsically bound to GPL’ed code must also be GPL’ed. However, if you hold the copyright to all of the source code you can of course lincense it under any other license you want even if you have also licensed it under the GPL.
The paranoia has really gone to the top.
OpenGL standards are known to have adopted technologies that are patented by Microsoft, and yet nobody cares.
You would think that OpenGL being at the very core and foundation of all the new visualization technology would be much more of a concern to people (google: site:oss.sgi.com microsoft intellectual property).
Or if really concerned, the patent search for the word “graphics” on google.com/patents assigned to Microsoft would be a severe blow to most GIMP and Linux users today.
Historically, Microsoft gets sued on a monthly basis over patent infringements, and yet, they have never sued anyone over a patent infringement even when they have a huge portfolio.
Yet, all the heroes of the revolution: IBM, Adobe, and Sun have sued their competitors over patent violations and extorted money from them.
Seems like a case of a double standard.
Apparently most of the OpenGL patents from SGI were sold to Microsoft in 2002:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/01/16/sgi_transfers_3d_graphics_patents/
Does that make OpenGL evil? Not at all.
All it means is that there needs to be a patent reform.
> Historically, Microsoft gets sued on a monthly basis
> over patent infringements, and yet, they have never
> sued anyone over a patent infringement even when
> they have a huge portfolio.
A huge patent portfolio is not used to sue, but to threaten to sue. Microsoft has bullied around many small businesses and then settled out of court, often by buying the rights to whatever they want, presumably for a lower price than if they hadn’t done any bullying. But you’re right, MS wouldn’t dare attack individuals.
> all the heroes of the revolution: IBM, Adobe, and Sun
IBM and Sun aren’t heroes, even though they have done a lot for various FLOSS communities, and Adobe hasn’t done any good for anyone AFAIK.
WARNING, only proceed with care!
You do want to regularly backup your photos.db file, which can be found in ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db.
You can backup the binary database, but I like to make a text dump of the database as well (first copy the binary database to a different location, to prevent mistakes that might destroy your database):
# echo ‘.dump’ | sqlite3 photos.db > photos.sql
Or a trick to optimze/rebuild your database:
# echo ‘.dump’ | sqlite3 photos.db | sqlite3 photos-clean.db
Please note that the location of these files may very well change soon, in the F-Spot version they might be located in ~/.config/f-spot.
I forgot this… DevelopInUFRaw in F-Spot also has batch development. Just develop a single photo. These settings are copied to ~/.gnome2/f-spot/batch.ufraw. If you then select multiple photo’s, and right-click batch develop, all the selected photos are developed using the previously selected settings.
I see in my Crystal Ball a cloudy image of a F-Spot episode….
Is there no alternative to F-Spot on Gnome?
Perhaps this: http://jcornuz.wordpress.com/2008/11/16/gtkrawgallery-a-python-based-raw-developper-and-organizer/ ?
I for one don’t think that mono is remotely evil; the FSF even support a similar project (GNU.net). While people sight Microsoft’s FUD/patents infatuation as a reason not to use mono I believe the opposite; we should support mono despite the threats/fear just as we do with OGG and Linux (basically anything not directly funding Microsoft) as a whole. Why are people more worried when Microsoft promises not to sue a project than when they threaten to? If Microsoft sues F-Spot then you will just have to stop using it, ending up exactly where you would be if you had made that choice in the first place. Another pointless reason people give is that they fear that mono will not be able to keep up with .net in the long term, as one of the main arguments for open source technology is that it can be developed much faster than propitiatory; the reverse of the prediction hence is in fact true as the mono project (thanks to excellent work from the developers) have implemented more of the specification than Microsoft (see the notes from the mono talk at PDC).
Back to the subject of photo managers I think that F-Spot is probably the nicest application available for any platform although Picasa has many nice features and Gwenview is a good option for KDE.
I don’t like Novell, neither M$. Dot.
Novell was an MS’s ally in the (shameful) ooxml/iso issue.
Don’t trust them, don’t need them.
With the patents (which I agree need to be reformed) there is a lot of uncertainty. And some of you say ‘well, if patents came into action and you wanted to dump f-stop and other mono related stuff, you’ll be exactly in the you’d be if you had never used them’.
But for me the thing is that I don’t wanna be a user of this stuff. The way I see it, I’ll use pure opensource stuff. Using it is supporting it.
I you use mono, you are supporting mono, and it’s sorta selfish to think that you are safe because you can always switch to other apps when necessary. You like open source, you think in global terms, not in your own terms.
But this is only the way I see it. I don’t mean to change others opinion on the subject. This thread has started as a place to say what you think. That’s what I’m doing, just my opinion.
Btw, I use Digikam.
No problems with opinions – I wanted them. Thank you to all of you!
Mono is NOT evil. Is just a gnome dep as it’s being used more and more.
In the end, nothing is evil, no nvidia-drivers, no DRM licensing, no spyware or viruses.
Yes, there may be some people wanting you to not use those things, but who cares?
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/03/24/mono-danger-to-linux/