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Open Soap Box

May 7th, 2008 by

With openSUSE 11.0 GNOME gained a new default BitTorrent client – monsoon.  This choice has been met with some criticism, which is fine.

Well the GNOME Team are holding their regular meeting tomorrow Thursday 08 May 2008 @ 1600UTC/GMT/ZULU – or for those not quite with the whole “foreign” time thing try this.  One of the themes is the BitTorrent client, why am I saying this?  Well for all those that have an opinion about it, please come along and let everyone know what that is, yes there may be a chance to get on your soap box and denounce the world and it’s dog,  and we can have a real-time discussion about it.  If you don’t tell someone (preferably someone that makes decisions) then no one knows and nothing happens, filing bugs also helps 😉

A bit of background reading on why the choice of monsoon was made can be found here – yes I did indeed do the initial review of clients and made the recommendation, and I’m sticking to it!  I did however get others to test it to confirm I’m not 100% insane.  As with all applications your mileage may vary, but we are intent in trying to make your mileage be the same great journey as one would expect from openSUSE.  So if you care, join in and you never know you may bring something to the table that no one thought of 😉

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4 Responses to “Open Soap Box”

  1. I, for one, welcome my MonoTorrent overlords. I’ve played a bit with Monsoon on my Fedora machine and while it is not perfect out of the many clients available it is the one that shows the most promise in terms of giving us powerful features and a solid foundation without compromising the simplistic easy to use UI.

    I was very pleased to see my openSUSE GNOME brothers and sisters elect Monsoon as their default client, I’m hoping it will pave the way to mature the stack further and eventually lead to intergration akin to that Alan will be doing as part of GSoC across our stack.

  2. Bill

    question – how to get your app. designated as a default Gnome app. in Suse?
    answer – write it mono.

    Is the above question unfair? Is the sentiment unfounded?

    I don’t think you’re “100% insane” but I do wonder who the other testers were and what relationship they have to the Mono project.

    Seems that if OpenSuse is truly open then default application designation should be given a more community driven process like a community ballot. And yes I know I can use any client I wish.

    Am I the only one who feel Suse (Gnome) is a Mono-centric entity?

    • Andrew Wafaa

      Bill, I think you may be a touch heavy handed there.

      Just to make sure that the air is clear, I have no affiliation with Mono what so ever apart from being a user of applications written in C# – I can’t code to save my life regardless of language. Only one of the testers had anything to do with the Mono project.

      The reason I nominated Monsoon was that as a user I found it to be the perfect balance of simplicity and features. I don’t care what language an application is written in, so long as it does what/how I need it to do the job. There was just over a week of consultancy for all those to pass comment, and there were several people on the mailing list that voted for Deluge, a couple for Transmission. The discussion was also had on IRC and the topic was brought up in three weekly meetings, to me that sounds like being failry democratic and letting the community vote.

      I believe you may well be on your own in the Mono-centric train of thought; Debian, Ubuntu, and even Fedora are all mimicking a lo of openSUSE’s application choices. Just like there are a lot of Python applications, out of interest what is the issue with an app written in C# vs C or C+ or Python or Fortran? It is a Free and Open language.

      • Bill

        Andrew if you had described the selection process as you did in response to my post I wouldn’t have been so “heavy handed” because I would have been better informed. But I do think Mono is one of those technologies that has both detractors and admirers as shown in this Ubuntu Wiki page entitled “No-Mono-by-Default” https://wiki.ubuntu.com/No-Mono-by-Default and remember RedHat does not support it (though Fedora does and yes RedHat may have taken the position because it’s a Suse development or because of Jboss).

        Suggestion – why aren’t decisions like this opened to voting? They could be announced in the weekly newsletter using the same system used for the recent Yast poll.

        regards,