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Getting rid of Mono could never work.

First of all I doubt Miguel would stay with Sun/Novell if they quashed Mono. He'd probably leave and continue the work elsewhere. I doubt they could stop him since Mono is based on ECMA standards and the current Mono C# compiler, runtime and class libraries are all covered by open source licenses (GPL, LGPL and X11, respectively).

Second, if Mono was quashed most of its developers would probably migrate over to dotGNU, the other free C#/CLR implementation.

Long story short, free software can't be bought (and eliminated or made proprietary) as easily as the companies that develop it.

No, but it might be time to back off from blatantly cloning the Microsoft platform (you know, the one they make half their money from) and try something a bit more original instead.

> So you plan on trying to run ASP.NET on linux then?
> If you run your web server on Winodws it isn't free.

What a load of rubbish. I do not have to buy a copy of Windows for EACH application I install! Windows is an operating system - not part of ASP.NET!

Extending your argument - how exactly is Linux free if it requires a computer to run?? Does linux come with a free computer? Unless you can get computers for free then Linux isn't any more free (as in beer) than using Windows using your argument. EVERY system has prerequisites of some sort or another...

You're talking rubbish. Unless you are forced to buy an operating system with EACH and EVERY piece of software you install then you cannot factor it into the cost. I might ALREADY have the operating system. It might have come with my computer. It does not cost me any EXTRA money if I suddenly decide I want to use ASP.

And what if I WAS planning to run ASP.NET on Linux? It's possible with the Mono project. Then it would be free. And it would still be better than PHP IMHO - at least for anyone wanting to do anything more complicated than a pet project.

The topic here is ASP.NET, not ASP. And ASP.NET does run on *nix (very well, too) thanks to Mono. There are a lot of large areas where ASP.NET excels over PHP too.

What I *really* want to see is mod_mono with class wrappers for the identical IIS hooks.

ASP.NET support is divided in two pieces:

* Web Forms (Web Applications infrastructure).

* Web Services (the SOAP-based rpc system).

Both are fully functional at this point. Publicly available applications such as IBuySpy, nGallery and many others are known to work.

The Web Services stack is being used for commercial applications such as SourceGear's Vault. They even funded the development of our Web Services classes back in 2002. Another example is OpenLink's Virtuoso. People from OpenLink also contributed to Mono/

You are operating under the assumption that the main use of Mono is going to be to allow people to write .NET software

Strangely that assumption is quite widespread. I think I've tracked down the source though.

Lucky that for you portability from Dotnet to Mono is an added bonus. Let's hope that other Mono users will have an equally chilled attitude!

How is that better than JVM or even better CLI ?
It is an attempt to solve a problem already solved (in a much more elegant and portable format) using outdated techniques.

Just mho

Just curious: have you taken steps to inform other users that Mono APIs are not based on, and thus incompatible with, Dotnet APIs?

The Mono Project itself is pretty clear about it. Like, on the left, you get the non-.NET stack in a BIG RED BOX, and on the right, you get the .NET stack in a BIG BLUE BOX. You can install one, the other, or both, depending on whether you need .NET or not. Most Linux developers and most open source developers don't need what's in the BIG BLUE BOX.

I ask this because one could easily form the impression from Mono promotional material that it is a complete and compatible implementation of Dotnet. For example, the first sentence in the Mono FAQ reads: "The Mono Project is an open development initiative sponsored by Ximian that is working to develop an open source, Unix version of the Microsoft .NET development platform."

And what is wrong with that? Ximian is sponsoring the Mono project to develop a UNIX version of the Microsoft .NET development platform. That's their business interest in it. It doesn't mean that that's all it's good for. Plenty of companies have sponsored gcc development for their purposes, but your use of it is probably completely different.

It doesn't claim that it is "complete" yet (in fact, the roadmap tells you how complete things are), although they are clearly aiming for that.

Got two for you...

Not F/OSS friendly: microsoft

F/OSS friendly: mono

The true benefit of projects such as this is their independence from the big brother corporations

You mean like Sun and HP funding the Apache group?

Or Novell and Ximian underwriting the Mono Project?

Or IBM contributing to F/OSS?

Do you think these and other projects would be where they are today without the backing of serious money/resources?

although i think it works in apache 1.3.x now, mod_mono was a deciding factor for me to switch to the 2.0 series. and for that, it has been working great...

Except that Microsoft have said that it does -- they've said "royalty free and otherwise RAND". See the FAQ

Is there any credible party (slashdot fudders excluded) who is still arguing that Microsoft can pull the rug out ?

I haven't tried it, but on the about page it says:

Mono's runtime can be embedded into applications for simplified packaging and shipping..

No they can't. read the FAQ

Mono is delivered in v1.0 with Dashboard, the proactive "personal assistant" which shows the associated info, of all types, about the entities (people, places, info objects) you're focused on. With the right GUI, this will depose the desktop, filing system, and search engines now haystacking our needles. Where can I get a client for my smartphone?

Mono implements the ECMA/ISO covered parts, as well as being a project that aims to implement the higher level blocks like ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms.

The Mono project has gone beyond both of those components and has developed and integrated third party class libraries, the most important being: Debugging APIs, integration with the Gnome platform (Accessibility, Pango rendering, Gdk/Gtk, Glade, GnomeUI), Mozilla, OpenGL, extensive database support (Microsoft only supports a couple of providers out of the box, while Mono has support for 11 different providers), our POSIX integration libraries and finally the embedded API (used to add scripting to applications and host the CLI, or for example as an embedded runtime in Apache).

The nifty thing about this is that Mono has the potential to be bigger and better than the .NET Framework, and we don't actually *need* .NET to make good use of Mono.

The way I see it, Mono could end up gaining more market share than Microsoft's implementation, and as long as we don't tie ourselves to the Windows-specific APIs, there's not a whole lot Microsoft could do about it!

The greatest risk of the Mono project is Microsoft stepping in and filing suit against the project for using its API w/o a license. Doesn't anyone else see this? Why was Mono ever started to begin with? All you Mono developers are doing is putting $$$ into microsoft's pocket!!!

Actually, the majority of the API is covered by the public EMCA specifications. Microsoft specifically made it impossible (very very difficult) to sue someone for that when they made the standards public. See the mono and microsoft faq for details. The fact that mono is perfectly legal doesn't change the fact that they may be putting $$$ into microsoft's pocket though.

Given that my main OS is Windows (sorry), is there anything like this for it?

...However, the Java runtime systems commonly available on Linux lack the performance that customers demand, and Java applications do not conform to the Linux GUI look and feel.

As has been pointed out ad tedium in various Java-related discussions on /. - Java's early reputation for poor performance may have been justified in the 1.0 and 1.1 days, but modern Java VMs employ sophisticated JIT compilers which gives it comparable performance to natively compiled languages like C++, and easily matches .NET's CLR performance. Java's bytecode and .NET's bytecode are not that different, the main differences are in the APIs.

Which brings us on to the second justification for .NET over Java, native GUIs, which is even weaker. Java-Gnome does the same thing as Mono's GTK bindings, offering exactly the same GUI abilities, and SWT offers a truely cross-platform GUI API with a native look and feel on each platform it runs on.

likes Modest Mouse.

Anyone here use Muine, is it better than xmms?

From the FAQ:

The Mono project has also sparked a lot of interest in developing C#-based components, libraries and frameworks

Yes it has. In our company's roadmap, we considered C# and Mono, but the controversial elements of their licensing (ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and Windows Forms subsets) gave us pause until we researched it further. Most of it is covered under the ECMA/ISO and the other technologies developed on top of it.

Looks like the Mono strategy is to work around the patent issues by using a different technique that retains the API but changes the mechanism.