Mono - 'Breaking Down the .Net Barriers'

ceejayoz writes "MSNBC has an interesting article about the Mono project, saying that the 'volunteer effort could oblige Microsoft to work with Linux'."

Comments

I dunno.......!

[curtisk]

I think this is a cool idea and all, .NET is actually not too bad in alot of ways..but I can totally understand why many ppl's opinion of Linux is alot of copying.

Why not do the same thing, but don't cater it to .NET specs?

Make the Linux equivalent (or better). Granted there are software packages that are "*nix only" but Soooooooo much time is spent making stuff to conform to MS specs , or "just like..."
The more that things like that are done, the closer you become to turning linux in a windows re-write IMHO

Re:Mono is a platform

[IamTheRealMike]

Basically, what these pages show is that Mono is less like Wine

Well it's both. Windows apps will still be written using System.Windows.Forms and they will need Wine to emulate them unfortunately. Mono/Linux apps will use the Gnome or KDE .net bindings, and they won't integrate as nicely into Windows.

Unfortunately Wine and the SWF effort are currently being screwed around by threading issues, and the new glibc also messes things up even more, so until the threading situation is sorted out I doubt we'll be seeing Windows .NET apps run on Linux.

Re:Java

[mark_lybarger]

what patents does SUN own on the Java language and arcitecture itself? we've seen IBM come out with a non-standard GUI library, and SUN only replies with: "it's not the standard java". as far as i know, anyone is freely able to use and extend the java arcitecture as it suites their needs.

microsoft does have patents on the .NET arcitecture and have not at all publicly stated that they won't use those patents to stop those who implement their technology on other platforms. when asked about mono, they say "that's an interesting project and it shows the power of .NET". they fail to add that "yeah, and we're going to basically own their source when it's all and done with it. tht GPL is going to get ripped to shreds."

as others have mentioned FORTRAN isn't quite dead, but like BSD, it's dying. as late as 2 years ago i was coding business applications in FORTRAN on both VMS and Solaris platforms.

Re:The Purpose of Mono

[PigleT]

You're missing out on the single fact that Microshaft have actually submitted a whole standard to the ECMA - the C# specs.

Sure there's nothing new, though. There's been nothing new since the 1960s with lisp, but that's a different rant. ;8)

The contest sponsor has plenty of MS cash

[Cerlyn]

As yet another Ohio State person, I wonder why no one seems to have linked to the contest in question yet. I'm not too worried about OSU's bandwidth since I have some idea of their network topology (multiple backbones, etc.).

Personally, I've always wondered how NTsig (the group running the contest), can claim "not to be fully funded by Microsoft(tm)". Even when charging $5 per year per person, NTsig will be giving away over $10,000 in prizes for this contest, has regularly handed out thousands of dollars worth of MS software, and gave out a few Xboxes last quarter too. Furthermore, it is known that at least one NTsig officer is paid by Microsoft to run the club. Hence, I cannot say that the club is unbiased.

I attend a class at OSU where the professor teaching it has a large Microsoft grant. He has more MS servers than he knows what to do with (one hit by the latest SQL worm), a Tablet PC, a video projector, etc. -- all allegedly paid for by Microsoft. While he seems to be teaching the course fairly, he did add .NET alongside the Java portions this year. The same professor freely admits he still sees plenty more Java than .NET use, however.

Just to be fair, I'll link to the Ohio State Open Source Club too, although on a $300 per year budget, they can't be that significant, can they? :)