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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'."
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Nobody could reasonably expect a project like this to have significant impact on a behemoth like Microsoft, but at least other platforms won't get shut out of a developing market. I'm glad Miguel at least has this realistic view.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
> saying that the 'volunteer effort could oblige Microsoft to work with Linux'.
And look what happened to all the companies Microsoft saw fit to "work with" in the past.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Do you really want microsoft in your backyard?
Please think a bit about everything that happends when you get this, and figure out if maybe pushing the giant hard and fast will get you what you want. It might just get you everything you ask for, which might not be the very best thing. Microsoft has a very interesting way of taking over something and making it work just well enough to kill what spawned the idea. Granted linux is not you average everyday software package or bottom rung OS so this may not happen as fast or with as much fanfair. All I can say is if you look at the past you will find they are good at at least one thing. Making the masses think they have the best goods. If they switch gears on the Linux community and grab it with both hands and say "We are sorry, we like it! Lets try to work together" don't be surprised when they take over. The Microsoft juggernaut is not something you want hanging around in your backyard sniffing at the roses. Losts of money to force the issue, and enough very smart people to make it happen.
Again I have been known to be wrong....
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
In other news, nVidia will be helping ATI develop the latest Raedon drivers, and Apple will release OS X for the PC. Also, the XBOX will now offically ship modded to work with XBOX Linux, and will even include a bootable Linux CD. Yeah... right... ;)
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
It seems to me that in Microsoft's position, they are not obligated to do anything. They control the biggest monopoly in the computer industry and they are in the habit of making companies/projects obligated to make their systems work with Microsoft systems. There is no reason for Microsft to be obliged to do anything with a port of their CLR.
It's basically a win/win situation
Presumably you meant "Win/Win"
This is a weak story. A point is made about MS being forced into compatibility, but no facts to back up the claim. Journalism at it's finest. I'll make my own conjecture: Microsoft will put out a compatible/standard product when they see SIGNIFICANT decrease in market share or lost revenue. They haven't got X-Box right, nor Windows CE, but a few billion dollars later, a few strong-arm deals later, a few revision later, they'll have a story and a product and the sheep will make it a standard.
Religion and science are both 90% crap..but that doesn't negate the other 10%.
Microsoft is in my kitchen! I don't even run *nix at the moment but will soon, thanks to Mono. Does that make me 'the enemy' around here?
If MS does 'embrace' Mono and decide they can do it better, then it will only help me more, because it will either a) be better or b) I'll still use Mono. That's the joy of open source, right? Freedom of choice? This just gives you more freedom and more choices.
Rejoice!
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Mono turns .NET into a commodity - so you won't have to bow to the altar of Microsoft in order to use it. That doesn't sound like a bad thing.
.NET get more early adopters - in which case it does seem to benefit Microsoft.
It looks like just another tool for the developer; don't think its going to make java go away anytime soon...
Now, Microsoft may look at this from two different perspectives: historically, it has been Microsoft that commoditized other people's standards and reaped the benefit - they might not take to having the roles reversed very well. On the other hand, this could help
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
It's interesting how quick the article goes into meaningless comments about power struggles - rather than a discussion of the logical benifits of the technology.
I'm taking part in a Microsoft sponsored contest at my university currently, the rules dictate that we have to use one of the .NET technologies (ASP.Net, C#, VB.net etc). However the rules specifically state that we cannot use open source CLRs such as Mono and/or Rotor. I just find it odd that the article talks about how Mono may help gain MS support, but at the same time MS seems adamant at keeping us from using it.
:)
Then again, I go to Ohio State. What do people out in Ohio know
Typical. The author must have contacted the security team instead of the .NET team. (Seriously, though, you'd think an MS-NBC reporter could get a little more than that!)
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For the most part, MS doesn't care about the Mono project, but if they do, it's a win by letting it procede.
.NET, some developers in the the Linux world may still find that the Mono c# compiler is better than using Tomcat and Java. They might stop innovating for the Java world.
.NET and so the main purpose of Java, which is cross-platform, "seems" to go away.
.NET is a better implemenation of the Java concept. I can use multiple langauges (VB.NET is much nicer for string handling crap, C# is better for syntax, Perl.NET for regexp) and it all works together whereas in Java, there is no reuse at all. You have to _rewrite_ everything. Heck, there's even a COBOL.Net (http://www.netcobol.com/IBuySpy/).
.NET does clients _and_ servers both very well.
.NET!
Even if Linux has a weaker implementation of
Then, MS can combat Java directly by saying, here's a Linux implementation of
Any effort that sneakily moves the focus _away_ from Java is a good thing for MS. When they have to compete with Mono/Linux, they win easily, because their implementation will _always_ be boatloads better.
Personally, I think
So in the end, Mono is an excellent diversion for Java developers to stop innovating. And besides, using Java on the client side has never been very interesting or usable.
MS doesn't care because they've built a better platform than Java and they throw $5 billion a year at R and D. No one comes close to that number.
Go Miguel and go
David C
http://chicagodave.wordpress.com
This note was originally published at John Munsch weblog on January the 14th.
.NET to fail and fail badly
.NET "rebuttal" that I linked to above, "For non-profit use VS.NET can be had pretty cheaply, especially if you know anyone that is in college somewhere." Pretty cheaply? For a non-profit (that means charities, churches, universities, the hobbiest who is going to give away his work for FREE)... pretty cheaply? Wow. That is well and truly pathetic. To try and justify it, and say, oh well, you can try to scam an educational discount so it won't be so dear, is even more pathetic.
.NET commercials with William H. Gacy telling you how great it is without really ever telling you anything about it? Microsoft doesn't trust .NET to stand on its own technical merits and it knows it may go like cod-liver oil down the gullets of a lot of people who have seen how the company works behind closed doors even if it were the tech shiznit.
.NET just in case there wasn't any grassroots community who actually wanted to do it. Or maybe just in case there was and they couldn't control it.
.NET for other platforms? If those same people were working on giving us new libraries and new tools for an already existing language instead of pouring in the thousands of man hours it's going to take to build a copy of the C# compiler or a .NET version of Ant and JUnit?
Lots of reasons why I want
It's benefits a criminal organization. Not one that's been found guilty of crimes once or maybe twice, but lots and lots of times. Those crimes are many and varied, but here's just a few of them: Stac Electronics v. Microsoft, DOJ v. Microsoft, Sun v. Microsoft.
P.S. If you want to split hairs, Stac v. Microsoft isn't a criminal action, it's doesn't stem from a criminal abuse of their monopoly like the other two cases. Instead it was just a case of a small company being driven out of business by willful patent infringement, theft of trade secrets, etc.
Microsoft isn't just one thing anymore. It's too damn big for that. I'm sure even Bill himself knows better than to think that he truly controls the whole ship because it's become big enough that he can't possibly know all the projects, people, etc. anymore. But even a really large company still has a kind of collective personality that it exudes and a large part of the personality both internal and external to Microsoft for many years now is that of a total control freak.
If they don't own it, if they don't control it, if they didn't create it, if it doesn't have a broad stamp from Microsoft on it, then they don't want it. Sometimes it's sufficient for the thing to merely exist and they'll refuse to acknowledge it, other times they need to actively stamp it out because they can't control it.
When was the last time you can remember Microsoft saying they supported a standard? That is, not something they invented and submitted a RFC for, an actual, take it off the shelf and re-implement it without renaming it or "improving" it so it doesn't work with anybody else standard. C++? Basic? HTML? A video or audio codec? Java? Anything?
I'm sure there's something, somebody will point out their excellent support for TCP/IP or something and I'm sure that's true. But if you were to look at Microsoft as a person in your life, you'd wonder what was wrong with him or her such that so much had to be controlled by that person.
When your business is selling the operating systems that 90+% of everybody uses, software development tools should not be a profit center.
Why should I have to plunk down a couple of thousand dollars for a "universal subscription" in order to have access to compilers and basic development information? Sun doesn't have to do that? On this point I'll quote from the
Marketing. Have you been "lucky" enough to catch one of the
So they are going to pull a page out of Intel's bum-bum-buh-bum "Intel Inside" playbook and try to sell the brand like it's sneakers and cola. Trust us, you'll look cool if you use it, and we'll keep hammering the brand on TV so somebody who doesn't have much tech savvy in your organization will ask you if you are using it, or have plans to port to it, or whatever, even if he hasn't got a clue what "it" is in this case.
They don't trust you. They don't like what they can't control and they can't control you. They can try and they always will keep trying but ultimately you are going to see them keep trying to do things and always keep a step towards the door just so they can bolt if they have to. Want to see what I mean? Go visit GotDotNet sometime if you haven't already been there. It's the grassroots community website that Microsoft put up to support
Ever been to SourceForge? Of course you have, everybody has because that's one of the hubs of all open source projects. You can go there and get the source of thousands of cool open source projects and it really serves the community well. There's even hundreds of projects now that list C# among their programming languages. So why did Microsoft feel compelled to create their own GotDotNet Workspaces that is clearly just a ripoff of SourceForge?
A few reasons are fairly clear: First, at many of their workspaces you don't get in unless they know who you are. Ever been stopped at SourceForge and asked for a name and password to look at a project? What about download binaries or source? No? At GotDotNet you will, lots of projects are marked with a lock. Second, forget about all those messy licenses that Microsoft might not approve of, you don't need to worry your little head about BSD vs. GPL vs. LGPL. You've got the one true workspace license that you have to agree to, or else you won't be putting your project there. Lastly, well it's kind of obvious, but it's really all about control isn't it. After all, if you aren't under their thumb, that has to be a bad thing. So a SourceForge that they control is pretty much a requirement, isn't it?
It's a really sad way for a lot of people to waste a whole lot of time rebuilding that which already exists. Wouldn't the whole computing world be a lot better if there wasn't a team of people, maybe a couple of teams of people building complete copies of
In the end, we'll all just be left with another way to do the exact same thing only in a different language. Lord knows the world benefits now from being unable to share media between France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the US, and Japan because we can't all speak the same language. I benefit every day from the fact that I can't read a Japanese manga I might enjoy or understand a TV show from Europe. Once you are done building this tower, go build a few more right beside it using Perl, Python, and Ruby too. They're all trailing behind in certain areas, we need to make sure the same set of stuff is reinvented and rewritten for all of them too.
Mono and Portable.NET really shine in allowing former Windows developers to get involved with Linux and still have a comfortable and semi-familiar place to start.
.NET are enthusiastic about Mono, but the higher-ups (see: PHB's) have no love for Mono or Linux.
I don't see Mono or Portable.NET as cross-platform technologies (unless you mean cross-platform across Unices) because Mono and Portable.NET grew up on Unix and will be used here the most. Besides, Microsoft has simply created too many API's and hence the barrier to a *quality* cross-platform development environment is too great.
Rather, Mono and Portable.NET will be good for rapid prototyping and as a conversion tool for Windows Application developers. Is also important for providing an alternative when the great migration begins of Smart Clients begin from Windows to Linux.
As for the rest of the article: Yah, I'm sure the Microsoft developers who created
Even when Mono becomes a mature product, if a customer asked me to write a .NET application and then asked if it would run on Linux, I could never honestly tell them yes. Why? Because Microsoft is a moving target and they always throw a wrench into something like this. I would never trust an application I wrote for Microsoft.NET would run 100% in Mono. For that reason alone, Microsoft will continue to hold their monopoly. The monopoly isn't because they have a great product, it is because people fear Microsoft will change gears on them. Microsoft can write code faster than any of us and nobody wants to be playing catch up by supporting a different OS. There is absolutely no motivating factor that Microsoft will play fair with .NET and the only chance the Mono project will succeed is if a major competitor like IBM takes over the project. Personally, I would love to see someone like IBM back Mono. It is going to take something like the success of .NET and its cross platform ability to Microsoft in its place. But that is so unlikely to happen, just like Java because Microsoft will drag out the problem so long, new technology will come along and the problem just goes away. If IBM could find a way around the patents, I say they should take up the Mono project and dump millions into advertising .NET! People are so confused about what .NET is anyway, they probably wouldn't even notice IBM stealing the brand name... :)
http://www.askthevoid.com