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Dotgnu Coding Competition
Honestly writes "Apparently DotGNU seems to be offering more than the 'warm fuzzy feeling' to its contributors. Somebody has funded about $4500 worth of prizes for code contributions. The developers have confirmed that the $$$ is in FSF Hands (good hands, I suppose). Here is the split up of prizes. It's almost strange to earn money writing open source. Especially when you're not even
employed by dotgnu. Anyway all I can say is ,I like it. It's ideal for a grad student with lots of free time. But hardly anyone seems to have seen
the Newsforge posts (except maybe me)."
The Mono FAQ has a section devoted to it.
Basically Mono's FAQ trashes DotGNU and Mono at every chance. Miguel and the Mono crew has had a smear campaign against DotGNU since day one.
DotGNU in the past has tried to cooperate and initiated talks in sharing resources, but this didn't go well with Mono.
The true difference between Portable.NET and Mono is Portable.NET has chosen different technical decisions.
#1: The compiler is written in C/C++ not C# itself, so it doesn't have the chicken or the egg problem. Mono's CVS is very difficult to get a handle of because of this. PNET's compiler is about 3x as fast as Mono's.
#2: The topic at hand, winforms.. PNET's winforms only dependancy is X, which means their winforms work on handhelds, osx, etc. Very portable. Mono's requires Wine, not very portable to say the least.
Thats a rough quick sum.
I was involved in that argument. If I recall correctly, it was a Rhys Weatherly and some others demanding that the Mono be placed under the DotGNU steering committee and that everybody work on their project instead. Of course, at the time it was quite obvious that DotGNU was mostly ideologues who were obsessed with 'defeating Microsoft' through some embrace and extend tactics, whereas most of the Mono hackers were fairly pragmatic about the whole issue: 'This is pretty cool! I'd love to see an implementation of this in Linux!'. Most of the people who weren't turned off by the downright abrasiveness of Rhys were turned off by the zealous ideology.
As for bad-mouthing, the only thing the Mono FAQ says about Portable.NET as opposed to Mono is that it the runtime (and compiler) are much less tested. Ximian claims that by developing the compiler and most of the rest of Mono in C#, the whole toolchain has been given a much more rigourous workout than Portable.NET.
In fact, I'd say the badmouthing has been much more in the other direction: there used to be a page around on the DotGNU website (not sure if it's still there) badmouthing Mono. None of the claims had any substance. For example, it claimed that Mono was on shaky legal grounds with regards to hidden Microsoft patents, which may perhaps be true. However, Portable.NET/DotGNU isn't safe from those legal threats either. Further, while Mono was developed from the ECMA (and now ISO) specifications, Portable.NET was initially developed by reverse engineering Microsoft's .NET implementation (without any clean-room engineering), putting it at risk of copyright infringement claims as well as patent claims. This was also part of the reason why there was little interest from Mono in merging the class libraries.
I suspect things are probably more civil these days. Cooler heads usually prevail in the end.
As for your other claims....
#1: The compiler is written in C/C++ not C# itself, so it doesn't have the chicken or the egg problem. Mono's CVS is very difficult to get a handle of because of this. PNET's compiler is about 3x as fast as Mono's.
Mono's CVS is easy to handle. It is distributed with a partial prebuilt toolchain, that is then used to build the entire toolchain. It's all MSIL, so there are no platform portability issues. It is also standard practice to write a compiler in its own language.
#2: The topic at hand, winforms.. PNET's winforms only dependancy is X, which means their winforms work on handhelds, osx, etc. Very portable. Mono's requires Wine, not very portable to say the least.
WinForms contains a number of window-isms, which the Wine project have already implemented. Reimplementing winelib seems silly and a waste of energy. I can't imagine it'd be appreciably harder to port Mono's WinForms implementation across platforms had it been written from scratch than it would be to port winelib itself. And if winelib gets ported, people other than Mono users and developers can benefit from that work.
Anyway, just my $0.02.