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Mono Progress In the Past Year
Eugenia writes "OSNews posted an article accounting the applications created in GTK# the past 8 months, since the release of Mono 1.0. While many of them are still in their infancy, it's clear that the platform had a healthy progress, with 'super-hits' like Tomboy, F-spot, MonoDevelop, Muine & Blam! and other, less known gems, like SportsTracker, PolarViewer, MooTag, GFax, GIB, Sonance and Bluefunk. The 2.0 version of Mono is expected around May, but the developers advised distros and users to upgrade to Mono 1.1.4 despite being a beta."
Welcome our new CLR overlords!
First, there was a plan: how to bring together the different development groups at work? My boss said there was a sort of tension he thought could be eased by some social interaction. Not easy. Almost all of the different development groups despised each other, each thinking its "art" was more important and eloquent than the others'.
There was the kernel extension developer group, coding mostly in C and some PowerPC and x86 assembler. They worked on making our PCI board work with Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, QNX, and Solaris. They worked "special hours," coming in at one and staying late, supposedly, until seven or eight at night. They enjoyed Red Bull and had a penchant for ThinkGeek t-shirts and cracking jokes about Win32 API calls and the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.
We had XML developers too. They worked on our website, documentation formatting, and simple apps to configure the driver software. They used HTML, XSL, JavaScript, and a bit of Java. They typically dressed casually, drank coffee and tea, and liked to work straight from the spec: no "Learn XSL in 30 Days" books were to be found in their cubicle farm.
Then we had the guys who wrote full-out UNIX apps. These guys and the products they wrote had been acquired from another company, and were the source of most of the tension: they'd never really been integrated into our group except that they were physically present with the rest of us. They all had beards or mullets or long, unwashed hair. Many wore suspenders or the afore-mentioned ThinkGeek clothes; some even had Penguin tatooes or small C app code tattooed on them. Their cubicle farm was known for the bleating laughter that exploded when one of them found a "silly" bug on someone else's code, and for the rotten, fetid stench that could only be compared to three-day-old shit reeking from inside a rotting corpse's abdominal cavity.
So, in order to get the guys to "know each other" my boss had asked me to organize a during-hours, alcohol-friendly party. My ideas ranged from a keg or two to live entertainment, AKA strippers. But as to what to get them to actually talk to each other in a human manner I had no clue. So I let it go til the last minute and decided to let my inherent creativity mull it over in the back of my head.
When the day of the party had arrived, the catering company brought in a few trays of lunch meat, chicken, pizza, and side dishes, I had picked up the kegs (all four) from the local brewery, and the big-screen TV and DVD were set up ready to blast the Matrix into the eyes and ears of my co-workers. The eagerness in the the air was encouraging and I thought that loosening up and smiles going on even now were a good sign. I even saw some of the guys who'd known each other previously begin to bunch up, bringing along the co-workers they knew from everyday work.
The first thing everyone did was hit the food line, loading up their plates and grabbing a cup for beer to wash it down with. A few approached me and thanked me for the food; it seems appeasing the belly really did tame the beast. After a few minutes of silence and eating and a few second and third courses, they guys were ready to sit down and be entertained. After asking if anyone needed anything else before the movie started, the lights went out and the Matrix began playing. I heard a few enthusiastic comments and jokes being told.
About half-way through the movie I noticed a lot of the guys, especially from the UNIX app group, were getting up and presumably going to the restroom. No suprise, as the second keg was history by now and the third was probably half-way gone. I also noticed some of the guys bumping into things and stumbling. Alcohol's the social lubricant, eh? Well, not long after, my bladder beckoned and I answered. As I made my way to the restroom, I had a self-satisfied smile on my face: my little plan was working, my boss would be happy, and it might even a Christmas bonus or a promotion (even if in title only).
Well, as soon as I
Just cross your fingers and hope that those projects with ".NET" in their project name doesn't get sued by Microsoft...
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No you weren't. :)
Mono just crossed over to computers. Open Source was making out with Bill Gates, and caught Mono.
Damn annoying too.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
The diference is .NET is a standart and Java is not.
Dream on you fucking MS fanboy.
No one outside of MS and a few random idiots like you know or care about Mono/C#/.Net.
Personally, I don't trust reverse engenering thing and I don't expect anybody at a corporate level can trust that.
.net platform and it could have any impact on mono users.
.net ? no, because .net seem to be fitting the gap let by ASP for all the small/medium project (depending on the "market").
.net collegues.
People need standard, people need complience tests.
mono does not offer both because appart from a very core piece of the platform the rest is locked at Redmont side and MS will make sure it is kept so !
As a consequence, MS can do whaever change they want in the
Who will bet his money on moving sands ?
So, unless MS comit strongly by submiting the WHOLE platform to ECMA or pushing their implementation to some OOS with an OSI approved license, Mono will struggle for survive next to his "big brother".
In those conditions, this means, that mono will never be a complete, stable, relable solution.
How much enterprise project do you have ever see running "mono" ? Personally none.
Is it the problem of
Anyway, comparing that with J2EE, I see daily J2EE OSS based projects implemented and that are proving linux+JBOSS or linux+Tomcat is a cost effective enterprise solution.
So, Mono is still FUD for me and for all my
Hey, but at least we can all look forward to the nightmare situation that Gnome and the stupid little MS faggot miguel created for the Linux desktop repeated for Linux application development.
Ain't open source lucky to have fuckwits like miguel around?
I have nothing against C# or .NET and have developed using both. But the naiveté of the OS community worries the pants off me. The words "Trojan" and "horse" spring to mind.
You know the Trojan horse story I'm sure. The Greeks and the Trojans were in a siege against the city of Troy. The Greeks constructed a large wooden horse and left is as a gift to their gods, burnt their camps and sailed away. The Trojans wheeled it into their (unfortunately walled) city and a had a large piss up to celebrate the end of the siege. Once the city was asleep a small but crack team of Trojan infantry men clambered down from inside the horse where they had been hiding and killed all the city guards on the main gates. The rest of the Greek troops came in via the now open gates and killed everyone else. The Greeks lived happily ever after. The Trojans didn't.
Microsoft is in a siege with Linux. It would like to destroy Linux because it threatens its fledgling server business and because, really, there isn't much growth left in the desktop bus at the mo. Currently it is using marketing FUD to do this but it knows (as does everyone else) that long term FUD doesn't work - all it does, if it does anything, is slow down adoption rates. MONO is a gift from Microsoft to the Open Source community. As soon as it starts being included on large scale Linux production systems a crack team of MS lawyers will pounce and start suing everyone in site for patent infringement. And corporates will, in the end, be forced to give up Linux. And worse, MS (unlike SCO) may actually have a point.
Mono is a great piece of reverse engineering and is properly Open Source. I wouldn't touch it with a 50 foot pole though. Java/J2EE may not be open source in the strict definition of the term, but I'm legally way more comfortable using it than I am Mono.
From the depths of my soul I spit at fucks like you.
I use to think open source really had a chance to change the world, but fucking human garbage like you are destroying those dreams.
Can it be that nobody will reason that, by endorsing Mono as a .Net clone/subset, we allow Microsoft to dictate what an open-source product should do?
.Net, it is not very reassuring that resources invested in .Net will not be lost when migrating to Mono.
.Net plug-in that validates code against Mono to ensure that it's Mono-compatible?
FOSS can't beat Microsoft by embrace and extend. More so when it's Microsoft who hold the standard reference and not the other way around. They can make the Mono developers jump wherever they feel like, by extending and deprecating APIs at will.
And, by being a subset of
Changing the subject a little bit, is there a Visual Studio
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Right. So by that logic, you can write OO code in machine language. (Which you can't, by the by; no processor on the market today has a "frob this object" command in its opcodes.)
I wonder when this "OO is just a style" meme will die. Guys, we have different computer languages because machine language is icky. (Have you ever hand-hacked applications using debug.exe? I have. I didn't like it and I'm not going back.)
In order to guard our precious sanity from the frozen wasteland that is raw machine language, we've invented formal languages in which it's possible to describe mathematical constructs in terms of various different metaphors. PROLOG uses pure mathematical logic as a way of approaching the problem domain. Instead of raw 1s and 0s, we escape from it altogether and we get to think in terms of bindings and clauses. (Variables? What are those? Functions? Don't need 'em.)
LISP uses set theory to do the same thing. Learn set theory in and out and you'll discover interesting niches of LISP, and come to appreciate its alien beauty.
What's C? C's a portable Assembler that's been kludged up over the years. That's not an insult--sometimes what you want is a portable Assembler with 30 years of hacks on the side, because those hacks are what give it such power. The C language is designed in such a way as to make kludgy hacks easy to write, which is sometimes a great strength.
The languages we use lend themselves, quite directly, to how we think about problems and how we decide to solve them. As such, it makes absolutely no sense to say "well, you can do OO in any language." Sure you can. All Turing-complete languages are equivalent. But at that point, why don't you go back to machine code? That's Turing-complete, too.
When you've bled from your eyeballs on the raw binary, then come back to languages. Discover what each one brings to the table. Discover where they're superior and where they're inferior. You might discover a lot of new things along the way.
Whilst I am sure that Mono has all sorts of technical merit (I mean, the hackers behind it must have done a good job writing it), I still believe that Mono is a grave mistake that will make the whole Free/Libre Software movement vulnerable to a Microsoft legal attack. I will admit a strong dislike to anything Microsoft and that I would prefer to see other development tools/framework, but right now, the fear of legal tribulations is outweighting that dislike.
Keep Mono alive if you want, continue improving it if this is what you like, but please, and I implore you, do not make it the mandatory building block of some critical piece of hard to replace software. Billg's first under-handed attempt at lobbing a grenade at the FLOSS movement is heading for total failure (that faux-sco thing), but his next one might succeed if we let Mono become unavoidable in FLOSS development.