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Mono Blocked from MS Conference
Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that Microsoft has apparently blocked the Mono 'Birds-of-a-Feather' meeting from being held at their Professional Developers Conference for the second year in a row. Miguel de Icaza discusses the circumstances in his blog. From the blog: 'It is their conference, and they have every right to control what they will allow to be shown there, but they actively have misrepresented things.' Not terribly surprising but infuriating nonetheless.
Right So they announce "The Race to Linux project" at the MPDC which is exactly what Mono lots you do but they bar Mono from the Confrence???
I must be missing something here...
"I reject your reality, and substitute my own" - Adam Savage
I'm not convinced that MS' only road to victory is to destroy everyone. I know it has kind of worked for them in the past but maybe they should consider other alternatives. I don't understand why they don't port .Net over to Linux. People who are using Linux now aren't going to stop because there's no .Net. So what's the point? Why not just get half a loaf of bread and get people to use .Net at least even if it's not on Windows. If MS really wants .Net to take off, they need to ensure that it's adopted by as many people as possible. Otherwise people will continue to look to Java and other languages for cross-platform applications.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
It is correct to say that Microsoft can choose who they want to attend the conference. There's no disputing that. Technically, they don't even have to give a reason. HOWEVER, when a reason is given and it is blatantly and willfully deceptive or untrue, then it is not so much the barring as the use of FUD to damage competition unfairly.
Forget the barring. Ignore it. It isn't the important part of the situation. What is important is whether it is correct to say that other conference-goers are being given a line intended to intimidate or coerce. THAT is the important part, the conference itself is irrelevant.
You should also forget the rights a normal competitor has in the US. As a legally-declared monopolist, supposedly monitored for potential malpractice as ordered by the courts, and as an organization fighting the necessity for increased openness as decided by EU courts, Microsoft is (in theory) limited in what it can do to use negative advertising for causing willful harm to competitors.
If this was a "normal" situation, with a "normal" company, very little of this would matter one way or the other. This is NOT a normal situation, and Microsoft was ruled a monopolist by both the US and EU, making it definitely NOT a typical player in a free market.
Actually, the EU situation is probably the most relevant here, as it is entirely possible that the example of Mono may well be usable by the EU as proof that Microsoft's counter-case over the penalties and openness of its standards are without merit. If Microsoft is willing to obstruct a free market, even when in court for doing so, then it cannot be trusted to not do so by choice at any other time.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I recall reading something a long while ago that claim that the samba guys knew more about the workings of SMB than MS does.
I wouldn't find a statement surprising as when you deal with a *project* you can do as much or as little as you want, thus its members stay stable and pass info around. With a *product* you have employees who jockey for status, don't pass around info, come and go.
being a control freak doesn't always get you to the place you want to go. (Today?)
That's a good insight. I remember .Net being presented back in 2001 as the next Java, with the word "Framework" substituted for "Virtual Machine". As the years have gone by, I keep waiting for it to "become" Java, but all we've got to show for it is an architecture with the speed of Java (slow) and the portability of a native Win32 exe (not portable at all).
I don't understand how people can get so enamoured of the .NET world, devote their professional careers to C# and the MS universe, and then wonder what happened when MS decides to zig when they want to zag.
.NET just broke all their code in Windows Vista, but you can bet you'll see it on the blogs of less experienced coders.
Seriously. I see Spolsky and Sink congratulating themselves on how well they've managed to sneak out of the MS sandbox with clever PHP translation schemes and the like.
Gosh, guys, you don't have to give Redmond the remote control to your shock collars just because you want a little bit of leverage writing code.
Work a little bit harder and you can be free of Microsoft and in control of your own destiny. You won't see the Mozilla foundation complaining about how
You're missing two important points:
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Eh, no.
;-)
You can make GTK+ apps with MONO and C# for Linux without using any propietary MS IP.
What they can pull the plug on in on ASP.NET. Of course, you can always run your ASP.NET app trough Grasshoper and turn it into a JAVA app
So now they are stuck. They are still *trying* to kill Java, but in the end they are realizing that they have built their own worst enemy.
Heh. This is just like IE and Firefox.
By using the monopolic practice of embedding Internet Explorer in Windows, Microsoft opened to the gates (no pun intended) to the information superhighway, without realizing that this would allow people to get organized and fight against their own monopoly - not only with Firefox, but also with other competing projects like OpenOffice.org, and now, Mono.
This is so.... ironic. And funny. Reminds me of the typical story about a wizard who summons a monster to rule the world, and then the monster kills him.
"Except that there's no proof that mono itself will scale on those platforms and P4 and AMD64 aren't exactly lightweights these days."
.NET will not scale on those platforms because it does not run on those platforms.
.NET development. Sure, Microsoft are the only ones that can do anything about the runtime but there are literally thousands of vendors of .NET components (most of whom only support .NET on windows)."
.NET. Imagine if Miguel put all that work into a better JVM for linux.
But there is lots of proof the
"YOu gotta be kidding me. In reality, there more many more companies supporting
He was talking about the runtime, not components.
"Mono's VM, although continuously improving is not as stable as Microsoft's and their class library isn't either complete or, again, as stable as Microsft's."
I agree, furthermore it will never catch up. MS will make sure of that. If by some miracle mono does close the gap they will be sued and that will stop them in their tracks.
Mono just doesn't make sense to me. Not when you java already exists, runs on every platform mono runs on, has proven to scale to massive proportions, can run on the tiniest of devices, had great IDEs, and is already mature and baked.
It was a fools errand to try and reverse engineer
evil is as evil does
I worked at Microsoft game division a year prior the xbox launch. MS is SO clueless, they had projects for the PS2 going on. Needless to say one day they had a huge meeting...
Just to say I'm not surprised
So then why did INETA accept the application for a slot? If they didn't think it was appropriate, why not simply reject the request for a slot, instead of trying to act like it didn't happen?
Miguel didn't say anything about "infuriating" in his blog. I'm sure the anonymous coward or ScuttleMonkey (whoever added that) was really infuriated (rolls eyes) over this.
So much wasted energy on rabid hatred of Microsoft. Give it a rest
You have apparently been fallen for the FUD from MSFT. This is totally not true. I have been developing very large java appications for years, and we've moved from 1.1 through 1.4 (and for trials I've used 1.5) in large banking applications. Everything has been perfectly backwards compatible, except for a few obscure bugs. Show me any code that doesn't have bugs.
For years we have been developing in a group of 20 developers. We didn't have anything standardized but 1.3. Everyone was developing on a different 1.3 version, and deployment was on yet another. I 2 years time this situation endured we have NEVER seen any version problems at all. We use mainly J2EE (serlvets, EJB, corba, JDBC) but no applets.
The only problematic area has been applets/swing in version 1.1, and especially the incompatability for those when switching from, you guess, MSFTs crippled java implementation to Sun.
It is very sad that to this day, so much time after MSFT's ploy to sabotage Java by bringing incompatible versions, people still believe this story. Please don't give MSFT so much satisfaction by repeating such nonsense, grrrrr.
I agree, furthermore it will never catch up. MS will make sure of that. If by some miracle mono does close the gap they will be sued and that will stop them in their tracks.
.NET APIs, just like no open source Java implementation will ever catch up with Sun on Java APIs.
.NET, it's done in Gtk+ and other toolkits.
Of course, Mono will not catch up with Microsoft on
The difference is that with Mono, it doesn't matter. Open source software development and cross platform development in Mono is not primarily done in
Not when you java already exists, runs on every platform mono runs on, has proven to scale to massive proportions, can run on the tiniest of devices, had great IDEs, and is already mature and baked.
Repeating a lie often enough doesn't make it true. Java does not run on my Linux box, for example, while Mono does. Java has not "proven to scale" any more than Mono has; and while Sun was pushing Java for enterprise apps, their runtime had horrendous memory leaks. Finally, Java is not mature, it's frozen; there is a difference.
Imagine if Miguel put all that work into a better JVM for linux.
Then we would be stuck with yet another incomplete implementation of Java, a language and a set of APIs, many people have already decided not to use.
After years of programming Java, I have gone back to C++; Java simply isn't working out. Unlike Java, however, C# is worth another try.
The whole concept of Mono is somewhat confounding to me. Why not just implement something new? Why spend so much time recoding the .NET API?? When I first heard of Mono I thought that it was cool that existing .NET apps could potentially run in Linux. Then I realized that I don't give a ____ about these apps anyway. And I gaurantee I won't bother running some GPhoto type application in Windows. Anyone who uses this is just going to be using Linux anyway. On the server end.. I have to wonder what the ROI would be for porting apps from Windows-IIS/.NET to Linux/Mono.NET. It seems like a complete waste of time. Also, most people that write cross platform apps simply don't care about .NET and won't bother learning it, even if it really is as cool as Miguel says. Most of the Mac/Linux types quit coding on Windows a long time ago. Those that still do code on Windows usually do it as their job, which is usually in a position they've had for 5+ years.
.NETv2, complete with a whole new API and super-duper-mega-active server pages. Of course all of the IIS users (which will remain 99% of the .NET users) will pretty much have to "upgrade." Then the Mono developers get to do it all over again when they could have just started from an existing cross-platform kit or just created their own. Mono seems so much like a ship going way off course whith no one on board willing to question the path.
There are so many other ways to create cross platform code in a non-MS API. QT and WxWidgets are both quite nice. I do admit that I might consider Mono over Java though. If only just to avoid the "Java trap." Of course this only matters if I want to do some GPL type coding.
Sooner or later MS is going to put out
I hope I'm wrong though. If what the Mono developers say is true than it will be really exciting down the line. I've become pretty skeptical over the years though.. It's already been over a year since Mono 1.0 and I can't name one commonly used cross platform Mono/.NET app. There certainly seems to be way more resources getting dumped into it than results coming out.
*prepares for the flames*
From the article
.NET development tools available for alternative platforms, such as Linux."
"the majority were not interested in having
Certified, compatible implementations are available for just about any relevant platform you can imagine (yes, probably not for BSD's but that's because they are not relevant).
In comparison, .NET framework is really available only for Windows, mono doesn't cut it.
Do you mean that anyone should be able to extend or modify the "standard" Java APIs anyway they choose? Why? To ensure that only their virtual machine can be used to run a particular piece of software? I think that Microsoft tried to do just that in the 90's, and got sued.
Licensees can *implement* the API's in any way they choose, as long as the API does what it's supposed to do thus ensuring compatability between different virtual machines.
I don't know if there is something in Sun's licensing policies which prevent a fully GPL'ed SDK being done by someone, but I really couldn't care less about "open source" Java SDK or runtime environment. SDK's are essentially free anyway and they work well; whether they are open source or closed source is totally irrelevant.
A benign but exploitable control signed by MS (for example) can be forced on a user by a malicious site and then used to compromise their machine. i.e. the trust model is completely broken.
Microsoft have been increasingly deemphasizing ActiveX because of all the problems with it. I think that IE7 is going to be extremely restrictive of what ActiveX controls can do. ActiveX controls are bad news and even MS know it.
So what's going to replace it? I expect to see XAML and .NET being pitched as the alternative solution for sites that want interactive content. In theory a .NET application could run in a sandbox mode just like Java and still provide useful functionality but it really depends what security policy MS set and how the secure the design and implementation are before knowing that.
Java is, firstly, really slow, throw all the benchmarks you like at me but anything that uses swing gui (and any other gui kills the whole WORA point or java) is intolerably slow on my 800mhz system (click button, wait half a second for menu to appear), and easy as it is for slashdotters to forget this machine is still about the average spec. No, I'm not using an old JVM, no, I'm not short of memory, no, I'm not running other apps at the same time, no, I'm not going to upgrade my system when every other program under the sun performs fine. Secondly, it's horribly locked into OOP, which may be the dominant paradigm at the moment but isn't appropriate for everything and may well be overtaken in the process. Thirdly, it's too difficult to call into java, from another language. Java libraries are almost useless if you decide to move on to something else. It's easy enough, though not as easy as it should be, to call out of java via JNI, but embedding it into another program is another story. Java is, ultimately, a dead end.
I am trolling
.NET has the wonderful language mixing capability and is worth reversing for that alone.
I am trolling
There have been a lot of reports out of Redmond to the effect that Microsoft is being strangled by internal politics and endless meetings. The most recent report, and a very significant one, is a cover story article in next week's Business Week magazine.
In that article, Ballmer comes across as being out of touch and in denial of the problems. It is no wonder why Microsoft is unable to put forth a coherent and consistent strategy on anything.
We build it, integrate it so gnome can't live without it, then they kill gnome by charging for builds. Bam. Gnome is dead on that day.
;)
Harsh as this may sound, I am actually hoping this happens. It would have a number of very necessary consequences:
- the entire OSS community would learn to never ever rely on proprietary tech again, it would lead to a code purge in the major projects, where the line between open source and proprietary has been getting increasingly blurry (like the linux driver including proprietary firmware, or X relying on proprietary drivers for credible 3D use).
- with gnome dead everyone would standardize on KDE, which would be a dramatic advancement. Not that I have anything against gnome, KDE could die just as well, but regardless, either these guys work out a way to truly have their desktops interact, or one of them is going to have to die. The current situation leads to too many problems that the end user sees for a truly useful desktop product to ever result from it.
- the EU would likely go after MS again. This is always a good thing. No explanation necessary
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Mono is basically a dance with the Devil. Now Mono is surprised they have fleas after laying the big Dog, but I'm mixing metaphors. With M$ themselves distancing themselves from .Net proper Mono is facing less adoption.
I like what Miguel is doing with mono.
.Net (about 50-50), running SQL Server as a backend.
.Net will be complete), this is a viable option.
The reason I like it that I write C# for a living. I maintain a web application. Originally this was written in classic asp. It is currently a hybrid with some classic asp and some
With mono there is the possibility that I can port this to run under Linux. Postgress being the replacement for SQL Server. Now I haven't looked at this in depth yet, but in a year or so (by which time the migration to
Mono offers a practical upgrade path. The only other options are a clean rewrite in another language. The would take a minimum of 9 months, during which time no features would be added to the product.
meh