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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.
It is their conference, and they have every right to control what they will allow to be shown there. Is this news?
Sounds like left hand doesn't know what the right is doing.. Today's early "Race to Linux" thread about porting .Net linked to this article, which explicitly mentions mono as being an allowable language. This just seems odd to me, expecially because its also sponsored by the very same Microsoft Professional Developers Conversation..
There I fixed that for you.
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
Film at 11...
Come on now, is anyone surprised by churlish behavior by MS towards the Mono developers? Does "Samba" ring a bell?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Wake up with fleas
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
Hands? Don't you mean tentacles?
Do you Gentoo?
The conference is all about .Net -- its a monologue, dammit.
since when was linux a japanese schoolgirl
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Right. It doesn't.
.Net into a Java killer. And they recognized that to do this, it must be cross platform. And to have an edge on Java, it must be an open standard (which Java is not). So Microsoft tried to engineer the perfect Java Killer. Unfortunately for them, .Net is likely to be a more effective Windows killer than a Java killer..... 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.
I used to work at Microsoft and they have so much disorganized legacy strategy floating around that effectively keeps them from doing anything threating.
Ever wonder why Microsoft offered help to the Mono project at first? Because they wanted to make
So this largely explains their dilema, their disorganization, and their self-defeating strategy.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
But when the guy essentially works for Novell, what the fuck did he expect? They didn't let the Oracle folks in either, eh?
The zealotosphere will of course take this personally and another round of "OMFG TEH M$ IS TEH EVIL!!1!" is forthcoming. That's fine. Just remember that Microsoft is not into giving competitors slots on their conferences just so they can come across as being nice. The PDC is not an all-access proletarian gig. If Icaza was still independent I'd put good money on him getting into the PDC to demo his stuff. With the Novell t-shirt however, things are a little different.
Oh, and BTW... OS News and every two-bit blog out there had this days ago. Slashdot is late to the party - again.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
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)
Microsoft is behaving exactly the same way they've always behaved.
Look, Miguel, it's pretty simple. You go play in the sandbox with a reknown bully, you eat sand. Most people figure this out before their sixth birthday. You want to do this mono thing, fine, but you _are_ going to get screwed every time you venture into Microsoft's playground and you aren't going to get a lick of sympathy from the rest of the world when it happens.
c.
Log in or piss off.
when they drop the hammer on the GNOME/mono group for using their IP, they will be able to tell the truth in court (for once) that they have never supported this project. In addition,they never fully understood how much of their IP this project walked on (I wonder if they can do that with a straight face?).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The Roman empire, as others, was built by dominating all possible enemies, or politically playing them off against each other. This works okay for a while, but eventually it always seems to lead to the empire's undoing.
The Roman Catholic church, following the fall of the Roman empire, in turn conquered much of the world by assimilation and adaptation.
Perhaps MS will take this lesson from history one day before it is too late?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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 wouldn't expect Microsoft to have a .NET Birds of a Feather group at a Linux conference. It probably wouldn't go over well with the attendees, I can just imagine everyone attending the MS BOF pointing out how what MS hasn't done for Linux. Furthermore, the sponsors may have political issues with them having a slot in the conference.
It seems very silly to hold them to a double standard. Microsoft is under no obligation to cater to Novell and their associates. Just as you would not expect groups associated with Linux to be under any obligation to cater for Microsoft.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
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
1. It is not illegal to use mono or to develop mono.
.net as their claim that MS will never sue.
.net ecma standards ever has been comparably free.
2. C#/.net libraries are ECMA standards
However,
1. Microsoft has the right to charge a RAND (reasonable and non-descriminatory) fee at any time for the use of these standards.
2. They have never, ever, stated in any binding way that they would not do so in the future.
3. *any* fee, even minimal would result in the instant death of any OSS project dependent on those standards.
4. RAND can (and frequently does in the proprietary software world) mean several dollars per download! Or requiring build licenses for all developers producing binaries (every end user of gentoo for example!) that are in the hundreds of $ range. These are all reasonable and non-descriminatory in that context!
Miguel De Icasa and Ximian/Mono people *know* this full well but don't want to admit how dangerous mono adoption is for the gnome community. They cite a BS casual mailing list post from the head engineer of
See how much crap this is for yourself (from official Mono faq):
http://web.archive.org/web/20030609164123/http://m ailserver.di.unip.....
http://www.go-mono.com/faq.html#patents
Jim Miller's off hand email is the *only* assurance anyone has ever received that MS would never charge a RAND fee! If this were truly MS's commitment then they could release a statement or legally commit themselves to that! This email is not not not legally binding people! Until MS makes a legally binding agreement to never charge for use of these standards, it is not ok to use mono!
See also Seth Nickels' blog on this subject "Why Mono is currently an unnacceptable risk":
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/2004/May
The two main arguments against what I'm saying are realy crap also:
1. Java is also proprietary:
Yes but Sun has licensed Java in such a way that they are legally prohibited from charging *any* royalties at all for existing releases of Java. We know with 100% certainty that Sun will never try and collect any RAND fee. Ever. The situation with Java is totally different for this reason. Even if Sun changed its mind or was purchased by a less generous company (like MS for example), existing releases of Java and alternative implementations based on existing released specs would always remain free as in beer. The no version of the
2. You are always infringing somewhere, worrying about this is wasting your time:
True, there is always a danger of unknowingly infringing. However, in this case mono is knowingly using patented software. If MS decided to collect or sue, mono and gnome would have absolutely zero defense! Furthermore, MS is well known for destroying threatening companies when it suits them to do so! They have done this many times in the past. Remeber how they *lost* an anti-trust lawsuit? It is because they are agressive, unscrupulous and incredibly rich and illegal monopoly that used its power to destroy competition. They can and will crush gnome if gnome threatens MS! Mono is the ultimate submarine. 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.
Take Away: Mono is cool but way too dangerous. Smart people and companies are staying away from it (which turns out to be *most* companies by the way. That is why Redhat and others are pushing Java as an alternative). People who back mono either have motive (ximian), are misinformed (most of the people on this forum), or just dumb (people who are really drooling over the potential of mono so they are ignoring the risk, probably ximian a
Here you hear once more that developers who buy into .NET are not interested in developing or targeting other platforms other than Windows. Those who would want to have Linux then rather use PHP, Perl, etc. That is so crazy and ignorant that it doesn't make any sense! Or maybe, the people expressing those opinions are not "Real Software Engineers" -- or good business people for that matter.
.NET 2003 quite regularly. In fact, now that I have discovered the beauty of VMWare, it will be that much more comfortable to create projects in Visual Studio that are resting on a VMWare shared folder and use them instantly in the Linux host.
.NET 2003 with the intention to deploy and run in Windows boxes whose only .NET Framework runtime is the Mono for Windows SDK.
.NET developer that only wants to use .NET in Windows would be as silly as a PC user back in 1987 who only wanted to use IBM hardware.
.NET will be much bigger -- and better for everyone -- than Microsoft .NET alone.
.NET developer at the PDC or elsewhere that would not grin once he/she sees their application running on Linux or Mac OS X?
It is NOT an all or nothing proposition. You can develop in Visual Studio and very well target Linux, Mac OS X and anything else that runs Mono. As much as I use the totally cool MonoDevelop (a.k.a Bad Ass IDE of the future), I still use Visual Studio
But make no mistake, that is just one of those rich kids whim of mine. I have, for the past two years, used a Windows box that has mapped drives to my Samba enabled Linux boxes to achieved the same effect.
One must also keep in mind the great utility of Mono's Windows incarnation. Thanks to my add-in (sorry for the shameless plug) you can use Visual Studio and test in Mono without having a Linux or Mac OS box anywhere in sight. In some cases, I very purposefully create Mono applications using handy dandy Visual Studio
In the early 1980's IBM put out the specifications for the PC and regardless of what were their intentions back then, the world of IT has become what it is today because of all of the innovations that we later had by contributors like Compaq, Dell, HP, Apple, Toshiba and many others.
Today, being a
I say we have an extremely similar situation with the original submission from Microsoft to the ECMA of the C# language and the CLI specification. Now, in 2005, you have a great group of contributors that include Novell, Microsoft, IBM, HP and many others.
But perhaps the most striking difference from my IBM PC analogy is the role of the individual contributor. You see, I want to suggest that Open Source
No really, from a business perspective, you would have to be brain damaged to create an application or system of any sort and not hope that it can run in as many platforms (meaning customers that are willing to pay) as possible!
So you mean to tell me that there is some
For GOD sake, GET A CLUE!!!!
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).
And the security of ActiveX.....
Actually, it is not too unportable via Mono, but I worry about a non-sandboxed security model based on digital signatures.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
You hit the nail on the head. Mono is the only choice for a serious C# application. Unfortunately, the rest of the industry figured this out years ago and wrote all their code in java, which runs on all the platforms you mentioned and has nothing to do with microsoft. Why you wouldn't use an existing and mature cross platform language that is non-microsoft is beyond me.
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
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.
It's obvious that Mono will NEVER be able to run every .NET application. As soon as Microsoft starts seeing Mono as a thread, something will happen.
BTW, where's the big wave of .NET applications?
If you can read this, thank an english teacher.
Woah. Talk about delusional.
.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).
For high-end computing - Mono runs on Sparc, S390, and Power support, Mono's really the only choice for high-end computing platforms.
Except that there's no proof that mono itself will scale on those platforms and P4 and AMD64 aren't exactly lightweights these days.
For embedded designs - Mono runs on ARM with MIPS soon to come, which makes Mono really the only choice for embedded platforms.
Well the compact framework runs on those processors too as does Portable.NET/DOTGNU.
For businesses - Many companies are able to provide support for the Mono engine, only one is able to support microsoft's implementaion. Any rational business will not allow any product that's sole-sourced from a single vendor, whether it's screws, bolts, gasoline, or software engines. With Microsoft's implemention your business is left at the whims of a single vendor who can pull the rug out from you whenever they feel like (remember Visual Basic 6, and the contempt MSFT showed business relying on that platform).
YOu gotta be kidding me. In reality, there more many more companies supporting
Basically, for any serious C# application, Mono is the only choice.
That's really delusional you know. Most C# applications being written today are on ASP.NET and SWF apps written for windows (many are internal custom applications).
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. There is also no decent IDE for mono (monodevelop is so far away from being able to compete with visual studio or borland's offering that it's not funny).
Only in Japan would Linux be a Japanese schoolgirl.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
"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
de Icaza reportedly hurled his chair across the room and yelled, "I'll bury them!"
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
Microsoft's dominance in the corporate workstation market is largely due to superior development tools (compared to other rivals) for line of business tools.
.NET and Windows.Forms.
.Net's goal.
.NET. Unlike Windows.Forms though Avalon will not be part of the .NET standard (it will be under the Microsft namespace) and will be very dependent on Vista technology. Developers will flock to this to make their applications "Vista-friendly" and kill cross platform interop with Windows.Forms.
.Net to be this dangerous to them. But it is extremely dangerous.
.Net to kill Java and Software Assurance to lock people into subscription contracts, but people forgot about Linux....
For other tools (large scale/higher performance, nice-looking apps), MFC/VC++ is still the way to go.
Native calling is pretty easy to do in >NET and many developers use Win32 calls to gain missing (perhaps purposely) in
Sure but how many line of business apps need this? How many benefit from this? This was not
Avalon is going to be Vista's killer API and it will be exposed through
Line of business tools again?
The point though is that Mono makes it much easier to move from a Microsoft-centered shop to a Linux-centered shop. Even with Avalon, this is still a reality. Now with Avalon, I still think that you are going to see quick Linux compatibility develop, and so Microsoft will have a number of problems keeping developers there.
You have another issue. How many companies are still running Windows 2000 primarily? How fast will Vista be adopted?
I don't think that they ever intended to allow
The original strategy was to go with
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Sure, we *could* pass Win32 calls to WINE (hoping they work), but that defeats the whole point of using .NET to be a truly cross platform development API. We might as well ditch Mono and just focus on getting the Microsoft .NET runtime to work over WINE by your philosophy.
.NET for themselves, but the dream of "write once, run everywhere" is at risk if using native calls and Avalon becomes norm rather than the exception.
Native function calls and Avalon pose a major problem in having applications developed with only Windows in mind working on Linux. Of course Linux developers can still benefit from using
I admit to being somewhat of the loop on this. I used to Gnome, I ditched it when they dropped Sawfish in favor of Metacity.
.NET? And no, I wouldn't have gone Java.
But I was interested when they came to this conclusion that some sort of Application Development Framework, over and above what they could iron out of C(++) was needed. What I don't get is why
Why not go with Objective-C? Want the memory manager, link with libgc. It works GREAT! And if you don't feel the need to play ever catch up with Apple, you can link the GNUstep stuff with libgc, and fork off in your own direction. It's amazing to me what the GNUstep guys are able to do with such a small amount of developers. And then you can start playing with the StepTalk stuff being done in GNUstep, which gives you a *really* fluid application toolset. You get the C, the objects, the messages, the elegance (i.e. no need for the language to bolt on another 20 features every rev because it somehow never really figured out what it wanted to be, nee Java), and the uber fluid Smalltalk stuff at the top. And you can pick and choose, so you don't have the religous flamewars.
Am I on Slashdot??!?! Oh. Sorry. You caught me on my soapbox in front of my mirror.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
Reminds me of the typical story about a wizard who summons a monster to rule the world, and then the monster kills him.
Or instead of killing him, the monster just throws a chair at him.
Great analogy. But really, what more do you expect -- if you read up on innovation, you'll see that this happens all the time -- Micro$oft isn't going to cannibalize themselves voluntarily, but it will get them in the end.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Wrong on both counts.
.Net apps can (and in fact, do) require specific versions of certain libraries, or even certain versions of the runtime itself. When an app is built, it is built against a specific version of the runtime, and when run it will be run against the same versions. So if you only have .Net 2.0 installed (assuming Microsoft don't bundle 1.1 and 1.0 with it as well), you may well find yourself in a position where 1.0 and 1.1 apps no longer work. This is intentional, by design, and there's nothing you can do about it. You simply have to install multiple versions of the runtime.
C# /
Java apps may require a certain minimum version of Java, but I've never, ever seen a Java app require a specific version of Java unless the app itself is broken in some way. I've run stuff from Java 1.0 on a current Java 1.5 runtime, and it still works as well as it ever did (better, in fact).
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.
That is some strange history writing...
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
The CLR proves zonal security, which can be set at the enterprise, machine and user levels. By default you get Full Trust, Skip Verification, Execution, Nothing, Local Intranet, Internet and Everything. Don't like those zones? You can create your own and provide the conditions for an executable or loaded assembly to be placed in them. For example I have c:\sandbox\internet in the Internet zone. Any CLR exec I drop in there runs under that zone, despite being on the local hard drive, which by default has Full Trust.
Better still you have CAS, which allows you to specify what permissions you need. The permissions are granular and you can create your own should you need to. If the zone your code is starting in does not have the permissions you request the CLR will not run it. You can also request optional permissions, so if you optionally request to save to local hard drives, and you don't get it, you can remove that menu option/functionality.
So there is a CLR sandbox, there has always been a CLR sandbox. It's not ActiveX.
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*
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.
Developers: Mono Cock Blocked from MS Conference
What the hell are you talking about? If your applications really need that strict version numbering, you must be doing something really wrong. I have been a Java developer for 8 years and I know this for a fact.
Hey, wasn't Java supposed to be cross platform or something? Those poor *BSD people don't have someone like IBM behind them to pay for the certification.
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.
So in which way is Sun Java policies any different in effect than Microsoft's .NET policies?
SDK's are essentially free anyway and they work well; whether they are open source or closed source is totally irrelevant.
That is true only when you look at the initial cost and ignore anything after it.
...because Mono exists, I tell them: "Yeah right, and Windows is cross-platform because WINE exists"
On top of that Microsoft is pushing things called Application Blocks (ABs) which a useful bits of functionality such as logging and caching. There is already an enterprise library version of the ABs (backend stuff mostly) and MS is poised to release ABs for UI development for .NET 2.0. In theory this sounds like a great idea, but you just have to grep the source of these ABs for PInvoke and you realise they're infested with Win32 calls. So anyone who uses an AB may unwittingly be tying themselves to Win32.
I suppose in theory, the ABs could be fixed to remove the calls - calls to high performance timers and so on - but where is the pressure going to be to do that? Microsoft most certainly won't care to do it, and I suspect there will be all kinds of rules to prevent developers doing it.
So at the end of the day whether .NET is allegedly cross-platform, the reality is that it isn't. Not while MS continue to push and enable native calls by default.
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
Now, I'll admit it's not always perfect, but in my experience it works. I work on a large LOB application, which has been developed for the 1.0 framework. It runs fine (in fact, it runs somewhat better) on the 1.1 framework.
The only work we had to do to enable this was add a few lines to the configuration files on the machines which had both 1.0 and 1.1 frameworks installed. This forced the applications to use a specific version (1.1), not the version they were compiled against. I believe the middle-tier components, which are web services hosted in IIS, required a similar tweak to the IIS configuration.
Requiring specific versions of other libraries may well be an issue - I've not had any experience one way or the other. The project I work on deploys all the required dependencies alongside the application files, which I would expect to mitigate most versioning issues with the libraries we use.
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.
Swing may be slow and crappy, java is definately not. The compromise in speed that you make in a large Java application compared to a large C++ program is negligable for most application development, and of course development in a modern OO language is much easier. Plus the tools for java such as IntelliJ and Eclipse are still a year or two ahead of microsofts intellistudio and about 5 or 6 years ahead of open source development tools.
.NET platform.
Java on desktop linux will die unless a good open implementation becomes popular like harmony/GCJ etc. Java is of course firmly entrenched in many banks and large development companies because its the only modern development platform suitable for large scale cost efficient development that isn't tied to Microsoft. It's also become increasingly popular to write large multiplayer online game backends in Java.
To make out that being a modern OO language is a disadvantage is laughable. It's a bit like saying "I'm still going to use my horse'n'cart because cars are just fad and soon we'll all be flying planes." Sure, the java platforms isn't suitable for people who haven't learnt modern development practices of for hacking togethor small or temporary scripts, but that's not it's core market.
I wouldn't declare Java dead yet, given the only viable alternatively currently is the
What???
Java does not run on my Linux box, for example, while Mono does.
I work on Redhat, CentOS, Debian and Mandrake boxes and each and every one of those runs Java just fine.
Java has not "proven to scale" any more than Mono has;
Right, all the Fortune 500 companies use Mono for their enterprise apps instead of Java. (Yes, that is sarcasm.)
and while Sun was pushing Java for enterprise apps, their runtime had horrendous memory leaks.
Yeah, version 1.1 was buggy, but that was ages ago. Early linux versions were not so great either. Software can improve, you know.
Finally, Java is not mature, it's frozen; there is a difference.
Have you even looked at Java 5? The list of improvements is enormous.
Come on. There are plenty of real reasons to praise Mono. Don't try to make up false ones.
The entire Mono project is based on the false assumption that Microsoft will bestow its blessings on those who clone .Net (and its tools). Given Microsoft's predatory and paranoid history, I can't imagine why Miguel persists in his Quixotic quest.
All about me
This happened with the whole BitMover/BitKeeper(TM:) debacle, and it seems that nobody had learned from it.
Is Sun nervous because Blackdown has made their own JDK? I highly doubt it.
Blackdown didn't make their own JDK; they just ported Sun's code to platforms where it didn't run before - and, of course, with Sun's permission.
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).
Thank you very much, but I want to decide for myself which platforms are relevant.
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.
There are no third party Java implementations at all, whether commercial or open source or free. Java isn't a language or a platform, it's a proprietary implementation from Sun that's been ported to a few platforms by various licensees.
SDK's are essentially free anyway and they work well; whether they are open source or closed source is totally irrelevant.
I've been through this cycle several times before: whether platforms are proprietary or open does matter a lot. You'll eventually figure it out for yourself when you have to stop shipping a product or pay inflated licensing fees.
"... the entire OSS community would learn to never ever rely on proprietary tech again, ... (continues) ... with gnome dead everyone would standardize on KDE ..."
*sigh*
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup