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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.
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..
The news part is "but they actively have misrepresented things." Maybe MS misrepresenting things is not news either, but at least this is a new case of it. Mono didn't get enough votes to get in the conference, because they were not allowed on the supposedly "open" ballot.
There I fixed that for you.
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
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
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.
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
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:
This sig intentionally left blank.
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!!!!
Except that they're not held to a double standard. Microsoft sits on the boards for OpenGL and a lot of other standards. Microsoft has been to Linuxworld and other open-source or Linux conferences. They also show up at Macworld and other Apple conferences.
They might grumble a lot, but Open Source supporters seem to have given Microsoft as many rights as anyone else in the community may have. Microsoft doing a MONO/.net promotion at a Linux conference would be completely acceptable.
The ______ Agenda
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
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.
"Nonsense. Mono is quite clean of Microsoft intellectual "property". There is no legal threat to the Mono project."
m ent_id=32499
.net as their claim that MS will never sue.
m ailserver.di.unip.....
*said by a Novell representative* Oh, wait!
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=11889&com
"1. It is not illegal to use mono or to develop mono.
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://
http://www.go-mono.com/faq.html#patents
Jim Miller's off hand email is the *only* assurance anyone has every 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.
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. 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 bye 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 and some gnome developers again)"
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
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?
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).
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...:-( )
...because Mono exists, I tell them: "Yeah right, and Windows is cross-platform because WINE exists"
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
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
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