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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. 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
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!!!!
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)"
Its somewhat worse than that, Miguel has not only wasted his time, but he's suckered a large number of others developers in to expending massive effort on Mono. It is interesting and all, but it was as nearly as I can tell a complete waste of time, that could have been better spent on Java or standards not completely dominated by Microsoft. Now if there were interesting .NET web sites all over the Internet I wanted to use and had to have Mono to use on any non Windows platform then yes it would serve its purpose, I just don't think I've encountered such a web site. Are there any?
Not sure I grok why Miguel has such icon status in the open source world, he doesn't seem to have very good judgment.
@de_machina
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).
...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