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Fedora Core 5 includes Mono
cyberjessy writes "Surprise! The Fedora Core 5 Release will include Mono in the distribution, in spite of Red Hat's opposition. In addition to the Mono runtime, it will also include Mono applications like Beagle and F-Spot. Is the Linux community finally ready to accept Mono? Mono is becoming increasing important due to Windows Vista, which has WinFX (the next .Net Framework) as its core API. This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono. Will Mono achieve what WINE could not?"
Yes, off topic, but it's nice to see a well written and concise topic summary around here once in a while.
The strategy for dealing with patents is discussed on the Wikipedia article about Mono. It is not a well thought out strategy.
It's probably good that Mono exists, it may have uses in some situations. It may help people get out of .Net related lock-in, but in general it should not be built upon.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
I don't really care about windows programs running on linux, though this is of course an interesting subject.
What's more important is that the stupid infighting about what role mono could play in Gnome can now finally end.
Mono seems to offer something that many people like and can now finally simply be used to build great programs for Gnome (just like pythong, jave, etc.), without being preoccupied with Fedora and thus a large Gnome distribution not shipping mono.
First time the "Kissing Disease" has ever been accessable to geeks.
.Net apps, but I can't help but think we'd be better off with another language. .Net is so freaking encumbered.
.Net apps on Linux servers...
One the one hand, I'm all in favor of open source alternatives, and it adds a lot to linux to be able to run
Still, it'd be nice to be able to host
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It's the kissing disease, you know. Our little OS is growing up! :)
This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono. .NET? .NET in the near future.
Will all major Windows applications be rewritten to
I just can't imagine Adobe, Autodesk, Corel, etc. translating their code to
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And this is probably what MS had in mind all along. And I don't see it changing either. Microsoft make it easy to slap together apps with their stack and tools. Mono makes it hard to do the same with theirs. That means Mono will constantly be playing catch-up with Microsoft, reaching for but never getting close to 100% compatibility.
This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono.
How about
This may mean that in the future, some native Windows applications will run on Linux, with Mono.
Not a chance. All of the MS application base (including the new ".NET" stuff) still depends on the underlying Win32 system functions, DLLs, etc. The newer interpreted APIs are just wrappers around the older stuff.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The question is: Will Mono support these new features, and if so, when?
"The problematic parts are not the core technologies submitted to the ECMA or the Unix/Gnome-specific parts."
The problem (software patents) can affect any part. If MS have claimed they don't have patents on "core parts", you cannot trust them. If the Mono devs have claimed that MS don't have patents on "core parts", they are saying something they can't possibly know.
As well as including "according to the public statements of MS and the Mono devs", you should also read that sentence with the qualification: "for now anyway".
if you say something is not well thought out, also saying why
The reasons why their plan is not well though out are given in that article, in the last paragraph of that section, just after the list of the 3 strategies.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Sadly the portage system is written in Python, which is my point. Gentoo depends on Python. A simple clean design would have Gentoo consist of a kernel, binutils, compiler stack, init scripts, and portage written in C and depending on the C library only. Instead the portage system pulls in Python for no particular reason. By all means use Python as an application language. Foundational system services should not be written in it.
an ill wind that blows no good
This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono Maby, but Mono is sorta like java. the .Net Programs will be portable as long as the developers don't use Microsoft APIs like java is portable to gcj as long as you don't use the com.sun.* packages etc.
Mono is becoming increasing important due to Windows Vista
As a developer, I have great concern over how Vista will muddle the Windows landscape. Microsoft is creating a situation where developers have to build and test for way too many Windows platforms.
That is, many developers and network administrators use Windows 2000 exclusively and most other pros and home users use XP -- and my father in law still uses Windows 98. NONE of these people have any intention of upgrading to Vista. So Vista will likely only be installed on new PCs
It's getting to the point where there's just too many versions of Windows out there to support:
Win 98 SE
Win 2k Workstation and Server(s)
Win XP Home and Pro
Win Vista??
And the pointy-haired-bosses will continue to shout that *all* versions of Windows must be supported. That means more development, more testing, more installers, more deep sighs.
The "write once run anywhere" of Java is becoming more attractive all the time.
boxlight
Winforms on mono is not complete yet and it will be a long time before a compatibility WinFX layer is ready. Mono is great for what it is, not for what it could be.
Cheers,
Adolfo
..... why wasn't the Open Source clone of the "C#" programming language called "Db" ?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
If you know better, and think it should have been written in C, I', sure the present developers would be very interested in seeing your port.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The whole "run Win-apps under Linux" really is a little misleading. That's not really the point of Mono for most users.
The point, rather, is that it is a very, very nice development environment and a very pleasant language, well-suited for application development, as f-spot and others are a testament to. As a bonus, the apps written under mono will be easy to deploy under Windows as well, should it be needed.
And when you use Mono to write desktop apps under Linux you aren't using anything Windows-related that isn't covered by the ECMA standard. You have no larger exposure to patent issues than you have under any other environment (possibly barring plain C and POSIX libs. Possibly).
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
How is it a boil? It's a great language, very useful, makes the base system smaller overall (because so many things can be made much smaller in python) and is nice to be able to depend on it being available. Slating distributions for depending on python is like criticising them for depending on libc.
I am trolling
The trouble with Java, at present, is that full implementations (complete with all the latest J2EE, Java 1.whatever-is-latest) are proprietary to Sun and other commercial vendors. You can't include a full-scale Java with a Linux distribution; the licenses won't permit it, as the implementations aren't "free" the way Linux and attendant software in a Linux distribution need to be.
The lowest common denominator takes you back to partial implementations of Java 1.2 or the like; Kaffe, Classpath, and the like, with no Swing GUI and I'm not sure if Eclipse will run well with these "partial" Java environments.
MONO avoids all that; the free implementation is reasonably full featured, seemingly moreso than the "libre software" implementations of parts of Java.
I doubt it'll actually provide all that much interoperability with Windows. But the point of it was that the Ximian folk were getting tired of fighting with writing C memory management code for dynamic applications like Evolution. If they can write "Evolution Next Generation" using MONO, and have it be smaller, more componentized, more powerful, and more robust than struggling with the C version, that could be the "killer app" that makes MONO worthwhile in its own right, ignoring Microsoft's software.
It seems to me that Beagle is one of the relevant components for MONO-based "killer apps."
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono. Will Mono achieve what WINE could not?"
Mono will certainly not ever come anywhere *close* to being able to run "all native Windows applications", there's like half a dozen independent reasons for that, ranging from your "it'd require a recompile in any case" trough unpleasant little facts like the fact that Mono is trying to chase a moving target that is willing to spend a lot of money and man-hours precicely to *avoid* that too much works with Mono.
In sum, they'll have all the problems of Wine, and then some. (the need for sourcecode f.ex)
Worse yet: the mono-developers are suggesting one migth want to develop OSS applications with a primary target being Free OSes under Mono. Doing so would be double hurtful: It'd ensure that any such application developed for Linux works perfectly under Windows (because mono is a *subset* of the MS-environment, AND because all OSS-applications come with source), but *not* the oposite.
It's a braindead waste of time. I don't see how I can put it more politely. It actively hurts the Free Software ecosystem.
People in Europe and Britain are kinda safe right now. Software patents are being granted, and are being used as the basis of litigation threats that the recipients can't afford to contest, but at least the courts are on our side, so far.
This situation is not stable. If China, India, and Latin America bring in software patents, then Europe will probably give in at a subsequent world trade agreement.
To keep people in Britain and Europe safe, people in Britain and Europe must take action - and one easy way to do this is to donate to competent, active groups such as FSFE. One way to do this is to join The Fellowship of FSFE, and also encourage others to join.
Here's a webpage about how and why to support FSFE's Fellowship campaign.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
This more general patent problem is not limited to Microsoft and not limited to Mono. Java is no more protected, and neither is any other reasonably modern implementation of anything non-trivial.
The only way to be _sure_ you aren't violating a patent is to turn off the computer and leave it altogether.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Eclipse is a package in FC4, compiled with gcj. It's fairly stable, and the user-interface is the same as in a version of Eclipse running with Sun Java on another platform.
The inclusion of Mono in Fedora is the first step towards healing a rather serious potential rift in the GNOME world. Up until now, you could not develop a Mono-app with GTK# and expect it to work on all major updated distributions without added software.
Don't worry about Windows compatibility, Mono is cool enough on it's own, especially because Novell/Ximian has done such a good job with the Mono-wrappers for GNOME-technologies. Hopefully this will see more GNOME-development.
No they don't. They could write everything in assembler and just use the kernel calls. They depend on libc because it's easier to write programs in C and use the library - the exact same reason they depend on python.
I am trolling
Very telling entry from Miguel's own blog.
What's on display here isn't even remotely close to a cooperative spirit to further a community standard. It is more of a Cold War.
ECMA? Who cares... ECMA trying to set the direction of C# and CLR is like steering a truck with a flea.