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New Mono 1.2 Now Supports WinForms
smbarbour writes "The Mono project (the open-source .NET compatibility library acquired by Novell when Ximian was purchased) has released version 1.2. They are now including support for WinForms. Ars Technica has a detailed rundown on the new release. The Mono project supports Visual Basic.NET as well, so developers that use VB.NET now have the possibility of directly porting applications to Linux." From the article: "Relatively high memory consumption and performance bottlenecks are commonly perceived as being amongst Mono's most significant weaknesses. Some critics frequently refer to various performance issues to support arguments against broader adoption of Mono technology in open source projects, most notably within the GNOME community. The performance improvements in Mono 1.2 could potentially address such criticisms, but it is likely that a lot more work will be required before the problems are completely resolved."
Could patents be used to completely disable Mono?
.NET Framework is divided in two parts: the ECMA/ISO covered technologies and the other technologies developed on top of it like ADO.NET, ASP.NET and Windows.Forms.
.NET Framework, and what has been patented by Microsoft falls under the ECMA/ISO submission. Jim Miller at Microsoft has made a statement on the patents covering ISO/ECMA, (he is one of the inventors listed in the patent): http://web.archive.org/web/20030609164123/http://m ailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-sscli/msg00 218.html.
First some background information.
The
Mono implements the ECMA/ISO covered parts, as well as being a project that aims to implement the higher level blocks like ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms.
The Mono project has gone beyond both of those components and has developed and integrated third party class libraries, the most important being: Debugging APIs, integration with the Gnome platform (Accessibility, Pango rendering, Gdk/Gtk, Glade, GnomeUI), Mozilla, OpenGL, extensive database support (Microsoft only supports a couple of providers out of the box, while Mono has support for 11 different providers), our POSIX integration libraries and finally the embedded API (used to add scripting to applications and host the CLI, or for example as an embedded runtime in Apache).
The core of the
Basically a grant is given to anyone who want to implement those components for free and for any purpose.
The controversial elements are the ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms subsets. Those are convenient for people who need full compatibility with the Windows platform, but are not required for the open source Mono platform, nor integration with today's Mono's rich support of Linux.
The Mono strategy for dealing with these technologies is as follows: (1) work around the patent by using a different implementation technique that retains the API, but changes the mechanism; if that is not possible, we would (2) remove the pieces of code that were covered by those patents, and also (3) find prior art that would render the patent useless.
Not providing a patented capability would weaken the interoperability, but it would still provide the free software / open source software community with good development tools, which is the primary reason for developing Mono.
The patents do not apply in countries where software patents are not allowed.
For Linux server and desktop development, we only need the ECMA components, and things that we have developed (like Gtk#) or Apache integration.
With the new Novell/Microsoft agreement, will the patent policy change?
Mono is a community project, and as such, we will continue to implement the policy of not integrating knowingly infringing code into Mono.
And we will continue to follow the steps outlined in the previous topic if code that potentially infringes is found: finding prior art, finding different implementation techniques, or if none of those are possible, removing the code from Mono.
Have you looked at job ads lately? Hundreds of VB(.net) jobs for every Python job.
Microsoft has made it abundantly clear that when you implement the the ECMA stuff, and your own CLR, you are entering into a RAND agreement with Microsoft, and they have patents essential to the running of it:
It doesn't matter what Microsoft "makes clear", they are simply spreading FUD, and so are you. You don't enter into agreements by implementing a public standard. You may be infringing on their patents, but given the vast amount of prior art, it seems unlikely that Mono is infringing on any claim that would hold up. And Microsoft's statement of terms may not be satisfying, but a court would take it into account if there ever were a lawsuit.
And what's the alternative? Sun has many patents on Java, has actively defended their intellectual property against FOSS projects, and open source implementations need to implement the entire Java platform in order to be useful.
Mono, in contrast, is a separate implementation, under an open source license, based largely on its own APIs and libraries. Also, Microsoft's patents have been scrutinized in detail.
The situation may not be very satisfying, but for anybody wanting something faster than Python and higher level than C++, the choices come down to Java and C#. Technically, I think C# is superior, and at least for now, the legal situation surrounding it is also better than Java.