Slashdot Mirror
Why Microsoft Will Never Make .NET Truly Portable
Michelle Meyers writes "Just days before Microsoft claimed to be making parts of the .NET CLR "available" to other platforms, NeoSmart Technologies had published an article bemoaning and blasting Microsoft's abuse of it's developers by pretending .NET was a true cross-platform framework when they're doing everything in their power to stop it from being just that. Of interest is NeoSmart's analysis of how Microsoft has no problem making certain portions of .NET available to Mac users — just so long as its distributed under an "open source" license that forbids any and all use of the code except for educational purposes — yet are terrified of the very thought of .NET being available to *nix users, even if that's to the benefit of .NET developers everywhere. Even more interesting is one of the comments on that article linking to legal documents in which Microsoft employees discuss the (im)possibility of creating a cross-platform code and UI framework, years before the .NET project even started!"
I always figured the whole "cross-platform" marketspeak was just a ploy to take some of the wind out of Java's sails. MS wanted people to stop jumping on the Java bandwagon and start jumping on the .NET bandwagon, so they made it sound like .NET was (or would be in the future) more widely usable than it is.
I develop in both the Java and .NET frameworks. I like the Java language a lot more than C#. Unfortunately, users like Windows.Forms a lot more than Swing.
Karma: Raspberry Kiwi
What .net is now is completely different from the vast swarm of swirling spin and angry buzzing buzzwords that poured forth from Microsoft when that concept was spawned, half-formed from the bowels of that beast. It was going to revolutionize the world, one-up .mac on the personal services side while providing corporate services that scaled to millions of users and provide a synergistic end-to-end mashup of all business processes with qualitative and quantitative analysis of everything at once. dotnet was going to bring the ultimate in efficiency and productivity to every one of your workers, from the CEO all the way down to the guy who screws the plastic case together and puts it back on the conveyor belt. (Remember the cars on demand ad, with the robot painting the cars as people decide what color they want? .net made that possible!) There was going to be windows .net, office .net and so on, all of them designed to work with The Intarweb in new and wonderous ways that would blow the minds of every lesser being if so much as a hint of their power was whispered at them from across the room.
Now it's just a runtime for a bytecode interpreted language. Whoopity-doo.
Cross platform for Microsoft means it will work on Windows, Xbox, and mobile devices that run Windows.
It's just another word to ignore when Microsoft says it versus say Samsung when their printers are cross platform which means Linux/Mac/Windows.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.