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GNOME Foundation Helping OOXML?
christian.einfeldt writes "According to long-time OpenDocument Fellowship member Russell Ossendryver, it appears that GNOME founder Miguel de Icaza's widely-publicized praise for OOXML as a 'superb standard' is being followed up with on-going support by the GNOME Foundation in 'resolving' the thousands of criticisms leveled against Microsoft's proposed standard. In an open letter in his blog, Ossendryver urges the GNOME Foundation to halt its apparent support for OOXML as a standard and to put its efforts behind enhancing adoption of the genuinely open standard, ODF, which was approved by the world standards bodies as ISO/IEC standard 26300 on 2 May 2006."
Your UNIX history is wrong, but that doesn't even matter.
and on the other hand we have a set of APIs that are actively controlled by a company that has a history of using submarine patents, and who is currently attempting to monetize them... with some success.
Mono applications on Linux only use the ECMA APIs, which are not covered by any patents and which are explicitly open. There is no reason whatsoever not to use them.
If you can't see there is a difference there you're deliberately not looking at it.
Sounds to me like you have some stake in making Mono look bad.
C# and Python are extremely different, and C# is much nicer than Java. I understand disliking that the best came from Microsoft, but lying about it isn't going to put an openly-developed language on top again.
Java reminds me a lot of C++. It was the first to popularize some new ideas, and it was really good for its time, but now it just looks like a cludgy mess. Java is starting to really show its age, while C# is fresh and shiny. Java didn't have a foreach loop for ages, and it still doesn't have C# style properties.
When it comes to interpreted/JIT garbage collected statically typed languages, C# is the best. I wouldn't use it for long-term important projects (due to the Microsoft issue), but when I'm just playing around with something that's too big for a scripting language (e.g. Python), I use C#.
It's a really really nice language, even if it did come from Microsoft.
So simple, if you don't help M$, but use their tech, you will get killed. .net in itself is not better than any other technology out there (C++ or Java), the fully integrated developer environment is what makes it better.
Wine would be killed if it depends on M$.
Samba would be killed if it depends on M$.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Miguel has been a leader in several projects I've used a lot; first Midnight Commander, then Gnome, and now Mono, so I care about what he says (not that I agree with him on everything). He appears also as a reasonable guy, so I listen, and then make my own opinion.