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The Case For Supporting and Using Mono
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister argues in favor of Mono, asking those among the open source community who have 'variously described Mono as a trap, a kludge, or simply a waste of effort' to look past Miguel de Icaza and Mono's associations with Microsoft and give the open source implementation of .Net a second chance, as he himself has, having predicted Mono's demise at the hands of open source Java in 2006. Far from being just a clone of .Net for Linux, McAllister argues, Mono has been 'expanding its presence into exciting and unexpected new niches.' And for those who argue that 'developing open-source software based on Microsoft technologies is like walking into a lion's den,' McAllister suggests taking a look at the direction Mono is heading. The more Mono evolves, the less likely Microsoft is to use patent claims or some other dirty trick to bring down the platform."
Ok, sure. I can do that. In fact, I wrote just such a journal entry in mid-07:
It is quite obvious to anyone using the platform that the Mono team is not in bed with Microsoft. In fact, it would seem that the Mono team is explicitly trying to warn you away from .NET technology. Otherwise, why would they make it SO GODDAMN HARD TO DEVELOP FOR?
Read More: A Day Without Mono is like a Day Without a Bullet in my Head
Ooooh. That wasn't positive at all, was it? Huh.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
A third party implementation of a standard defined by the first-party implementor is always going to lag behind the original. Even if .Net is technical nirvana, if your platform's only implementation comes from a third party, your platform is a second-class citizen.
The case against Mono has nothing to do with the technical niceties he presents, nor do the fears of Microsoft "pulling out the rug" matter... What matters is that when developers and end users pick a technology, they pick the leader, not the follower. Accepting Mono is giving up and giving in to Microsoft vendor lock-in.
Mono is in a precarious, teetering position. Somewhere between tepid and antagonistic reaction amongst professional and casual developers, a designer community that is seen as a puppet or apprentice to the hegemony, and not even a clear path forward for compatibility. Be distinct, or be identical, but there's no way to be both.
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The thing is, everyone associates Java with slow psudo-3-D games that take forever to load on a cell phone or browser. People associate other (sometimes slower) languages such as Python and .NET/Mono to be much, much, faster. Now, this isn't really correct, but if I was going to learn a new language, it probably would be .NET or Mono and not Java.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Now that Java is open source, wouldn't it make more sense to use the JVM as the standard runtime, instead of something that "might" not get sued for copying the .NET runtime?
Java has already been made to run on .NET. I wonder if it'd really be that hard to get standardized C# running on the JVM?
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An' foolish notion
What you need is Mirrorbuntu, copy-and-paste-monkey.
Sorry, I will never trust Microsoft enough to put them in a position to control a key technology. So that means there is no discussing the issue as far as I'm concerned. There is NO rational basis to argue. I don't trust em.
And I don't trust the judgement of anyone who isn't themselves suspicious of Microsoft and Miguel's motives.
Mono is a trap if it is allowed to be deployed beyond a browser plugin to support .net content in the browser. Come the day my current distro of choice loses any finctionality when removing the mono packges I'll be running something different as soon as bittorrent can supply me a new install image. Again, that position is 100% non-negotiable. I have used binary drivers in the past, bought closed source apps and committed many 'sins' against the Church of GNU but this is one case where compromise simply isn't possible. They want us dead, you can't compromise with that.
Democrat delenda est
Most people think of Qt as a GUI toolkit. They're not wrong, but that's like calling a Swiss Army Knife a "pocket knife." That's only one thing it does, and the characterization completely misses the point. Qt is an application framework. It fixes every gripe developers have with C++.
Qt promotes clean and well-developed code that is easily ported to Windows, X11 (Linux et al), Mac, and Embedded (Linux sans-X11). That's something even Java doesn't do well (have you ever tried porting between J2SE and J2ME? nothing works!), even disregarding the whole performance loss from the JVM emulation-like interpreting that goes on.
The LGPL relicensing of Qt coming this spring will change the entire programing language landscape. Nokia is moving in to crush Java. C#/.NET and it's mediocre OSS implementation in Mono aren't even on the radar.
I cite the LGPL announcement because that's the kiss of death, placing Qt firmly above GTK (GTK being an incidental casualty on the way to said crushing of Java). With Mono relying so heavily upon GTK#, that puts it behind the game already (the Qt# project is cited on the Mono page as completely dead).
Recall that Nokia is a phone company. They need not make money from the software. Freeing and promoting Qt (and getting it to supplant J2ME) merely feeds this primary function. And while they're at it, they're sweeping in a wonderful set of perks for software engineers in and out of the Free Software community, on both embedded platforms and desktops.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
And why couldn't you bundle it with the .msi? From what I remember of using Windows, that's how GTK+ is shipped for Pidgin and GIMP, why not do the same with Qt?
to the casual observer, a copy of a not very successful proprietary virtual machine and framework that has been partially abandoned by its own masters-- it does not sound like a super idea.
You might recall Microsoft spent like three years rewriting parts of Windows in .NET and then gave up on it, for all the obvious reasons. Maybe we can learn from their very expensive learning experience?
Just compile statically, and you won't have to bundle anything. OK, you'll probably need to include the mingw10.dll. And libmysql.dll if your app accesses a MySQL database, like mine does.
I've read some things that make me think that you can build the mingw library into your app, but I've also read things that make me run away from that idea screaming.
Also, it's probably possible to build MySQL statically, and then wrap it into the executable as well, but it's not something I want to try.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
Miguel has smacked around this stupid argument before. Mono is a relatively small effort. There are people certainly violating Microsoft's IP in areas like Samba and the myriad Exchange clients, which are a far bigger threat to Microsoft's revenue streams. Mono, if anything, improves their revenue streams, because it makes .NET more feasible for some developers who otherwise wouldn't consider it.
But they're going to go after Mono, right? Let's just ignore that Samba 4 is (supposedly) going to eat Microsoft's lunch on the AD side of things. They're gonna go right after Mono! Rar! BE SCARED! Because that makes so much sense for them to do, right? It's not cutting off their noses to spite their face at all.
I'm really starting to think that the main reason Slashdot gets pissy over Mono is because Microsoft doesn't "lose" because of it. It's a case where everybody wins. And Microsoft can't be allowed to benefit, oh teh nos. :(
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Mono developer = Microsoft .NET developer, but a Microsoft .NET developer != Mono developer.
And that's a good thing? If Mono were merely a separate 'take what you like and leave the rest' clone of .NET it wouldn't be so bad, I guess. It might be yet another potentially portable platform (albeit one that carries vague patent threats).
But Miguel has actively promoted it as a way to get all that great .NET code being developed out there onto Linux. And that it is not. Probably never will be. Microsoft certainly doesn't want it (or won't once they displace Flash), and Miguel can't do it in any practical way.
He'll come close. Achingly close. But Mono code will be limited practically to Linux. Or it might work on Windows in whatever limited way GTK stuff works there today. Certainly not likely to work on Mac's or various phone platforms.
And there are technologies that already work on all those platforms. If Microsoft wanted it (and if anybody would - or could - ever trust them), .NET could work on all those platforms. But they don't, and it won't.
So keep working on Mono. It may someday be a nice technology in its own right. But *please* stop trying to justify it by saying that someday it'll make all Windows code 'just work' on Linux. Does anybody really believe that?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Only Microsoft consultants will tell you that WinForms is dead. I've know developers at 2 organizations that moved from WinForms to WPF, and they hated it. (Caveat: I was at one of them). The app went from using 10MB of RAM to 200MB. It went from a minute to compile to 15 minutes. It went from taking 2 hours to make a change, to taking 2 days.
WPF is powerful, robust, pretty, inefficient, hard to use, and in beta. (Yes, Microsoft says it is not beta, but WPF is still not ready for anything more than experimental use.)
As for Silverlight, since it offers no benefit over Flash, and since even Microsoft Gold Partners have told me that they use Flash unless forced to use Silverlight, I think it will be a non-competitor unless Microsoft starts shipping it with the OS (maybe they do in Vista - if so, then Flash is dead no matter how good it is)
Speaking as a long time windows user and being fairly new at using Linux as a dedicated work-OS, I must say that that whole one-click .msi stuff is pretty damn awesome.
To elaborate the whole perception that users are dumb is pretty misguided. I'm not a dumb user, but even I like things to be easy. It's because (usually) I don't give much of a shit how the thing works, just that it does.
Before you declare that you're any different, think of how you put gas in your vehicle.. Do you care how the fuel pump works? If you're like me you only throw a fit when the clip that holds the fuel lever open is broken, but otherwise don't pay much attention.
See it's about motivation not intelligence. I do like using OSS because I think it's a GoodThing(tm) therefore I'm motivated to try it. It's a lot of the reason it took so long for Java to get a toe hold. "I just want to run PrettyWidgetBox, wtf is this JVM thing I have to have?" It's seen as ancillary or superfluous to the average user, and they don't often care enough to figure it out.
It kinda spoils one of my favorite quotes for me though regarding trash cans, bears, and tourists. Yellowstone added some trash cans with tricky openings to keep the bears out, but it turned out most of the tourists couldn't figure it out. The quote goes, "It turns out there is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists." Which is unfortunately hogwash. The bears are motivated by survival to get in the trash can. The tourists are demotivated by apathy to take the time to figure out a trashcan. They just want to be able to put shit in the trash hole and be done with it. If they're frustrated for more than a few seconds they just throw it on the ground.
Question everything
There's no reason it can't. I recently bought some new virtual instruments. Those are large sets of samples of real instruments, combined with playback software for making music on the computer. They came with a new sampler I'd never used before, developed by the company that sells them (EastWest Play, if you are wondering). I was mildly surprised that as it was installing I saw Qt4Core.dll, Qt4Gui.dll and QtNetwork4.dll were copied to my system directory. Turns out they decided that QT would be good to use for drawing the GUI. Probably in part because it's Mac and PC.
At any rate, there was no additional install of QT required. The necessary libraries were included in the installer, and installed to the system with the software. So if you wish to use QT for your program, go for it. Windows programs very frequently include third party libraries (FMOD would be a popular one with games). You just have the installer handle it.
However comparing QT to .NET is kinda off base, they aren't the same. The reason to use .NET is because it is a managed framework, just just because it can do GUI easily. Visual C++ provides easy GUI tools and will compile to native code.
Also using .NET doesn't preclude using QT, there are bindings for QT to C#.
Miguel has smacked around this stupid argument before. Mono is a relatively small effort. There are people certainly violating Microsoft's IP in areas like Samba and the myriad Exchange clients, which are a far bigger threat to Microsoft's revenue streams. Mono, if anything, improves their revenue streams, because it makes .NET more feasible for some developers who otherwise wouldn't consider it.
In the past, Microsoft has "cut off the air supply" of competitors. That's difficult to do with Linux as it is less a single-sourced product line than amorphous multi-vendor entity. Microsoft's strategy then has been to try and pigeon-hole Linux. But how to do that? You need to become a gate-keeper.
That's the fear over Mono. Gain developers. Gain support. Develop a dependency. Pull out the patents and seize the keys to that dependency. You are now the gatekeeper.
So what about SAMBA 4 and Exchange compatible clients? Don't they also support Microsoft products? That's win-win too, right? Surely they wouldn't go after those. Or would they? Who knows. Ballmer's threats lack detail.
And there's the key. You want to make your "everybody wins" technology widely accepted? Stifle the threats from a CEO who's continues to generate distrust in your company. No tin foil hat required.
There was a famous story about Sun and IBM that got aired a lot during the MS antitrust trial. It goes like this:
One day, a bunch of IBM patent lawyers show up at Sun's headquarters, saying that Sun is infringing on patents A, B, C, etc. They demand a hefty license fee. Sun engineers (remember, it started as a company of engineers) sit down in a boardroom with the lawyers, look at the patents, and are surprised--they're for various obvious things like mathematically adding a variable stroke to a line, and such. The engineers walk the lawyers through their own patents, explaining how they're all obvious and wouldn't stand up in a court of law. The lawyers remain silent until they're done. Then the chief lawyer says "Perhaps you're right. But after one big court case dragging on for years, we'd just come back with another set of patents and repeat the whole process. Eventually we'd find something that you'd infringed on, and then you'd have to pay damages rather than a licensing fee."
Sun signs a cross-licensing agreement with IBM the next day.
That's the worry. It's not that Microsoft has patents that can allow it to launch SCO 2.0 with a better hope of success. It's the worry that, if they decide to snuff out Mono, they can launch a legal crusade to so encumber Mono in litigation and FUD that it dies an ignominious death. Then all that effort is wasted, OSS and Linux get a bad name in the process, and a lot of developers and customers are soured on Mono, Linux, and anything that doesn't come from a Fortune 500 company. This is why Novell signing a patent cross-licensing agreement caused such bad blood--it implies that MS does have patents that are or could be infringed. On the fateful day that MS decides to crush Mono, Novell's agreement strengthens MS's case, if only in PR terms.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I know the story, but I don't see how it is relevant here. Microsoft could do the same thing to Java, or anything else for that matter. If the only argument is that "Microsoft might strong-arm you out of the market" then nobody else on the planet should write software.
I agree with you about Novell - my hatred for them is the strongest reason I avoid Mono.
The difference between Mono & Samba is that C# is dev language.
If, for instance, Samba is sued into oblivion by Microsoft then we loose a single application. Yes, it's sad and everybody cries... but there's technical ways to solve that problem that are relatively doable - such as developing a new NAS network transport protocol that doesn't break any patents.
Alternatively, if Microsoft sues Mono into oblivion - and we've all been happily developing C# code for hundreds of applications - then it's going to be a total meltdown.
To be honest though - there's not much of a chance that either of those things are going to happen.
I like C# - it's a smart, clean language. I don't utilize much beyond the stock language (2.0 & generics) and don't see much need too.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Yes, fear. Make all companies fear using/donating to/working on open source because they might be sued.
When Ballmer stands in front of a crowd and states that Linux has violated patents... people (albeit stupid) will listen. It would be like an alien race telling everyone that they are going to destroy Earth, then waiting for everyone to leave.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
It's not just that MS might come after you. It's that Mono, being an OSS implementation of .NET, would appear to be uniquely vulnerable to being crushed by MS if the beast deems it to be too great a threat, in a way that Java isn't as an independent technology.
C# and the CLR are ECMA standards, and as part of the standardization process, MS gave up the ability to make any patent claims. The idea that Microsoft might somehow be able to torpedo Mono is pure fantasy.
Hell, there's not even much reason to think Microsoft would want to torpedo Mono. They wouldn't have submitted their standard to ECMA if they didn't want it to be implemented.
Of course, all the logic and explicit legal agreements in the world won't change the minds of the folks here who are dead-set on this conspiracy theory.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
WinForms isn't dead. In some circles, I'd say WPF is stillborn, and if there's anything good that came out of it, it was in fact Silverlight.
In fact, I would say that while WPF has its plus sides, its got a few drawbacks as well. Its -really- slow compared to WinForms, the nested control architecture isn't as good, the layouts and sizing aren't as flexible, and worst of all, there's no datagrid.
I understand the inspiration. Microsoft tried to make a modern client gui toolkit that gives you some of what html does, but I frankly think they missed the mark. If anything, WPF will inspire the idea that developer's have choices in control and widget sets and that will lead developers to look at things like Qt and Java or even Webkit, as I have done.
This is my sig.
Compiling C# for JVM would indeed be a huge undertaking. However in the particular example you give you've fallen for a common fallacy. Hypothetical C# on JVM compiler would not need to generate a line for line equivalent in Java. Taking your example a possible translation maybe :-
class MyClass<T> {
private Class t;
public MyClass(Class t) { this.t = t }
public T getNew() { return (T) t.newInstance(); }
}
The compiler would then have to supply the class type when instantiating MyClass. By no means would this look nicer than the original but then it's auto-generated right and not for humans.
There are a couple of languages that have been written for JVM. One of the more interesting ones is Groovy which has many features that are not in the Java language like closures. So the point is just because the Java language does not implement a feature does not necessary bar a language that does have it from being written for the JVM.
> Gee. I was quite certain that ECMA was the gatekeeper..
Right.... ECMA is where crooks and liars go to get an official looking stamp put their turd sandwiches. And even the ISO proved to be corruptable by the huge sacks of cash Microsoft can toss around.
Democrat delenda est
Nope. ECMA has not forced Microsoft to give up its patent claims. The only requirement with respect to patents is that they be available under "reasonable and nondiscriminitory" terms -- which basically means that Microsoft can charge whatever it wants for patent licences, as long as it's the same fee for everyone. So MS can still threaten to sue for patent violations. And any fee of significant size is of course fatal for free software. So you are wrong.
"If it gets too powerful, or too feature full, who's to say if MS doesn't retract their promise and claim that Mono is infringing on their patents, suing whatever company might have worked on said products?"
MS patents are going to be general (as all patents with "business goodness" are). In other words, MS isn't going to limit any patent description in such a way that only .NET implementations would be in violation. If mono violates a MS patent it's very likely that Java and many other projects will violate it too. The mere fact that Mono is an attempt to implement a sub-set of .NET doesn't mean it has any greater risk than other projects.
In any case, I seriously doubt that MS has any desire to start a patent war anyway. Between the DOJ and IBM, it wouldn't be a winning strategy.
Microsoft has a history of using patents to protect its desktop market share.
They do? Can you name a single software patent lawsuit Microsoft has initiated? No? Why not?
The fact of the matter is, open source software probably violates a hell of a lot more than 235 patents out there. That's not a scare. That's simple fact. It's almost impossible to write ANY software that doesn't violate someones patent these days. Patents are bad, yes. And sure, Microsoft isn't above waving patents around, but they have *NO* intention of filing any lawsuits against anyone, otherwise they would have done so already at least once in the last 10+ years they've been talking about them.
Microsoft is not going to sue anyone over software patents. I don't have to be a mindreader or have any insider information to know that. I only have to look at their *ACTUAL* behavior. Microsoft has actively avoided software patent litigation, and I don't see them changing that stance anytime soon.
Sure, they want people who infringe their patents to pay up, but they wren't going to sue anyone to do it. Just like the guy who wants everyone who cuts across his land to get to the cool pond to go swimming to pay him, but unless someone is stupid enough to actually say "sure, here you go", they're just going to say "ok.. never mind"
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AFAICT people use mono to go MS 'native' - meaning .Net - when needed. The only non-trivial application in Mono I can think of right now is Unity, and that's a closed-source RT3D toolkit for x-plattform developement on Mac OS X. And apparently a very good one at that. They are being bugged left, right and center to deliver on Windows. And are preparing that now.
I have to admit that Mono has gotten me curious, because Monodevelop is a very neat looking IDE, C# doesn't seem so much of a PITA than C++ or Java and it appears to be more suitable for stronger ties to multimedia hardware than Java. I still haven't seen a convincing multimedia app in Java in 10 years, allthough the current 3D stuff with native OpenGL does look and run well.
On top of that it appears to me that Mono apps are easyer to deploy that Java apps. I'd expect Java developement to get up to speed fast in any revent Version of Netbeans. However, I catch myself still trusting Mono for good performance more than Java.
Bottom line:
Going Mono to me basically means nothing other than spending time learning C# and watching out that no MS dependancies sneak into my work. A risk I'd be willing to take, given that it has evolved into a feasable tool recently. However, the don't-trust-MS arguments delivered here are valid, and you ought to know what you're doing and calculate your risks well when dicking with MS-controlled tech.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Well, lets take WPF as an example. There are, and have been for years, equivalent Java frameworks. SWT and Swing really aren't the same thing at all, they're widget toolkits, not presentation frameworks.
What would have stopped WPF from being implemented on Java? Nothing. Nothing except the narrowly self interested strategy of one company, who could have provided a technology that EVERYONE could use on a mature platform, but instead we have no such thing. Instead man lifetimes worth of engineering talent had to be wasted on reproducing basically a clone of Java so that MS could 'control the technology'.
I don't really criticize MS for that, it is a result of the way business operates and it makes perfectly good sense from their standpoint to do it that way, but MS's standpoint has no relevance to me or other developers. It is just that simple, and IMHO it would be nice if the marketplace were to just slap down that sort of self interested ploy. I'm really not trying to take sides either, I'd have the same opinion if Sun's and MS's positions had been reversed.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson