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Microsoft Puts C# and the CLI Under "Community Promise"
FishWithAHammer writes "Peter Galli of Microsoft posted a blog entry on Port25 today, regarding the explicit placement of C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (the ECMA standard that underpins .NET) under their Community Promise: 'It is important to note that, under the Community Promise, anyone can freely implement these specifications with their technology, code, and solutions. You do not need to sign a license agreement, or otherwise communicate to Microsoft how you will implement the specifications. ... Under the Community Promise, Microsoft provides assurance that it will not assert its Necessary Claims against anyone who makes, uses, sells, offers for sale, imports, or distributes any Covered Implementation under any type of development or distribution model, including open-source licensing models such as the LGPL or GPL.'"
Adds reader anshulajain: "Understandably, Miguel De Icaza is jumping with joy."
to make itself remotely relevant among geeks. But it's too late. I certainly never be using any Microsoft technology or God forbid a language invented by them. Thanks MS, but no thanks. You betrayed all the trust you ever had. Have a long and painful death, bye.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
No Matter how sensuously it moves it's tail, it's the snake's head that will bite you.
(or throw a chair at you.)
Until the head is removed, I'm not going to play with it.
Thanks for not providing anything to refute my post.
However, the .NET fanbois on Slashdot seem to have modded you up anyway.
Congrats!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
When I see the words "Microsoft" and "Promise" together it just raises a comical sensation somehow. Perhaps it doesn't with many, but I am the typical Slashdot-Microsoft-hater for better or worse. I just don't trust Microsoft to not hold some strings somewhere or this to not be some sort of trap. Microsoft doesn't trust the market to choose Microsoft or its products to compete fairly against others. Instead, it typically needs to control the market and reduce competition in order to maintain its profit and position. They are the "Dick Dastardly and Muttley" (from the Wacky Races cartoon) of the technology marketplace. I have always found it ironic that they [D.Dastardly and Muttley] could somehow get in front of all the other racers in order to set some sort of trick or trap to slow down or knock out the other racers, but they can't simply take the lead and keep it. (Is it wrong that a 5-year-old child at the time had such thoughts watching these cartoons instead of just enjoying the slapstick action?) Microsoft is the same to me in this way. They have enormous resources and quite likely a vast arsenal of talented and creative people. They have more than enough of "the right stuff" to compete and win in the marketplace. But instead, they use their resources and creativity to cause other people to fail or otherwise harm others in the marketplace.
Obviously differences between the Dastardly Duo and Microsoft emerge on comparison as well. Microsoft actually manages to win most of the time.
Listen son, come here and sit by me, and I will explain this to you.
As you grow up, it is normal that you will have some questions, for example "what is that hair doing in my face" or "but wasn't part of the point of Mono to be cross-platform?"
Although this might seem odd to you, there are no problems in these goals.
What you have is:
(a) A foundation, ECMA that can be used to build application from the tiniest embedded device to the largest data center.
(b) A set of APIs that are not covered by ECMA to access databases, build web servers, make your servers communicate and build GUI applications that look like Windows.
(c) A portable set of APIs created by the mono group that is cross platform and was built from scratch, this includes GUI APIs, database APIs and many more.
In fact, you can get a good list from Mono's www.mono-project.com/Libraries
Today the desktop applications that were the source of the controversy are built with (a) and (c), that is Tomboy and the rest of the gang.
Some people might be interested instead in (a) + (b) or (a) + (b) + (c) but the patent license that was issued today does not cover it.
There are a few options for the (b) loving person (now with roman numerals):
(i) They can ignore the patent issue, probably on the grounds that it does not really matter anyways.
(ii) They could ask Microsoft for a license, but this seems like a lot of work and it is hard to tell where to start.
(iii) They could purchase Novell's SUSE Linux which already licenses the patents/technologies.
But, seriously ... My point is that with Mono advocacy being pushed quite hard in the face of so many kinds of public opposition it must bring pretty amazing technical benefits to inspire such devotion against so much political opposition.
My wager is that most of the people "pushing" Mono are people who have experienced C# development on Windows, and know how well it works. It's basically a war between the people who want to make great software in a great environment, and the people who only care about "Freedom."
(Not that Mono is necessarily "anti-Freedom", but that's the way the "Freedom" advocates talk about it.)
Some folks, on both sides, seem to just be digging their heels in for the sake of "being write" which is obscuring the real technical merits of the debate and making the whole thing look pretty murky.
From my experience, Mono fans are just trying to write software. The whole political mess comes from the people who actually care about political crap and don't care, as much, about writing software.
I've not heard of many majorly popular new applications being written in it beyond the original headliners of Banshee / F-Spot / Tomboy / Beagle.
There are thousands of applications in Windows written in C#, or other .net languages. You need to broaden your experiences.
This, along with all the noise, is what led me to wonder how much developer demand for Mono there really is, vs "merely" a demand for the existing applications vs an innate desire to propagate a major new project.
The noise is all coming from people who spend more time arguing about the intricacies of the GPL version 2 vs. version 3 and legal this and allowed uses that and blah blah blah licensing shit real coders shouldn't care about.
The people wanting to use Mono *just want to make good software* without wasting time wading through licensing shit.
I don't trust Microsoft in general but there's quite clearly a large group of people who are, independently, just saying that Mono is good.
That's because it is. Your trust of Microsoft has absolutely nothing to do with whether Mono is good or not.
The real deal-breaker with Java is that after decades of work, it's still impossible to make a GUI application with native look-and-feel using Java. C#/CLI could do it from day one, and still can on every platform it runs on. Bam, that settles it for me. I don't know enough about Java to address your other concerns, except that Java and CLI aren't mutually-exclusive.
C# / Mono have pretty little effect on me as a developer as I actually do have a legitimate need to work mostly in plain old C
If I had to write software in C again, I'd quit.
Comment of the year
You're stupid, that's all. And you've never written a large program in C#. You can write much, much cleaner more maintainable code in C# compared to C++ simply because the language constructs are more powerful. Same with Java. C++ is a dead(*) language and you're a fucking dinosaur if that's all you know.
* By dead, I mean stagnating in use. It's still got its uses obviously, as do C and assembly. But it's largely becoming a specialized language.
You're a douche. An old dinosaur douche with outdated computing skills shaking your fist at those young kids with their new "internal combustion engine" and "sanitation" and all those new whatsits. Back in your day men were men, and you didn't need those fancy "technologies", you had your horse driven carriages and your shitting hole!
I'm laughing at you because you're irrelevant. I've done a lot of Java and a lot of C#. C# wins very handily in the language syntax department, and handily in the vendor provided framework library department. Java wins in the community support and breadth of third party libraries. I actually think Maven is a huge plus for Java too, though some hate it.
In the end, if you're doing "enterprisey" development .NET is the winner hands down - the messaging support and integration are just leaps and bounds beyond Java.