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De Icaza Says Microsoft Has Shot .NET Ecosystem In Foot
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot because of the constant threat of patent infringement that it has cast on the system, Novell vice-president and Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza is quoted as telling the website Software Development Times recently."
That is all.
I used to respect that company (NetWare 3.11, NDS, NetWare 5.0, GroupWise, ZenWorks, all top-notch tech, IMHO).
Now, a tad less.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I think we should make a pact to STOP using the word "ecosystem" when it refers to computer systems.
It's the most annoying marketing-speak since "blogosphere" (or "twitterverse")
Microsoft has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot
A head shot would have been clearer. We all know .NET limps already.
Or is this just the usual Microsoft wobbling instead of making an actual decision?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
It took how many years for Miguel de Icaza to realize this? Most of us could have told him that with seconds.
There is hope for him yet!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Poor Miguel. Another Microsoft dream dies for him. But that won't stop him from trying to ram all things Redmond down Linux user's throats.
That's a little rich for De Icaza to be coming out and saying this now. He's spent years shouting down anyone that warned him about the patent scenario with Microsoft's technologies and yet he continued to proselytise. He's worked away on Mono and Silverlight and made sure to get them included wherever he could.
So is he allowed to be surprised or angry now?
I never get used to these constant resurrections
for assuming (and advocating to others) that Microsoft won't threaten Linux.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache:O6bmbLpdB1gJ:www.sdtimes.com/DOES_WINDOWS_COST_MICROSOFT_OPPORTUNITIES_/By_David_Worthington/About_NET_and_WINDOWS/34203+http://www.sdtimes.com/link/34203&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk
Taken from Google Cache: http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:LPFDjfqGMRMJ:www.sdtimes.com/link/34203+Does+Windows+cost+Microsoft+opportunities&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Does Windows cost Microsoft opportunities?
By David Worthington
March 17, 2010 — .NET Framework has won new users to the platform, and drawn its share of criticism from those who think Microsoft’s stewardship has often been off-target.
The evolution of the
Among the critics is Novell vice president Miguel de Icaza, who said .NET's focus on Windows has come at the expense of opportunities for Microsoft, and its desire to guard its intellectual property is an impediment on the platform.
"Microsoft has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot because of the constant threat of patent infringement that they have cast on the ecosystem," he said. "Unlike the Java world that is blossoming with dozens of vibrant Java Virtual Machine implementations, the .NET world has suffered by this meme spread by [Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer] that they would come after people that do not license patents from them."
In practice, the Java community only uses two or three JVMs (IBM's, JRockit, and OpenJDK from Sun), while others are research efforts or smaller-scale open-source projects, said author and consultant Ted Neward. "Virtual machines are not something the open-source community seems to want to experiment with."
Microsoft submitted the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) specification to ECMA International, which ratified it in 2001. Microsoft built technologies on top of the specification as .NET evolved.
Microsoft has made an open-source CLI implementation codenamed "Rotor" freely available, but it has had little or no uptake, Neward noted.
However, Mono remains the only implementer of the ECMA CLI specification outside of Microsoft, and that is a testament to the legal uncertainty surrounding some aspects of .NET due to Microsoft's statements about open-source software, de Icaza said.
"[Microsoft] would still be the No. 1 stack, but it would have encouraged an ecosystem that would have innovated extensively around their platform," he added.
Facebook, Google, Ruby on Rails and Wikipedia could have been built using .NET, de Icaza claimed. "All of those are failed opportunities. Even if the cross-language story was great, the Web integration fantastic, the architecture was the right one to fit whatever flavor of a platform you wanted, people flocked elsewhere."
"To say that Google could have used .NET is to undervalue both Google and .NET. Google creates value from things like distributed MapReduce and a brand-new system-level programming with concurrent coroutines," said Larry O'Brien, an independent analyst and consultant who writes the Windows & .NET column for SD Times. ".NET creates value from a fantastic IDE, great mainstream languages, and well-executed technologies like Silverlight, LINQ and the DLR [Dynamic Language Runtime]."
Despite the criticisms, customers are "making bets on .NET" all the time, said Brandon Watson, director of product management for Microsoft's development platforms. "The fact that we didn't get Google—I'll cry a little, but not a lot. I'm not certain that Google wouldn't have taken a bet on philosophy, wanting to beat us."
Further, developers can build languages on top of .NET 4.0's dynamic language runtime, which supports both Python and Ruby, Watson said. But it's the addition of new technologies on top of the ECMA specification, such as the DLR, that de Icaza believes impedes the CLI's adoption.
Microsoft's submission to ECMA has remained at a "core level," de Icaza claimed. "I
This has been a cloud hanging over the Mono project from the start.
They (the Mono project) has pursued a strategy of ignoring the problem, hand waving over it, or rationalizing it away (hence this story's FUD tag). Now they're finally admitting it's a problem.
The smart ones among us have foreseen this as an issue for years now.
Fair play from Micro$oft towards the free open source movement? Stop playing with monkeys.
Dear
Don't do deals with them, don't do products for them, don't use their products. Everyone fucking knows that.
The sky in Miguel de Icaza's world just turned blue!
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
-- as if nothing like this was ever anticipated or expected.
Whoosh!
"He also claimed that Facebook, Google, Ruby on Rails and Wikipedia could have been built using .NET."
Wikipedia? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA no. Really, no.
(Although the WMF Lucene search implementation was done in C# on Mono for a while, when Java wasn't yet sufficiently free software. It ran at half the speed of the Java version.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I'm afraid your commitment to excellence has not synergised with market driven realities of the mission critical holistic buzzwordverse. Buck up your ideas sonny and buy into the knowledge base on a going forward basis or you'll soon suffer negative organic growth in your wetware core vocal services vis-a-vis next generation corporate employment opportunity scenarios!
All MS is interested in is the bottom line. If they allow free implementations of .NET then as far as they see it they'll lose sales on their .NET compiler and whats more may even lose Windows sales if people port their .NET apps to a-n-other platform.
I'm not saying they're right but thats probably the way their short term thinking marketing and legal dept see it.
can we get that diseased crap out of GNOME?
Maybe the biggest lamentation I have is regarding C#. I keep on hearing how it's a wonderful improvement on C++, which is my bread-and-butter language. But I'm just not willing to invest time in a language that requires paying a Microsoft tax one way or another.
Similarly for F# (I have a deep love for functional programming).
Miguel was enamored with a lot of the technology behind ".NET", and thought he could outsmart Microsoft, in a sense. He thought he would be pragmatic and non-religious about the technology and adopt it.
What he never realized, and is maybe now only starting to realize, is that .NET is a *marketing* term. It was brilliantly crafted by Microsoft's marketing people. As smart as their developers are and as cool as Miguel thought their engineering and technology is, their marketing is far and away better and more sophisticated. .NET is a brilliant marketing strategy. Miguel didn't realize that by using the '.NET' term so incessantly, he was basically ensuring that he would be in the position that he's in now.
Sure, there was C# and the CLR. That was probably 10% of ".NET", which was a overarching strategy for the *Windows* ecosystem at the time that involved extending Windows into the Internet as much as possible, including "tieing" it into all sorts of Microsoft-oriented services that were MSN at the time.
Think about it. VisualStudio.NET. What the !@#$ does that mean? It's a branding term. Miguel showed his complete lack of understanding of marketing by using that term so regularly and continuously WRT Mono.
Everyone else has been saying that forever, but to hear it from you.. I'm impressed.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Put aside the fact that De Icaza is now eating his own words about the patent issue and look at the issue itself. Microsoft simply has not accepted how things have begun to change. Developers rarely need them the way that they used to need them in the business space. Most large enterprise apps can now be entirely built in Java, Ruby, Python, Perl or PHP for the backend and JavaScript with a toolkit like jQuery or ExtJs for the front end. There is not a single need for Microsoft in that whole space.
Microsoft needs to realize that developers have options now and their threats are empty. Most developers would laugh at their attempts to control things now and simply say "have fun with that" as they switch to some pure open source approach or one built around a hybrid of open and closed source from various projects and vendors.
Im pissed that the entire free software community didn't make this point already. YOU MEAN MICROSOFT IS LITIGIOUS WITH PATENTS??????? NO WAYS?! /sarcam
Seriously Miguel, I know you said Microsoft changed and all but it just proves you are either ignorant or ..... Naw your just ignorant ive tried disagreeing with you.
Fucknob.
^_^'
Dear
"The OSP is an irrevocable promise by Microsoft to not assert its intellectual property rights for covered technologies."
Sure. It's still kind of like having this sword above the mantelpiece, and when someone at a party asks whether it's dangerous, you say: "Don't worry. I promise that I'll never decapitate any of my party guests with it."
Somehow such a statement isn't entirely reassuring.
May this serve as a lesson for the next "de Icaza would-be": if you *ever* think of jumping boat "because this time M$ is going to play nice, really" and then you have the entire FOSS warning you that you're just being delusional, then instead of wasting your time and looking like an uber-fool years later, go work for a company that does *really* provide open software, under a real Open Source license. You don't like Google's Chrome browser? Fork them. Go work on SRWare Iron (a fork of Chromium).
Why is Java present in every single Blu-Ray player on this planet (it's part of the Blu-Ray spec)? Why is Java present in the wallet of entire countries' citizens (national ID SmartCard and/or national healthcare SmartCard)? Why is Java huge in the cellphone market (in everything besides the iPhone)? Why is Java powering a huge part of Google (GMail, GWT, Android, etc.), FedEx, Walmart, Twitter, eBay?
Because Java f*cking rocks and really *is* cross-platform.
Java is the biggest language success story of these last 20 years and .Net is just a cheap imitation of the JVM. Remember that one of the thing that makes Java so great is the inherent security of the JVM. If you have two neurons, would you trust M$ to come up with something that could be secure? .Net is a toy for Mom & Dad's Microsoft-shop.
He already pushed Mono into a lot of parts of Gnome...harm is already done De Icaza, you had to realize before pushing it into one of the most widely used Linux desktop enviroments.
Snakes bite, buddy, that's why we don't play with them.
I don't know why you keep thinking that Microsoft wants some sort of "ecosystem". They want control, but they're always willing to use a useful idiot.
Do you have ESP?
SCO fought THEM. Novell would have had to pay out for their own licensed works (they own the rights, SCO worked as their gopher).
Why do we care what this 'tard says anymore?
I mean, seriously, why?
I have heard nothing but idiocy come out of his mouth for years, yet somehow people seem to keep giving him the time of day.
De Icaza is known for just one thing these days: he hasn't got a fucking clue. Been so long since he had one, seems he says something even vaguely sane, e.g. ".Net is a trap for the unwary" and it is newsworthy.
I vote we all ignore this tool from here on in.
You can easily remove mono with 'sudo apt-get remove --purge mono-common'
Dear
For the record, I'm not one of those guys up in arms that Novell is trying to create interoperability with Microsoft systems. I think this is a good move to help companies transition to Linux.
Novell's work on Mono, Moonlight, OOXML support in OpenOffice, Samba, OpenChange, etc. is a good thing.
That being said, there have been tons of worried detractors citing possible patent problems with .NET.
De Icaza told everyone not to worry about them, and started shoving Mono into every app he could, ignoring those concerns constantly. Isn't a bit late to start listening to those concerns after you shipped products with Mono in them?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Miguel has been trying to convince everyone in the FOSS world this was not a problem at all especially in regards to Mono. So how come the change of mind now?
My karma is not a Chameleon.
He's not making a generalization about women, he's making a generalization about women who have affairs with married men. Claiming that he thinks all women are like that is a bit of a stretch; his remarks are more likely to generalize to men who have affairs with married women. (Also, it could always be "her remarks".)
Or even just users and suppliers. Why does they have to be a single catchy buzzword? Or are management types really so dumb they can only handle one word at a time?
Does that mean "gimp" is going to be ported to ".NET"?
You can see a prototype of such an image manipulation program at Getpaint.net.
Miguel was enamored with a lot of the technology behind ".NET", and thought he could outsmart Microsoft, in a sense. He thought he would be pragmatic and non-religious about the technology and adopt it.
I've been saying it for years -- real pragmatism must always include consideration of the practical realities surrounding a tool or technology. Like, who is providing it, what are the terms under which they provide it, could those terms change and how would that affect your use of the tool? Or as you point out, how does the technology you like (C#) fit into the larger strategy being pushed (.NET)?
Many engineers tend to want to ignore those aspects and focus solely on the qualities of the tool itself. They say they just want something that "does the job", and thus fail to consider how those factors affect the tool's ability to do the job. Because, being technically-minded people, they want the technical factors to be the only ones that matter. They call this "pragmatism" and being "non-religious".
Which just goes to show how even people who value pragmatism and rationality more than anyone can still be completely irrational. Ignoring the important external factors because you really wish they weren't important is not rational!
Rationality is simply a useful trick that our mammalian brains have picked up. But at the end of the day we are still emotional animals, and even when expending great effort to force ourselves to think rationally we can't eliminate the effect of our emotions. Much of the time "rationality" is simply a way to justify what we've already decided based on emotion.
Ergo the worst thing a person who values rationality can do is tell themselves that they are completely rational and uninfluenced by emotion. I think there's an important lesson to be learned here, even for those of us who saw this situation coming from a mile away.
The enemies of Democracy are
Sure, .net would have been way better if it embraced Linux and welcomed re-implementation from the beginning. It would have been more widely adopted, there would be more open source VMs and IDEs, etc.
Why? Because people love free stuff. Good for the ecosystem doesn't necessarily mean good for Microsoft. No one wants to pay for a Windows license for each machine in their datacenter. How many Solaris licenses did Java sell for Sun?
The way I see it, .net was yet another decent attempt at forcing Windows lock-in (and keeping already-locked-in partners happy and productive).
The idea that MS has shot .net in the foot because of people who use Mono is just hyperbole. I'd guess that 99.999% of people using .net do so on Windows.
Despite being a .net developer, I'd choose Python or Java if I had to do a project on Linux.
Just in, Microsoft's new Mobile Platform is set to dominate the Market with its new "modified, lawyer protected" .NET subroutines embedded in their "NEW" programming platform to be announced in the upcoming days. (may, or may not be currently compatible with any or all previously created software and may charge you a fee on the number breaths taken while holding the device)
So, in other words, Microsoft is encouraging a monoculture rather than a Mono culture?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
He doesn't go as far as say he's given up or that he's been wrong all along. All he said is that they shot themselves in the foot and LIMITED the spread of .Net by threatening people with patent litigation.
It really looks like he's saying "It could have been so much more" rather than "I have today truly awoken!"
So until we have a more solid quote from him that supports the idea of retracting on previous statements... the bubbly should be put back on the rack.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Some of the strongest minds in computer science have built out .NET, and continue to do so. There are some practicality gaps, but today the majority of the corporate world is powered by .NET devs, for better or worse.
However, this many years into the platform, it's starting to show it's age. From .NET 1.0 applications, laden with crude pinvokes to Win32 API's, GDI+ silliness, messy ADO.NET integration, through 2.0, 3.5, 4.0, the "Enterprise" helper classes, the "Foundation Extensions", the integration of pseudo-SQL declarative syntax with LINQ, Entity Relation classes, Unity, security, contracts, plus all of the layers of ASP.NET tools .... don't VS's forget code analysis, test suites, code coverage, profiling, generated documentation... there are many more but you get the point... ...all this is shaping up to be a very MS-centric view of the .NET universe. Which is a mistake, De Icaza seems to imply. I wholeheartedly agree. While the computing world abandons PCs for most tasks (gaming, editing information aside) and info consumption is done via smaller devices, on a variety of hardware & OS's, MS has bound .NET to their OS deployments - and there will be many other OS's talking in that space.
This is Microsoft's biggest gamble with .NET: That as the OS lives or dies, so does this platform. Really, it could be bigger than Windows. If MS shipping a full (even licensed) 4.0+ framework for use on Linux & Apple, it would inject a massive growth spurt in both those platforms but a huge and lasting foothold on the MS-based app development.
If you really are finally on the road to Damascus, be sure to snap some pics.
So, a major author of free software thinks Microsoft could have done better by being more open. Why is this interesting?
This is true in the trivial sense that anything any computer can do can be done on any platform that allows control of the same I/O facilities and supports at least one Turing-complete language.
OTOH, I don't see that any substantial argument has been made that .NET would have been an attractive platform for any of these things instead of their actual platforms if Microsoft had done things differently.
This is a classic jilted lover, fretting that he couldn't change her evil ways.
The country song of Open Source.
But I mean, seriously, he was lashing out at anyone who pointed out that a promise from Microsoft, even if sincere at the time, is still only a promise until it no longer seems in their own interest. And now, more in anger than sorrow, he's learned his lesson.
I'm thinking he'll need to re-learn it at least once before he'll have earned a VP title. Business is almost never for the idealistic.
I forget what 8 was for.
Could all of Microsoft's software patents be lost with Bilski? Then there wouldn't be any possibility for infringement.
How typical, fall back on the stereotypical Linux/GPer reason your product failed ... Microsoft is hurting us.
What a fucking cop out, if thats your excuse just shut the hell up and quit.
My company has an agreement with MS, I am in no way concerned for MS patent violations, I'm licensed, its not a concern.
I STILL WON'T USE MONO BECAUSE ITS CRAP. I'd much rather not have to deal with Windows servers and use Mono ... but Windows and the MS .NET implementation actually work. Mono doesn't even come close for anything larger than Hello World. And to be honest, I bet Hello World crashes half the time.
The GC is non-compacting so long running apps still require you to do memory management ... defeating the primary purpose of using the CLR for most people. Might as well use native C, it doesn't take 8 weeks to get the runtime to compile if you take that route at least.
Mono considers a framework or api supported when they've got stubs in for all the public methods ... even if those stubs do nothing more than throw a NotImplemented exception ... I realize you have obviously considerably lower standards for your code and projects Migul, but fucking NotImplemented exceptions means its not fucking finished.
Its got bug reports that have sat around for years to get minor patches such as the tiny little patch to get the SerialPort class to work on OS X ... the entire patch file is less than 20 lines or so, probably 3-5 actual lines changed ... just change poll to mono_poll to deal with the fact that OSX doesn't have a poll the mono likes. No one bothers to commit it ... so SerialPort is still broken in OS X ...
You know why people aren't using your craptastic pile of code .... IT WORKS PROPERLY LESS OFTEN THAN IT BREAKS.
Stop pointing the finger and use it to fix your crappy code base, the bullshit excuses your throwing out aren't doing you any good.
Make your framework and runtime actually work, stop trying to beat VisualStudio, its not going to happen, they have more resources, just as high of quality talent, and a WHOLE lot more motivation than you do. You won't win. Put your efforts into something actually useful to the project rather than producing another half ass unfinished buggy application. The damn thing doesn't even handle focus correctly if you click in the text window from another application while in debug mode for fucks sake.
When you use Mono, if you were going to report everybug you noticed, you'd spend a week reporting bugs before you even got to the point of running something. THATS why you aren't going anywhere.
No one anywhere who is considering Mono is worried about the patents, and thats not whats stopping them from using it. You might want to get some perspective ... your daughter is an ugly unreliable bitch and everyone else other than you knows it. You won't marrier her off until you make her at least as desirable as the other women.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
can you tell I'm a C/C++/Assembly snob?
Like most readers, I assumed that you were a fucktard rather than a language snob.
Perhaps you should try being less fucktarded, so as to make your intent clearer to your audience.
If you read closely, Microsoft admits that the reason Vista came out late is that they *tried* rewriting large parts of Windows in .NET, and cringed at the results.
So Microsoft has about $4 billion and 2.5 years of lessons in why .NET is not the shining city on a hill of programming.
So it's no surprise that they're quietly burying it, as they have so many names and hot technologies du-jour. Take a quick mental trip through the half-dozen Microsoft database connection technologies of yore.
Java embodys one radical change, and it's not a feature of the language (which was pretty radical itself at the start). No, the radical feature is that it's GPL'd. This change came a little late in the game, but look what it's produced already.
Take Android. You might say 'just another smartphone platform', but think about how it came about. Google didn't develop it. A startup did. And how was it possible for a startup to build an entire internet-capable touchscreen platform? GPL. Because they had a free OS they could use any way they wanted, and a free virtual machine they could use any way they wanted, they were able to get creative and package it all together as an innovative new platform. Google bought it, added polish and apps, and suddenly it's an iPhone and Android world with Microsoft playing catch up.
Microsoft can't do this. They are committed to their proprietary OS, so they are unable to harness any major creative leaps that come from outside the company. Outsiders can't play with the OS to tweak it to their needs, so they have no way to use Windows as a platform for creativity that doesn't fit into the channels that Microsoft provides them. Plus, they know that any really good ideas they develop on the Microsoft platform will likely be copied by Microsoft and never realize their potential (for them, at least).
But the Android folks could start with minimal overhead and produce something great under the radar.
That's the beauty of the GPL and the Linux (and now Java) models based on it. DVR's, netbooks, cheap wireless routers, smartphones, Kindle and 100 tablets to come. The Microsoft ecosystem is not capable of producing these things. So the next time you rag on Java or OpenGL, X-Windows or even OpenOffice - and rhapsodize about C#, .NET, MSOffice, etc., realize that you're missing the point. These tools may not individually be the absolute best in class, but they are all much more than good enough. And they enable the most creative and dynamic ecosystems in IT today. If you care about that, C# vs Java is a no-brainer. You're gonna want Java.
Miguel seems to be just now grasping this. He had hoped that a free version of .NET would be as good as Java. He liked the technology better (not sure how much better), and thought making it free would bring it to the creative class that's really innovating these days. But Microsoft won't let him. Never meant to, never will. Sorry Miguel - I feel your pain.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Are we going to see people back away from Mono? Are we going to see him back away from Mono?
Just about every normal OSS person has said that MS would do this. Hell, if you have a pedophile that has committed 100's of acts spread over 30 years and was caught multiple times, and still continues to do these acts, are you really going to leave your children with it just because it says that it will not attack your child? And yes, this analogy fits the situation.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I provided some context to the SD times article on my blog today:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Mar-25.html
Miguel.
Mono is cool and Miguel should right away take the consequences of his late insight on to this issue and publicly announce that compliance with .Net is not Monos prime goal anymore. As far as I can tell there are more usefull tools and programms built with Mono than with .Not (Unity 3D comes to mind). He could walk away from all-out .Net compliance right now and MS would be the looser on this one.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
still be so clueless?
OK, the Java world is blossoming. So that means Sun is doing great, does it?
Microsoft's relationship toward the .NET world is not driven by altruism. It's driven by the need to lock the .NET users into as much of Microsoft's product stack as possible.
Microsoft wanted to do to Java what it did to Netscape. Microsoft created a whole "Internet Explorer ecosystem" and as soon as it had most of the world locked in it stopped investing and bled that ecosystem dry. It only started moving again when users began to jump ship.
Microsoft's product strategy has always amounted to this: make it is to buy in, and hard to get out. That somebody working for Novell of all places doesn't understand that is a bit shocking. Microsoft took away Novell's bread and butter in the late 80s and early 90s essentially by making the case that you could have clerks run your servers rather than highly trained sysadmins.
This is not a "Microsoft is evil" rant. Microsoft does what most businesses try to do: maximize profits by evading competition.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I think Miguel just opened a Window, looked towards the Vista, and finally took notice of the tiny patent lawyers infesting his garden.
Look at him Go!
Many many people pointed out that Microsoft was going to see Mono as nothing more than an opportunity to legitimize .NET, and do everything they could to lock people in to the "real" .NET platform... legally, socially, and technically.
And this is what has, in fact, happened.
The original SD times article came up in searches, then disappeared. Then it was supposed to be in Google cache, but that disappeared too. I found it on Slate, but it might go away soon too, so I made a copy and present it here (just in case some web censor decides to bellyache and make the article go away somewhere else). Behold: .NET Framework has won new users to the platform, and drawn its share of criticism from those who think Microsoft’s stewardship has often been off-target. .NET's focus on Windows has come at the expense of opportunities for Microsoft, and its desire to guard its intellectual property is an impediment on the platform. .NET ecosystem in the foot because of the constant threat of patent infringement that they have cast on the ecosystem," he said. .NET world has suffered by this meme spread by [Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer] that they would come after people that do not license patents from them." .NET evolved. .NET due to Microsoft's statements about open-source software, de Icaza said. .NET, de Icaza claimed. "All of those are failed opportunities. Even if the cross-language story was great, the Web integration fantastic, the architecture was the right one to fit whatever flavor of a platform you wanted, people flocked elsewhere." .NET is to undervalue both Google and .NET. Google creates value from things like distributed MapReduce and a brand-new system-level programming with concurrent coroutines," said Larry O'Brien, an independent analyst and consultant who writes the Windows & .NET column for SD Times. ".NET creates value from a fantastic IDE, great mainstream languages, and well-executed technologies like Silverlight, LINQ and the DLR [Dynamic Language Runtime]." .NET" all the time, said Brandon Watson, director of product management for Microsoft's development platforms. "The fact that we didn't get Google—I'll cry a little, but not a lot. I'm not certain that Google wouldn't have taken a bet on philosophy, wanting to beat us." .NET 4.0's dynamic language runtime, which supports both Python and Ruby, Watson said. But it's the addition of new technologies on top of the ECMA specification, such as the DLR, that de Icaza believes impedes the CLI's adoption.
Does Windows cost Microsoft opportunities? - SD Times: Software Development News
Does Windows cost Microsoft opportunities?
By David Worthington
March 17, 2010 —
The evolution of the
Among the critics is Novell vice president Miguel de Icaza, who said
"Microsoft has shot the
"Unlike the Java world that is blossoming with dozens of vibrant Java Virtual Machine implementations, the
In practice, the Java community only uses two or three JVMs (IBM's, JRockit, and OpenJDK from Sun), while others are research efforts or smaller-scale open-source projects, said author and consultant Ted Neward. "Virtual machines are not something the open-source community seems to want to experiment with."
Microsoft submitted the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) specification to ECMA International, which ratified it in 2001. Microsoft built technologies on top of the specification as
Microsoft has made an open-source CLI implementation codenamed "Rotor" freely available, but it has had little or no uptake, Neward noted.
However, Mono remains the only implementer of the ECMA CLI specification outside of Microsoft, and that is a testament to the legal uncertainty surrounding some aspects of
"[Microsoft] would still be the No. 1 stack, but it would have encouraged an ecosystem that would have innovated extensively around their platform," he added.
Facebook, Google, Ruby on Rails and Wikipedia could have been built using
"To say that Google could have used
Despite the criticisms, customers are "making bets on
Further, developers can build languages on top of
Microsoft's s
I feel kind of bad for Miguel, he sounds like a kid, who just realized that there is no Santa Claus. It's sad.
You can't handle the truth.
Unfortunately, even the most studious lack of infringement won't prevent you from getting abusively sued into bankruptcy. It's all about the implied threat, Miguel.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Delphi was a cool tool, but VB was already entrenched when Delphi came out, which is (at least partly) why Delphi never became popular; Delphi was a response to VB, not the other way around.
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Microsoft has also made some of its associated intellectual property, including XAML and its ASP.NET AJAX library, available under its Open Specification Promise or open-source licenses.
The OSP is an irrevocable promise by Microsoft to not assert its intellectual property rights for covered technologies.
One change I'd like to see, make it a promise by Microsoft not only not to assert its "IP" rights but also not to transfer their "IP" rights to patent trolls.
Hello. My name is Miguel de Icaza. You killed .NET. Prepare to die.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Windows can run on routers and smartphones and so can some other proprietary operating systems. I'm not sure why people think this ability is exclusive to Linux. As for Microsoft they can afford to hire top talent to handle the creativity. FOSS advocates forget that creative people need to eat too. Why haven't all these creative outsiders fixed Java? It still sucks on the desktop compared to .net and everyone knows it. But if you want to keep pushing it for non-technical reasons then go ahead, the business world has moved on and I don't see many FOSS applications being written in Java either.
which you should have read about before trying a port. I'm not even sure why you would bother in the first place when you can get a cheap Windows host for 10 bucks a month.
.NET is not made for idiots, it's made for professional developers who can utilize it properly. Professional developers who know what they are getting into and read faqs before porting to a platform that is filled with hacks:
Why does the memory consumed by the Mono process keep growing? Mono currently uses a conservative, non-moving, non-compacting garbage collector. This means that the heap is not compacted when memory is released. This means that applications can produce memory Why does the memory consumed by the Mono process keep growing? It is hence important to not get into patterns that would create these holes, for example such a hole could be created if you create a block of size SIZE, release it, and then create two blocks of size SIZE/2+1. patterns that will effectively make the process grow, just like C, C++, Perl, Python applications would.
http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_ASP.NET
My local B&N sure has a lot of .net books for a platform that is limping along.
Will it also synergize market driven realities? Or will it cause partial irrelevance?
It's the only way to know for sure.
.NET has been a success for Microsoft and they never cared about putting it anywhere else than Windows. They don't want you to use other platforms, Windows is where their money comes from.
As a software engineer that primarily writes transportable code and hardware drivers. I disliked learning software only frameworks because they are artificial and change too often. chips are more stable. From the outset .NET made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. The idea that the software engineers could not be trusted to write unmanaged code was insulting and arrogant on Microsoft's and Intel's part. The licensing restrictions on the example cli runtime told me early that we would have trouble staying transportable with .NET. ECMA was a joke from the start and I had trouble understanding why people couldn't see it. The idea that Visual Basic was the best langauge for writing Windows programs said a lot about WIndows as a platform. I wrote the Mono people about my concerns and they did not respond. I wrote the DotGnu people about my concerns, and they didn't respond either. In the end, I just didn't bother to learn .NET because the versions came too fast and I couldn't afford to buy the reference documentation every time the changed the framework. In my mind, Microsoft shot themselves in the foot first, then released .NET. They just kept their foot wrapped in ductape all this time and didn't mention they were bleeding. It was dead from the start, but the body took a while to stop moving. This is my opinion, and I stand by it.
After years of free software advocates pointing out the dangers of .NET clone Mono and consequent belittling by Microsoft apologists, Miguel finally comes to his senses. (This follows up on GNOME removing spatial browsing as a default in Nautilus.)
Well, better late than never.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Because if Stallman is ever admitted to being right, then the world of the MS followers will collapse.
Stallman is indeed like Jezus. He upsets people with what he says, destroys the comfortable little cocoon they spinned around themselves.
Just as most Christians are not followed of Jezus teachings, a lot of people in IT are aware of the risks of closer source and single vendor, but survive day to day by pretending MS somehow doesn't qualify.
Icaza drank the koolaid, and now that he is twitching on the ground, it is slowly beginning to dawn on him that perhaps he make the wrong choice.
To deal with MS has always been to make a deal with the devil. Not so much because they are evil, but because they canabalize their partners if they get the chance. MS serves itself. Always. If you want to deal with them, then always ask yourself: How can I benefit AFTER MS has benefitted first.
It is like going to a casino. Sure you can win big. But you better realize that the casino will winner bigger. Always. It is how the world works.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Given that you've always been enthusiastic about the technical aspects and ideas of .Net and have managed to build an impressive re-implementation of .Net in FOSS, have you considered dropping the focus on .Net compliance?
After all, MS governance of the .Net ecosystem is laking, as you say. And from what you say it sounds very much like I'd expect it to be: That following .Net everywhere it goes is more trouble than it's worth. On top of that, from what I can tell Mono has gained solid traction in the development world all by itself and on its own merit.
This all together with the solid marketing the mono project does all by itself I can't shake the notion that by now de-prioritizing .Net compliance in Mono would actually give Mono adoption a boost.
What is your take on this?
(And, btw., thanks for the Mono toolkit. I've actually gotten curious about C# all because of it and the Monodevelop IDE.)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
for i in range(1000000):
print "Python! It rocks! Open Source! Cross platform!"
So you were infected by tomboy trojan and all you need is switch to gnote.
Rest are depending things, not big deal.