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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."
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
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.
Mono runtime (both JIT and GC) sucks, to be honest - compared to both Sun JVM, and MS .NET VM. Any .NET vs Java performance comparison that uses Mono is thus flawed from the get go.
It's faster than Python, though, I'll grant them that...
The myth about simple cross-platform development in Java is just that, a myth. Anybody with cross-platform Java experience will attest to this. Java, as a language, has grown stagnant, while C# has continued to evolve.
I and our team of 100+ Java developers will disagree with your statement of Java and cross-platform development. We find it excellent. Is it perfect? Nope, but in my opinion it would be a 9 out of 10 with the next closest competitor being.... Well there isn't really any close competitor but I guess we could give the C language a 2 out of 10. Perhaps Ruby is good but I haven't looked at it. Granted I am talking more about the JVM that Java itself. However, Java like other languages has evolved quite a bit in the last few years.
Does Java have the radical changes that say languages like SCALA have? Nope, but then again it shouldn't have that. Is it stagnant? Not at all.
The core difference you see between any of the Microsoft languages and the JVM languages is that the JVM languages somewhat try to work within the community. They also want to maintain binary (class) backward compatibility. Microsoft is an absolute dictator with their language and even to a large part their tools. This does have it's advantages, in that stuff comes out quicker, but then again, if you are a business and built you lifeblood one VB6 to have it brushed aside by Microsoft, you might be a little angry about that ruthless dictator approach. If you are some contractor type of person who wants constant change in the core framework to make your life easier (at the cost of compatibility), then you would probably like this approach.
So in short things like closures will be in Java 7 (not a small task), and Java the language is not at all stagnant. Cross platform development, testing and support is excellent with Java. We use OSX, Ubuntu, Microsoft Windows XP and 7, and RedHat with no problems.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
I provided some context to the SD times article on my blog today:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Mar-25.html
Miguel.
Rather, submit patches to replace System.Data with Sqlite-net and you have protection from Microsoft patents on .NET