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.Net On Android Is Safe, Says Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "With Oracle suing Google over 'unofficial' support for Java in Android, Microsoft has come out and said it has no intention of taking action against the Mono implementation of C# on the Linux-based mobile OS. That's good news for Novell, which is in the final stages of preparing MonoDroid for release. Miguel de Icaza is not concerned about legal challenges by Microsoft over .Net implementations, and even recommends that Google switch from using Java. However, Microsoft's Community Promise has been criticized by the Free Software Foundation for not going far enough to protect open source implementations from patent litigation, which is at the heart of the Oracle-Google case."
even microsoft doesn't like .net and is moving away from it. why would anyone use something that is about to be deprecated?
Considering a major release of the .NET framework happened in April, I'm going to go ahead and call you misinformed or a huge troll.
From the FAQ:
How much will MonoDroid Cost?
We have not yet announced the pricing for MonoDroid, but you should anticipate that the price will be in the same range as MonoTouch ($400 USD for individual users, and $1,000 for enterprise users).
How is MonoDroid licensed?
MonoDroid is a commercial/proprietary offering that is built on top of the open source Mono project and is licensed on a per-developer basis.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
It half sits on top of Dalvik and half on top of their own adaptation layer for native linux. But yes, it's at least half tainted. :)
Below are the en.swpat.org analyses. Two of the biggest things in Java's favour are that they have distributed OpenJDK under GPLv2, with the implied patent grant that gives, and Oracle is a member of OIN and there are thus a bunch of GCC and Classpath packages they've promised not to use their patents against.
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
To answer your counter-points specifically....
The back stab I was referring to for OS/2 wasn't Windows NT but rather Windows 95. As per the documentation put forward by IBM in the USA Vs Microsoft case ... and Microsoft eventually settled with IBM for the damage they caused them:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2005070114163052
Fortunately IBM, of course, were large enough to survive that.
Microsoft actually contracted with Spyglass to provide a royalty form Internet Explorer revenue in order to use Mosaic as a base... Microsoft then gave the product away free and therefore skipped out on said royalties. They eventually had to pay Spyglass a settlement for this action but not before sufficient damage was done and teh company did not survive - being bought out by OpenTV in 2000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.
With Java Microsoft contracted with Sun to write their own Java VM for the Windows platform. They then added interfaces to the java.* namespace and changed behaviour in this namespace. As a consequence things written for Sun's Java would not run properly due to changes in what was expected to be standard and things written for Microsoft's Java VM were not likely to run in Sun's one. The issue came to a head since Microsoft used the Java name and logos... Note that Microsoft would have been okay if they had used their own microsoft.* or similar namespace... but then that would have made Sun's VM the preferred write once run anywhere target. Sun survived this and the result was Windows XP SP1a and the removal of the MS Java VM. Microsoft were free to continue to develop MS Java VM if they actually stuck to the specs... instead they produced .Net and C#.
I'll let you google the references for that one yourself ;)
It may be hip to hit on Microsoft on Slashdot... however there are occasions they deserve it (just as there are occasions they do not). I put it to you that the highlights I've picked from the past 10-15 years are points against them... and are far from an exhaustive list.
This is what Microsoft tried to do to Sun to get rid of their Java: Embrace -- Extend -- Extinguish /. is too short to really inform).
This is the sworn expert testimony in court in case Comes vs Microsoft of a mr. Ronald Alepin on 5 january 2007, about Microsoft's strategy in 1995: Groklaw transcript of Comes vs Microsoft document (page down a bit for the transcript).
(please read the whole thing for yourself. this quote here on
It's long ago, but maybe it can still be illuminating to read if you care about Microsoft's plans with their .NET platform and interoperability e.g. with Mono (I personally don't use .NET so I don't care, but your comment "..until Sun sued them for license issues.." nagged me as only partially true :-).
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Sadly, only C# 1.0 and 2.0 are open standards. All the goodies of C# 3.0 and 4.0 weren't included in any standards yet, and 3.0 is already 3 years old.
Except that Microsoft is *not* moving away from dynamic .NET languages. They just released a platform unifying and solidifying dynamic language support within the .NET Framework itself.
This support is head and shoulders above anything else. Imagine that the platform and not the languages actually has services for doing dynamic member lookup with advanced caching and global optimizations. Making a platform which generalizes how different dynamic languages such as EcmaScript, Ruby, Python and C# look up members is no small feat.
It means that the language implementations themselves shrink quite a lot.
What we have on one hand is *one* disgruntled ex-Microsoft employee being cited on Microsofts plans for the future. On the other hand we have concrete and recent actions by Microsoft which suggests that they are very much investing in making .NET a dynamic multi-language platform.
I have no doubt that working with implementing an "outside" language inside an organization like MS is an uphill battle. But I have real problems seeing this as a sign that MS is backing away from dynamic languages.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*