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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."
Always gotta have the anti .NET zealot idiocy in each of these stories.
Some of the Oracle patents relate to Virtual Machines in general and not just the JVM. So how can Mono be safe from Oracle?
Almost every single company that has had dealings with Microsoft has been stabbed in the back by them...
IBM : OS/2
Stacker : Doublespace
Spyglass : Mosaic
Sun : Java
Everyone : plays4sure (DRM servers shut down leaving purchases useless)
Go : Mobile technology (at least I think the company was called Go)
Caldera : DR-DOS
Novell : Wordperfect
How many times does this have to happen before people see a pattern and avoid partnering with Microsoft? The bigger players can survive the knife between the shoulderblades... the smaller players *if they eventually get a payoff* still usually end up dead anyway.
I, for one, would avoid using the terms ".NET" and "safe" in the same paragraph. I realize they are talking about safe from patent trollage, but it implies that someone would actually want to, you know, actually USE .net or Mono by choice.
As opposed to Java? Damn right I'd use Mono.
I use both by choice all the time. The .NET platform is leaps and bounds ahead of the Java platform in nearly every way.
Oh, that's right, Java is licensed under the GPL, so it's inherently better. I forgot, ideology trumps technical merit. Now, in typical slashdot fashion, mod parent Insightful and me Troll. Thanks, and have a good day.
Similes are like metaphors
Oh, that's right, Java is licensed under the GPL, so it's inherently better.
To be fair, a decent contingent on slashdot was always saying that Java wasn't open source enough, and in light of the recent Oracle-Google lawsuit, it turns out they were right.
In the context of this particular story, I'm not sure how .NET doesn't look better than Java -- you've got one's parent company saying they won't sue you (even if that's not a great guarantee) and one that's actually suing you right now.
Except that poetmatt is just throwing out FUD. He is intentionally misrepresenting the fact that Microsoft has stopped officially supporting development of things like IronRuby as deprecating the entire platform. The fact that it is even modded as insightful despite being obviously false is quite telling for Slashdot.
You submit bug reports and they fix them. Java has bugs too, C++'s stdlib has bugs too.
"MonoDroid applications run with the Mono execution environment. This execution environment runs side-by-side the Dalvik Virtual Machine. Both runtime environments run on top of the Linux kernel and expose various APIs to the user code that allows developers to access the underlying system. Both Mono and Dalvik are runtimes written in the C language."
http://monodroid.net/Documentation/Architecture
Well... to be fair, there is a difference between Oracle suing the GOOGLE company and Microsoft promising not to sue YOU (user/developer) for using the Mono implementation... mainly because Novell/Microsoft relation.
I wonder how far would Microsoft allow Google to go in implementing a C# compiler/interpreter in the same way they are doing it with java...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
IE was purchased by Microsoft. They didn't do some dirty trick, they found a company making a product they liked and purchased them. Not just the rights to their product, the brought on the developers and all that.
DR-DOS wasn't a product that MS ripped off... It was a product that ripped off MS. MS-DOS launched in 1981. DR-DOS launched in 1989 and was version numbed to be the same as MS-DOS. They weren't breaking any laws or anything, but DR-DOS was designed to be their own DOS, compatible with MS-DOS.
Wordperfect lost on its own merits. It was the be-all, end-all of office programs. However the developers failed to keep it up, failed to improve it, and Office eclipsed it. You ever try using it recently (it is still around, still in development)? It is a pile of crap. It lost because there was a superior competing product. You know, how capitalism is supposed to work and all that.
I'm not claiming MS has never done anything underhanded. However people whine and bitch far too much. That a given product failed doesn't mean MS did anything wrong, it may just mean that the product sucked.
The more platforms we have available as developers, the easier it is to find solutions. Being able to program in Java and .NET and mixing a system seamlessly allows for faster development and more bells and whistles. I welcome .NET on any platform because it's better at certain things over Java (and vice versa).
...except that MonoDroid is a completely proprietary platform, and I don't know about you, but this free software developer likes to keep his software running on free systems.
Except that Mono is *also* under the GPL. No, it's not about ideology, it's simply some slashdotters have a vendetta against Microsoft that they'll follow even against common sense.
I bet you would've said the same thing about the people who refused to use Java for the exact same reason. Yeah, the good folks who had the Java patents before were fine with Android, but look what happens when new people are in control. It doesn't have to take a company buyout - what happens years down the road when there are new people in charge at Microsoft? All of sudden those glaringly obvious holes in patent protection aren't looking so benign. I like how Oracle says that Google "knowingly infringed on Oracle intellectual property" when Oracle didn't own it until long after Android was released.
Microsoft: Go ahead and use all of these parts of .NET. We promise we won't sue.
FOSS developers: What about that other part of .NET, which you might note is a key part in Mono right now?
Microsoft: ...
Microsoft: Go ahead and use all of these parts of .NET for Android. We promise we won't sue.
I can't say for 100% sure without examining their exact problem, but I would bet that your devs aren't very good and are trying to blame the tool rather than the craftsman. At least, I've never had problems solving similar problems with .NET. (Or Java or anything else, for that matter.)
That's Accenture, but yeah, let's not let facts get in the way here.
Computing is moving away from the desktop and onto mobile devices. Microsoft was built on vice-like control of the desktop computers, and as a result, the field has been stagnant for decades.
Do you really think they won't take any opportunity they can to gain the same level of control over portables?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
It always confuses me that these companies go with java when they could have gone with C/gtk
yeah yeah yeah... garbage collection. but if its really garbage collection shouldn't it just collect the whole damn language?