.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."

Comments

Safe from what?

[dreyergustav]

Some of the Oracle patents relate to Virtual Machines in general and not just the JVM. So how can Mono be safe from Oracle?

Et tu brute?

[JImbob0i0]

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.

Re:Et tu brute?

[xtracto]

About Java:

You *DO* Remember that the main problem was with J++ and Microsoft trying to distort a standard (or at least, a standard they *signed* they would respect) to make it incompatible?

Kind of how they made special Javascript or ActiveX extensions which broke the net??

Re:Et tu brute?

[JImbob0i0]

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.

Re:Et tu brute?

[benjymouse]

At the time Java came with its own set of widgets, and it had a terrible reputation (deserved) for being slow. At the center of the conflict was Microsofts insistence that developers should be able to use native Windows widgets for GUI apps - otherwise it would risk tainting the Windows platform as slow and unresponsive (yeah - I know - even slower, ok?).

To facilitate that they wanted developers to have the option to call native APIs directly. Library developers would then be able to make abstraction libraries which could take advantage of the rich Windows GUI (and COM) controls.

Sun would have none of that. Microsoft wouldn't yield. Microsoft lost the lawsuit, and then went on to make a language the way they felt it should be made. With a way to call native APIs which is leaps and bounds better than the nazi-abstraction of Java. No glue code necessary, just pure metadata annotations.

Sun went on with their own business and along comes IBM with Eclipse. Only IBM weren't too happy about the whole Swing deal. Java has definitely improved in speed, but on the GUI side all those gains (and more) had been eaten up by Swing. So IBM went for native GUI widgets with SWT.

There was a reason Microsoft didn't want to fix their JVM so that it would pass the compliance tests. They lost (or settled?) and Sun got an insane amount of $$$. Microsoft created C# and .NET the way they though it should be.

C# has evolved much faster than Java. And in some areas Suns "doubts" about whether such language features were feasible has been put to shame: Delegates, operator overloading, Native API (P/Invoke) marshalling, reified generics, value types etc.

Re:"Safe"

[Mongoose Disciple]

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.

Re:"Safe"

[Lunix Nutcase]

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.

MonoDroid is not Free Software / Open Source

[molo]

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.