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Miguel De Icaza Forms New Mono Company: Xamarin
rubycodez writes "After being thrown out on the streets by Attachmate, the purchasers of Novell, Miguel De Icaza has formed a new company Xamarin to make .NET development tools for Android and iOS. The company will also provide commercial international Mono support. There are those who would say Mono poses a risk of drawing Microsoft patent or other IP litigation for its inclusion in some major Linux distributions, and that these recent events might be the beginning of the demise of widespread use of Mono and other .NETiness in open source software, a good thing."
Please cite, specifically, what Mono or C# brings to open source platforms that aren't already there and done better. There's nothing new in C#, and the JVM is already taking off with new programming languages, plus it's finally fast enough for most everything. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that C# is exposing programmers to advanced language features, but these features have already existed in other programming languages for decades. Add to that the threat of patent violation lawsuits (which are *not* protected in OSS by MS's RAND licensing, no matter how loudly the fanbois scream), and you have a non-starter when it comes to Mono and C#. People don't trust Microsoft, and with good reason.
I myself have avoided C# as a heavy software engineer, partly because I'm already pretty good at C and C++ (which C# will not replace in my field, embedded and OS), but also because I'd rather dabble in more interesting and truly free programming languges, such as Scala, Clojure, Haskell, OCaml, and Go. Not to mention that economically speaking, Mono and C# don't run on Android or iPhone (and I'm sure someone will point out some project or software shop trying to push their C# for Android/iPhone package, but I doubt the efficacy of those solutions).
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