User: bsleeper

Re:Boost for Linux, Boost for Microsoft.

On: Petreley on Ximian and Mono

I wonder if Microsoft has been reading up on The Art of War... to paraphrase Dave Winer, they seem to be doing a good job of zagging, when everyone expected that they'd zig.

I wrote a brief piece for our web services newsletter that outlines three reasons why Microsoft would benefit from assisting the Mono project:

• Good will. Let's not underestimate this intangible comfort and buy-in that Microsoft can garner by pointing to an alternative implementation. .NET may be a bet-the-house strategy for the company, but the company is nothing if not pragmatic. What it loses in incremental market share to Mono, it more than makes up in wider acceptance of its basic approach -- and denies companies like IBM and Sun some share of their potential customers that would buy anything but Microsoft.
• Critical mass. Mono may be open source, but it still will provide built-in hooks for Passport and other elements of the Hailstorm strategy. What delicious irony that an alternative on the server side ultimately will drive wider adoption of the services that provide real lock-in on the consumption side!
• Counterweight to J2EE. Although the open source community is far from monolithic, it's not entirely unfair to say that there's a preponderance of support among these developers for approaches backed by Sun and the Java/J2EE licensees over those pushed by Microsoft. If Mono helps keep Linux-centric developers solidly in the middle, then the .NET has denied its opponents a formidable, if unpredictable, group of allies.

Does this make sense?

Bent Sleeper
The Stencil Group