Re:If people used better judgement
on
Cell-Phone Wars
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· Score: 1
If you have an area such as a movie theatre or a classy restaraunt you should be expected to use some judgement
I think the judgement is pretty simple: you should be able to use your cell phone wherever you can also talk to other people face to face. That means, the movie theater is out and the classy restaurant is OK as far as the other patrons are concerned. Of course, you should also talk in an appropriate manner: some locations demand hushed voices.
What is not OK about using your cell phone in a classy restaurant is that if you are dining with others, you are ignoring your dining companions or date. But if you are sitting at the next table, that is really none of your business.
First of all, I should say that I don't actually use my cell phone in restaurants or close to other people just because it is so disapproved of.
But, frankly, I think this dislike of cell phones is irrational and itself annoying. People talk to other people everywhere, often in loud or annoying voices. It makes no difference to me whether someone talks into a cell phone or to someone across from them; at least, when they talk into a cell phone, I don't need to hear the responses.
I'm beginning to suspect that what really annoys people about public cell phone usage is that they are missing out on half of conversation that they would really like to listen in on in its entirety.
OpenOffice is enormously useful right now, and bigger contributions from IBM would be great. But I think in the long term, OpenOffice is a lost cause because it is too much like Microsoft Office is today: a bloated, monolithic piece of software written in C/C++. Microsoft will be changing MS Office over the next few years, by rewriting large chunks of it in C#/CLR and modularizing it more. That will greatly ease their software engineering problems that they are having with their Office software today.
OpenOffice will need to make a similar transition. But that won't be happening within the existing OpenOffice framework: OpenOffice simply doesn't have the resources or will for such a radical and quick transition. Instead, it will have to be a newly designed office suite based on Mono and Gtk#. That is what IBM should really be investing in.
Sweeping statements that people should not be allowed to own ideas seem very short sighted in a number of applications
Well, I made no such statement, I challenged someone to justify their position because they thought it was obvious that people should be able to.
The idea behind protecting ideas through a system of intellectual property is merely a balancing act.
That's the idea, indeed.
Without it, many of the best aspects of capitalism will be eliminated.
That's your assertion. And, in fact, there is ample historical evidence to the contrary.
For example, without patents, companies that develop new drugs would quickly disappear (unless someone can offer a reason why anyone would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a new drug knowing you would never be able to recoup your costs).
Well, a large fraction of drug development is paid for by public money anyway, and most drugs are paid for by public money in a market that can hardly be called "free". In fact, quite a number of economists believe that we'd be saving a lot of money if all drug development was paid for by the government and we did away with drug patents altogether. Furthermore, a free market tends to develop the wrong drugs: drugs that make money are not the drugs that we have the greatest need for.
So, your drug example is actually an example where patents don't work.
As for the problem of screwing people who thought of ideas independently, that is just another balancing act. Sure, it would be great if we could come up with some certain way of proving that someone developed an idea independently from others. But do you have any idea how difficult this would be to implement? The problem is with burdens of proof.
Why are you stating the obvious? I was simply pointing out that the guy was wrong in his assumption that because he patented it, he somehow owned the idea in any moral sense.
As for the problem of screwing people who may have thought of the idea first but didn't patent it, Congress used a phrase most of us learned on the playground: "you snooze, you lose." That made sense to me when I was six and it still makes sense now.
Yes, and that's about the level of thoughtfullness you seem to have regarding patents: that of a six year old on the playground.
I'm not sure whether that's suposed to be funny or not, but dvdcp isn't listed on freshmeat, and there is no such Debian package.
In fact, the open source world has been fairly conservative when it comes to such features; for example, Debian does not include CSS as part of its package system (but it does include a package that will download a CSS decoder from somewhere else).
Don't try to advance, whether deliberately or in jest, the incorrect perception that open source is somehow a hotbet of illegality.
But of course you should be able have the right to call an idea your own and have it recognized as such.
And why "should you"?
As a scientist I will jealously guard my research and results up to practical applications as my own property. I have patents and will defend those if necessary.
Yes, I have no doubt that you will be "jealous" and display all sorts of other annoying behaviors so common of academics.
However, what you are completely overlooking is that "your" research and "your" results are based on centuries of tradition and thought by others. Your work has only been possible because others shared their ideas freely.
Furthermore, your patents keep other people from using the idea even if they themselves came up with it independently. It is just an accident that you happened to have filed the patent on "your" idea first. Chances are, in fact, that others had the same idea before but didn't patent it or did publish it.
Let me repeat that: your patent keeps other people from using their ideas that they themselves came up with independently. How do you justify that?
Completely restricting the use of an idea is a completely different thing, though.
That's what patents do: for about 20 years, the patent holder gets nearly full control of the invention. Patents don't even have academic or research exemptions.
That's not what patents were invented for
That is exactly what patents were created for: to give inventors exclusive use of an idea for a limited amount of time. And, at least since the times of Edison and Watson, corporate patent portfolios have been a big thing. It's just that barriers to entry into many markets were so strong for other reasons that they didn't have to use their patent portfolios much until now.
They had a monopoly on PSTN and LD services. A Very huge difference as it relates to UNIX and the world of computing.
They also had a monopoly position when it came to workstation operating systems and operating systems in a number of other areas, because UNIX was pretty much it.
Furthermore, Microsoft does not have a monopoly in many of those areas where they are trying to compete with C#: servers and server-side programming.
Hopefully you can understand why the rest of us are smugly smiling at your, well, simpleton statements.
If you are suffering from multiple personality disorder, yes, then I can understand that statement.
but I need to know where you are going with this, and I need to now whether it is 'safe' for me (and my conscience) to use Mono and, for example, your windows forms library.
If you are writing code that needs to run primarily on Windows but that you may also want to run on Linux, use the Microsoft APIs (in that case, what's the problem with your conscience if you develop for Windows anyway?). There is a small chance that Mono will run into patent problems over their implementation of the.NET APIs, but so far, there isn't much indication of that either way. And by developing on and for Linux (as opposed to developing under Visual.NET), you'll help the quality of those API implementations on Linux.
If you are writing code that is intended primarily for OSS platforms or if you are worried about patents, use open APIs like Gtk#, Gnome, etc. They are technically better anyway. And they will work on Windows as well, it will just mean a somewhat larger download.
how many times do you have to be kicked in the nuts from Microsoft before you're willing to accept facts.
I haven't been "kicked in the nuts from Microsoft" at all, and I frankly doubt you have been either, even figuratively. In fact, Microsoft doesn't matter to me much one way or another. They have never sued or threatened any OSS project I have been involved in or know about. They create mediocre technology for the masses and they compete with Linux--let them, it doesn't bother me.
I have, however, to use your terminology, been "kicked in the nuts from Sun": Sun has repeatedly broken their promises to make Java an open standard, they have repeatedly failed to address technical problems they promised to fix, and they are now trying to control or destroy Linux and Gnome through "embrace and extend" tactics.
Since I need a language like Java or C# and since Sun's behavior has been monopolistic and deceptive, that leaves C#. I hope Microsoft won't repeat Sun's behavior. Maybe they'll try--one can never be sure with large companies--but they'd have a much harder time: Sun never handed Java to a standards body, while Microsoft handed C# to two standards bodies and it now exists as open standards. For now, that's good enough for me.
Stagnating?? That's an astonishing thing to say. Go check out 1.5 and tell me it's stagnant.
Yes, 1.5 is stagnant. After many years of promises, Sun has finally added a little bit of syntactic sugar--stuff that was easy to do at the Java-to-byte-code level. They have left out the hard stuff: value classes, a good native code interface, and correct and efficient generic classes. The 1.5 release is a PR move to try to fool people into thinking that Sun has technically caught up with C# again; they haven't. Doing so would require incompatible changes in the JVM, and Sun isn't prepared to do that.
There is absolutely no advantage to C# over other languages out there, so if you don't even have standard libraries you are better off using something that is more generally available.
Well, let's see, what is "more generally available"? Java, C++, C, VB, and, if we go out on a limb, Eiffel and OCAML.
C# combines value classes, garbage collection, runtime safety, operator overloading, efficient generic classes, reflection, threads, and an efficient native code interface, among many other features. Java doesn't come close (it lacks value classes, efficient generic classes, and an efficient native code interface), it has serious problems in its type system (exception declarations, arrays, its attempt at genericity), and the Java language definition is proprietary and Sun hold several patents on the runtime. C++ lacks garbage collection, reflection, and runtime safety. Eiffel is the closest, but it's already a marginal language and has numerous design problems. OCAML is a great language all around, but it lacks value classes and operator overloading.
Sad as it is, C# is indeed the best there is right now. Java isn't even in the running for many applications because Sun has failed to fix crucial problems. The only alternative to C# is to stick with C++.
Oh please. Re-read what I wrote and then address it in the proper context.
I did read what you wrote and addressed it "in the proper context". You made a bunch of bogus, incorrect, and untenable assertions about what Mono is, and I corrected them. If you didn't mean to say what you wrote, you should have qualified it properly.
If they don't open it up, the OSS community will either do their own thing or move to C#. And many in the OSS communty aren't just not interested inJava anymore, they have gotten quite annoyed by the garbage people like McNealy, Gosling, and Schwartz are saying about OSS and their broken promises.
If Sun thinks they can go it alone, good luck. And good riddance.
Sun has made some simple cosmetic changes in 1.5, but they have avoided the hard stuff: value classes, a better native code interface, and correctly implemented generic classes. Those would require jvm changes, and they are necessary for java to be a competitive choice.
That is exactly what should worry you: how can and will Sun monetize Java further? Remember: there is no OSS implementation of the Java2 platform, not even swing.
In fact, their troubles have already hurt Java big time, by focusing their platform efforts where it can make them the most money (server, through hw sales), rather than what they promised and what people wanted (clients, guis, etc.).
Yes, and if you look at the source code, Sun owns you.
Many of C# extra "features" are unnecessary "syntactic sugar", some are superfluous and harmful, and those that are truely useful appear in JDK 1.5 soon. Plus, in JDK 1.5 gets features such as generics which are coming in.net as well, but at a much later time.
JDK 1.5 still lacks crucial features like value classes and true multidimensional arrays. And JDK 1.5 generics are a sham: they don't handle the hard cases correctly. Sorry, but JDK 1.5 doesn't even come close to C#/CLR in terms of functionality. Sun would have to change the JVM incompatibly to do that, and they aren't going to.
The language is an ECMA standard, but the runtime libraries are not. Without those, C# is pretty useless.
Yes, just about as useless as C++ is without Win32 and MFC, right?
Sun marketing has seriously damaged your mind. The fact that C# is "just" a language is a big plus to me. Unlike with Java, there isn't the assumption that just because I like the language, I also want to take 100 Mbytes of poorly designed runtime bloat along with it.
If it will, then I'll be happy to declare.NET as the greatest cross platform programming environment in the universe and hold the developers of the non-MS.NET frameworks up as champions of the open source world.
Why would "cross platform programming environments" be good for open source? If we take Java as an example, for Java applications, Linux is second rate, with more of Sun's efforts going into Windows. Sun has somehow confused you into thinking that cross platform support is good for open source, when exactly the opposite is true.
I frankly don't care whether MS Office runs on Mono. What I care about is whether I can write good Gnome apps in Mono, and that I can. Mono is far better than Java for supporting open source platforms.
Now, as you can probably tell from the tone of my post, I've more-or-less concluded that there is basically no chance that MS will ever allow Office.NET to run on any non-MS.NET framework.
Yes, and why would I care? How would that change if people programmed in, say, Java?
But if it doesn't, then I judge the whole effort to produce non-MS.NET frameworks as a waste of the open source community's time.
In fact, I agree with your view and would prefer for Mono to drop.NET compatibility entirely. Fortunately,.NET compatibility is only a small part of the Mono project. So, you can judge that part of Mono to be a waste of time, but still use and contribute to Mono productively.
Let's look at Java. How many professional/hobby/academic Java developers use Sun's SDK? How many use Gnu classpath with some other VM? [gnu.org]
Well, and that, in a nutshell, is why Java isn't a viable choice for open source: the only implementations that are complete and usable are proprietary.
Fortunately, for Mono, things look different: unlike Java, open source Mono programming is based on open source tools and libraries. Writing Gnome apps in C#, not only is Mono the preferred platform, it's the only platform. That's why Mono has a chance to move open source into the 21st century in a way that Java has promised but failed.
Mono and DotGNU, if nothing else, are good contingency measures if.Net happens to crush Java in the realm of web apps (not likely.)
I very much hope that something will "crush Java in the real of web apps": Java is proprietary and it isn't even technically very well suited to the job. If Mono can crush Java for web apps, we'd all be better off.
I love how it ignores basic facts of the players in question, not to mention the very, very long history of Microsoft's monopoly and abuse of the market.
So? ATT was a monopoly as well. That didn't stop us from re-implementing their software.
Meanwhile, +10 points for Microsoft. Good thing you were there to help them. They sure needed help with their monopoly!
Well, if there is an open and free implementation of their platform, they obviously don't have a monopoly anymore. And with Mono, people are playing Microsoft's own "embrace-and-extend" game because Mono implements.NET, but it also offers its own set of APIs.
Except that Java isn't actually an open standard and likely never will be. Java is a proprietary platform that is controlled by Sun and by an industry consortium. They just happen to give away implementations for free.
I don't know why everyone in the open source community feels compelled in chasing behind Microsoft technologies, whether it be Mono or Wine..NET compatiblity is only a small part of Mono and Wine is only a small part of Linux. I don't see what is wrong with offering compatibility in addition to native libraries.
We shouldn't lag behind and chase Microsoft's coattails. We should instead innovate; create our own.NET our own technologies, and make them BETTER then their closed-source counterparts.
Yes, and "we" do. That's, for example, why Mono has its own, native GUI toolkit, called Gtk#. It is, in fact, the preferred way of writing Mono GUI apps.
As someone who contributed a little code to gotGnu, I kinda started thinking, what's the point? What is the point of running.Net on a non-M$ OS?
You are making the assumption that the point of dotGnu or Mono is to run.NET on Linux. That's one point, but a minor one. The main point of dotGnu and Mono is the same as of GNU C or GNU C++: to bring better programming tools to the Linux platform. Note, incidentally, that.NET compatibility is only a small part of the overall Mono project.
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If you have an area such as a movie theatre or a classy restaraunt you should be expected to use some judgement
I think the judgement is pretty simple: you should be able to use your cell phone wherever you can also talk to other people face to face. That means, the movie theater is out and the classy restaurant is OK as far as the other patrons are concerned. Of course, you should also talk in an appropriate manner: some locations demand hushed voices.
What is not OK about using your cell phone in a classy restaurant is that if you are dining with others, you are ignoring your dining companions or date. But if you are sitting at the next table, that is really none of your business.
First of all, I should say that I don't actually use my cell phone in restaurants or close to other people just because it is so disapproved of.
But, frankly, I think this dislike of cell phones is irrational and itself annoying. People talk to other people everywhere, often in loud or annoying voices. It makes no difference to me whether someone talks into a cell phone or to someone across from them; at least, when they talk into a cell phone, I don't need to hear the responses.
I'm beginning to suspect that what really annoys people about public cell phone usage is that they are missing out on half of conversation that they would really like to listen in on in its entirety.
OpenOffice is enormously useful right now, and bigger contributions from IBM would be great. But I think in the long term, OpenOffice is a lost cause because it is too much like Microsoft Office is today: a bloated, monolithic piece of software written in C/C++. Microsoft will be changing MS Office over the next few years, by rewriting large chunks of it in C#/CLR and modularizing it more. That will greatly ease their software engineering problems that they are having with their Office software today.
OpenOffice will need to make a similar transition. But that won't be happening within the existing OpenOffice framework: OpenOffice simply doesn't have the resources or will for such a radical and quick transition. Instead, it will have to be a newly designed office suite based on Mono and Gtk#. That is what IBM should really be investing in.
Sweeping statements that people should not be allowed to own ideas seem very short sighted in a number of applications
Well, I made no such statement, I challenged someone to justify their position because they thought it was obvious that people should be able to.
The idea behind protecting ideas through a system of intellectual property is merely a balancing act.
That's the idea, indeed.
Without it, many of the best aspects of capitalism will be eliminated.
That's your assertion. And, in fact, there is ample historical evidence to the contrary.
For example, without patents, companies that develop new drugs would quickly disappear (unless someone can offer a reason why anyone would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a new drug knowing you would never be able to recoup your costs).
Well, a large fraction of drug development is paid for by public money anyway, and most drugs are paid for by public money in a market that can hardly be called "free". In fact, quite a number of economists believe that we'd be saving a lot of money if all drug development was paid for by the government and we did away with drug patents altogether. Furthermore, a free market tends to develop the wrong drugs: drugs that make money are not the drugs that we have the greatest need for.
So, your drug example is actually an example where patents don't work.
As for the problem of screwing people who thought of ideas independently, that is just another balancing act. Sure, it would be great if we could come up with some certain way of proving that someone developed an idea independently from others. But do you have any idea how difficult this would be to implement? The problem is with burdens of proof.
Why are you stating the obvious? I was simply pointing out that the guy was wrong in his assumption that because he patented it, he somehow owned the idea in any moral sense.
As for the problem of screwing people who may have thought of the idea first but didn't patent it, Congress used a phrase most of us learned on the playground: "you snooze, you lose." That made sense to me when I was six and it still makes sense now.
Yes, and that's about the level of thoughtfullness you seem to have regarding patents: that of a six year old on the playground.
I'm not sure whether that's suposed to be funny or not, but dvdcp isn't listed on freshmeat, and there is no such Debian package.
In fact, the open source world has been fairly conservative when it comes to such features; for example, Debian does not include CSS as part of its package system (but it does include a package that will download a CSS decoder from somewhere else).
Don't try to advance, whether deliberately or in jest, the incorrect perception that open source is somehow a hotbet of illegality.
But of course you should be able have the right to call an idea your own and have it recognized as such.
And why "should you"?
As a scientist I will jealously guard my research and results up to practical applications as my own property. I have patents and will defend those if necessary.
Yes, I have no doubt that you will be "jealous" and display all sorts of other annoying behaviors so common of academics.
However, what you are completely overlooking is that "your" research and "your" results are based on centuries of tradition and thought by others. Your work has only been possible because others shared their ideas freely.
Furthermore, your patents keep other people from using the idea even if they themselves came up with it independently. It is just an accident that you happened to have filed the patent on "your" idea first. Chances are, in fact, that others had the same idea before but didn't patent it or did publish it.
Let me repeat that: your patent keeps other people from using their ideas that they themselves came up with independently. How do you justify that?
Completely restricting the use of an idea is a completely different thing, though.
That's what patents do: for about 20 years, the patent holder gets nearly full control of the invention. Patents don't even have academic or research exemptions.
That's not what patents were invented for
That is exactly what patents were created for: to give inventors exclusive use of an idea for a limited amount of time. And, at least since the times of Edison and Watson, corporate patent portfolios have been a big thing. It's just that barriers to entry into many markets were so strong for other reasons that they didn't have to use their patent portfolios much until now.
They had a monopoly on PSTN and LD services. A Very huge difference as it relates to UNIX and the world of computing.
They also had a monopoly position when it came to workstation operating systems and operating systems in a number of other areas, because UNIX was pretty much it.
Furthermore, Microsoft does not have a monopoly in many of those areas where they are trying to compete with C#: servers and server-side programming.
Hopefully you can understand why the rest of us are smugly smiling at your, well, simpleton statements.
If you are suffering from multiple personality disorder, yes, then I can understand that statement.
Why don't you just read the Mono FAQ?
.NET APIs, but so far, there isn't much indication of that either way. And by developing on and for Linux (as opposed to developing under Visual.NET), you'll help the quality of those API implementations on Linux.
but I need to know where you are going with this, and I need to now whether it is 'safe' for me (and my conscience) to use Mono and, for example, your windows forms library.
If you are writing code that needs to run primarily on Windows but that you may also want to run on Linux, use the Microsoft APIs (in that case, what's the problem with your conscience if you develop for Windows anyway?). There is a small chance that Mono will run into patent problems over their implementation of the
If you are writing code that is intended primarily for OSS platforms or if you are worried about patents, use open APIs like Gtk#, Gnome, etc. They are technically better anyway. And they will work on Windows as well, it will just mean a somewhat larger download.
how many times do you have to be kicked in the nuts from Microsoft before you're willing to accept facts.
I haven't been "kicked in the nuts from Microsoft" at all, and I frankly doubt you have been either, even figuratively. In fact, Microsoft doesn't matter to me much one way or another. They have never sued or threatened any OSS project I have been involved in or know about. They create mediocre technology for the masses and they compete with Linux--let them, it doesn't bother me.
I have, however, to use your terminology, been "kicked in the nuts from Sun": Sun has repeatedly broken their promises to make Java an open standard, they have repeatedly failed to address technical problems they promised to fix, and they are now trying to control or destroy Linux and Gnome through "embrace and extend" tactics.
Since I need a language like Java or C# and since Sun's behavior has been monopolistic and deceptive, that leaves C#. I hope Microsoft won't repeat Sun's behavior. Maybe they'll try--one can never be sure with large companies--but they'd have a much harder time: Sun never handed Java to a standards body, while Microsoft handed C# to two standards bodies and it now exists as open standards. For now, that's good enough for me.
Stagnating?? That's an astonishing thing to say. Go check out 1.5 and tell me it's stagnant.
Yes, 1.5 is stagnant. After many years of promises, Sun has finally added a little bit of syntactic sugar--stuff that was easy to do at the Java-to-byte-code level. They have left out the hard stuff: value classes, a good native code interface, and correct and efficient generic classes. The 1.5 release is a PR move to try to fool people into thinking that Sun has technically caught up with C# again; they haven't. Doing so would require incompatible changes in the JVM, and Sun isn't prepared to do that.
There is absolutely no advantage to C# over other languages out there, so if you don't even have standard libraries you are better off using something that is more generally available.
Well, let's see, what is "more generally available"? Java, C++, C, VB, and, if we go out on a limb, Eiffel and OCAML.
C# combines value classes, garbage collection, runtime safety, operator overloading, efficient generic classes, reflection, threads, and an efficient native code interface, among many other features. Java doesn't come close (it lacks value classes, efficient generic classes, and an efficient native code interface), it has serious problems in its type system (exception declarations, arrays, its attempt at genericity), and the Java language definition is proprietary and Sun hold several patents on the runtime. C++ lacks garbage collection, reflection, and runtime safety. Eiffel is the closest, but it's already a marginal language and has numerous design problems. OCAML is a great language all around, but it lacks value classes and operator overloading.
Sad as it is, C# is indeed the best there is right now. Java isn't even in the running for many applications because Sun has failed to fix crucial problems. The only alternative to C# is to stick with C++.
Oh please. Re-read what I wrote and then address it in the proper context.
I did read what you wrote and addressed it "in the proper context". You made a bunch of bogus, incorrect, and untenable assertions about what Mono is, and I corrected them. If you didn't mean to say what you wrote, you should have qualified it properly.
The problems with Java are not just the proprietary runtime but also the stagnating language itself.
As for gcj, it's a good compiler but with very incomplete libraries.
Even today, Mono is already far more useful for most kinds of programming. Sad, but true.
If they don't open it up, the OSS community will either do their own thing or move to C#. And many in the OSS communty aren't just not interested inJava anymore, they have gotten quite annoyed by the garbage people like McNealy, Gosling, and Schwartz are saying about OSS and their broken promises.
If Sun thinks they can go it alone, good luck. And good riddance.
Sun has made some simple cosmetic changes in 1.5, but they have avoided the hard stuff: value classes, a better native code interface, and correctly implemented generic classes. Those would require jvm changes, and they are necessary for java to be a competitive choice.
That is exactly what should worry you: how can and will Sun monetize Java further? Remember: there is no OSS implementation of the Java2 platform, not even swing.
In fact, their troubles have already hurt Java big time, by focusing their platform efforts where it can make them the most money (server, through hw sales), rather than what they promised and what people wanted (clients, guis, etc.).
And the JVM spec is open,
.net as well, but at a much later time.
Not really: Sun has several patents.
plus all classes are available in source code.
Yes, and if you look at the source code, Sun owns you.
Many of C# extra "features" are unnecessary "syntactic sugar", some are superfluous and harmful, and those that are truely useful appear in JDK 1.5 soon. Plus, in JDK 1.5 gets features such as generics which are coming in
JDK 1.5 still lacks crucial features like value classes and true multidimensional arrays. And JDK 1.5 generics are a sham: they don't handle the hard cases correctly. Sorry, but JDK 1.5 doesn't even come close to C#/CLR in terms of functionality. Sun would have to change the JVM incompatibly to do that, and they aren't going to.
The language is an ECMA standard, but the runtime libraries are not. Without those, C# is pretty useless.
Yes, just about as useless as C++ is without Win32 and MFC, right?
Sun marketing has seriously damaged your mind. The fact that C# is "just" a language is a big plus to me. Unlike with Java, there isn't the assumption that just because I like the language, I also want to take 100 Mbytes of poorly designed runtime bloat along with it.
If it will, then I'll be happy to declare .NET as the greatest cross platform programming environment in the universe and hold the developers of the non-MS .NET frameworks up as champions of the open source world.
.NET framework.
.NET frameworks as a waste of the open source community's time.
.NET compatibility entirely. Fortunately, .NET compatibility is only a small part of the Mono project. So, you can judge that part of Mono to be a waste of time, but still use and contribute to Mono productively.
Why would "cross platform programming environments" be good for open source? If we take Java as an example, for Java applications, Linux is second rate, with more of Sun's efforts going into Windows. Sun has somehow confused you into thinking that cross platform support is good for open source, when exactly the opposite is true.
I frankly don't care whether MS Office runs on Mono. What I care about is whether I can write good Gnome apps in Mono, and that I can. Mono is far better than Java for supporting open source platforms.
Now, as you can probably tell from the tone of my post, I've more-or-less concluded that there is basically no chance that MS will ever allow Office.NET to run on any non-MS
Yes, and why would I care? How would that change if people programmed in, say, Java?
But if it doesn't, then I judge the whole effort to produce non-MS
In fact, I agree with your view and would prefer for Mono to drop
Let's look at Java. How many professional/hobby/academic Java developers use Sun's SDK? How many use Gnu classpath with some other VM? [gnu.org]
Well, and that, in a nutshell, is why Java isn't a viable choice for open source: the only implementations that are complete and usable are proprietary.
Fortunately, for Mono, things look different: unlike Java, open source Mono programming is based on open source tools and libraries. Writing Gnome apps in C#, not only is Mono the preferred platform, it's the only platform. That's why Mono has a chance to move open source into the 21st century in a way that Java has promised but failed.
Mono and DotGNU, if nothing else, are good contingency measures if .Net happens to crush Java in the realm of web apps (not likely.)
I very much hope that something will "crush Java in the real of web apps": Java is proprietary and it isn't even technically very well suited to the job. If Mono can crush Java for web apps, we'd all be better off.
I love how it ignores basic facts of the players in question, not to mention the very, very long history of Microsoft's monopoly and abuse of the market.
.NET, but it also offers its own set of APIs.
So? ATT was a monopoly as well. That didn't stop us from re-implementing their software.
Meanwhile, +10 points for Microsoft. Good thing you were there to help them. They sure needed help with their monopoly!
Well, if there is an open and free implementation of their platform, they obviously don't have a monopoly anymore. And with Mono, people are playing Microsoft's own "embrace-and-extend" game because Mono implements
Except that Java isn't actually an open standard and likely never will be. Java is a proprietary platform that is controlled by Sun and by an industry consortium. They just happen to give away implementations for free.
I don't know why everyone in the open source community feels compelled in chasing behind Microsoft technologies, whether it be Mono or Wine. .NET compatiblity is only a small part of Mono and Wine is only a small part of Linux. I don't see what is wrong with offering compatibility in addition to native libraries.
.NET our own technologies, and make them BETTER then their closed-source counterparts.
We shouldn't lag behind and chase Microsoft's coattails. We should instead innovate; create our own
Yes, and "we" do. That's, for example, why Mono has its own, native GUI toolkit, called Gtk#. It is, in fact, the preferred way of writing Mono GUI apps.
As someone who contributed a little code to gotGnu, I kinda started thinking, what's the point? What is the point of running .Net on a non-M$ OS?
.NET on Linux. That's one point, but a minor one. The main point of dotGnu and Mono is the same as of GNU C or GNU C++: to bring better programming tools to the Linux platform. Note, incidentally, that .NET compatibility is only a small part of the overall Mono project.
You are making the assumption that the point of dotGnu or Mono is to run