The poster is not correct. He stated that "Only the language features themselves are covered, which were already in the ECMA spec, so it offers theoretical coverage to people reimplementing C# without implementing *any* of the.net framework." The Community Promise covers ECMA 334 and 335, and ECMA 335 is part of the.NET Framework. Is it all of the.NET Framework? No. But it is without question part of it.
Not at all true. ECMA 334 and 335 cover the Base Class Library as well as C#. Winforms, ASP.NET, and ADO.NET are not included, but the Mono apps under Linux such as F-Spot, Tomboy, MonoDevelop, and Banshee are not developed with any Microsoft-originated libraries--only the Base Class Library and libraries such as GTK#.
The fact that the Mono distribution will now be split into these two factions is telling. It means that they were hoping everything would be covered, and were operating under this assumption.
That's not being done because of anything within Mono. It's being done to shut people like you up. That sounds harsh, and isn't intended to be flamebait, but seriously: that's the only real reason. This has been planned for a while, since well before the Community Promise was updated to reflect the current situation. It's not new and not in response to this.
As I see it, gone is the advantage of being able to run your.NET applications on Linux. For as much as the Linux (and Slashdot) community want to ignore it, the primary attraction of Windows developers to Mono was the cross-platform compatibility feature of the entire framework--not just the C# language. Most of those who develop for Windows will use.NET, and have been using (or would have used) Mono in order to run their applications on Linux. That is a significant chunk of potential mind-share and developer support culled at the stroke of Microsoft's legal pen.
You see it wrongly. This, and most of the fear in your post, only really apply if you think that Microsoft is going to sue you for using Mono. The levels of paranoia necessary to believe this are amazingly high. You are not important enough for Microsoft to sue. If you absolutely must have protection, you buy SLES--which, for an enterprise of the scale to have a legal department to mandate this paranoia, is cheap, and if you don't have a legal department screaming about it you're certainly not large enough to worry--and go on with your life, protected against the Big Bad Microsoft.
Microsoft wants Mono to succeed, because it increases the developer pool for their own environments too. None of this is a big deal, and Roy and the rest of his Boycott Novell monkeys are shitting their pants over absolutely nothing.
Sure! There's a lot of Mono development going on. Look at Banshee, F-Spot, and Tomboy. They're pretty nice GNOME apps--Banshee in particular is a really nice music player, I like it a lot. MonoDevelop is also a C#/Mono application, and while not up to NetBeans's standards, it's made a lot of progress in a relatively short period of time.
Since Mono is a Covered Implementation (Microsoft wrote this primarily to cover them!) and these applications do not use any non-ECMA Microsoft-derived libraries, even the Ubuntu complaints about them not being Free Enough(tm) should fall off quickly.
I wouldn't spend money in Denver or Minneapolis on it, no. It's not a good investment because a) the teams are already in places where the capacity is basically enough for the people who go--the new Twins stadium in Minnesota is a fucking joke, for example--and b) you're not going to attract tourists in those areas because of it.
I'm from New England, so my teams are the Patriots, the Red Sox, and the Celtics. In our area, hooboy do we have people who'd sell their mothers for tickets, and people come from all over the country for Red Sox and Patriots games.
Feel free to be paranoid if that suits you. I was never credulous enough to believe that Microsoft would sue me, so I've been using it for quite a long time.
Process creation is much cheaper under Windows than it used to be.
And one crashed thread takes out all the threads, resulting in--gasp!--the current situation, as Firefox's tabs are nominally multithreaded.
Process segmentation is the only way to retrofit that bad codebase into actually some sort of working order when compared to IE8 and Chrome. It should also help their astonishing memory leaks too.
Just because you aren't crashing Firefox doesn't mean that it doesn't still crash very often.
The authentication store is controlled by the master process so other tabs can access it (at least in Chrome, though given Mozilla's determination to fuck up I would not be surprised if they had problems with this).
It only appears to be unnecessary overhead because you don't know what's going on. Try to keep up.
Miguel has said they're splitting Mono into two releases: the ECMA-compliant one (which F-Spot, Tomboy, etc. use) and the.NET-compliant one (with WinForms, etc.). The latter of these is not covered by the Community Promise (though personally I don't think it matters all that much, Microsoft isn't going to sue despite all the fearmongering), but is available if you want it.
While Mono began as ".NET for Linux," Mono is becoming much more than just that. It's turning into much more of a Java competitor, and doing so very successfully. It runs on the PS3, Mac/Linux/Windows, iPhone, and is almost working on Android.
Even if they woke up tomorrow and yanked all WinForms support because of Microsoft, it wouldn't bother me at all. I use Qyoto for Qt bindings for all GUI work, and that's cross-platform between Windows, Mac, and Linux. I don't use ASP.NET (I prefer PHP for web apps), and there are fine database implementations that aren't ADO.NET.
Mono doesn't pretend to support.NET in its entirety..NET 3.0/3.5 are only implemented where it remains faithful to what appears to be coming in the upcoming ECMA 334/335 revisions.
If Microsoft extends it, Mono might follow through, if it looks beneficial to them. But they certainly haven't with WPF (only Moonlight, which is a protected subset that falls under the Community Promise).
This is a form of promissory estoppel, which amounts to a legal defense. In layman's terms, there are no backsies allowed on this promise, and the courts will enforce that.
And now, instead of invective you get a completely ECMA-standard package (which you also basically already have if you use Ubuntu or Debian), so you can quit your complaining.
Strange, I've written plenty of code in C++. I also vastly prefer C# because it lets me concentrate on getting the code done rather than worrying about the thousand stupid gotchas of C++. It actually makes programming enjoyable, as opposed to C++, which is a chore.
If there was a language as pleasant to use as C# that didn't use Mono (and no, Python isn't it, and neither is Vala), I'd use it. But there isn't, so I use C#.
If you don't want people to use C#, then provide a better alternative. None currently exists.
(Oh, and writing plugins for Gnome-Do is ridiculously easy.)
Slashdot Mirror
The poster is not correct. He stated that "Only the language features themselves are covered, which were already in the ECMA spec, so it offers theoretical coverage to people reimplementing C# without implementing *any* of the .net framework." The Community Promise covers ECMA 334 and 335, and ECMA 335 is part of the .NET Framework. Is it all of the .NET Framework? No. But it is without question part of it.
Not at all true. ECMA 334 and 335 cover the Base Class Library as well as C#. Winforms, ASP.NET, and ADO.NET are not included, but the Mono apps under Linux such as F-Spot, Tomboy, MonoDevelop, and Banshee are not developed with any Microsoft-originated libraries--only the Base Class Library and libraries such as GTK#.
You are wrong, and your FUD is fail.
The fact that the Mono distribution will now be split into these two factions is telling. It means that they were hoping everything would be covered, and were operating under this assumption.
That's not being done because of anything within Mono. It's being done to shut people like you up. That sounds harsh, and isn't intended to be flamebait, but seriously: that's the only real reason. This has been planned for a while, since well before the Community Promise was updated to reflect the current situation. It's not new and not in response to this.
As I see it, gone is the advantage of being able to run your .NET applications on Linux. For as much as the Linux (and Slashdot) community want to ignore it, the primary attraction of Windows developers to Mono was the cross-platform compatibility feature of the entire framework--not just the C# language. Most of those who develop for Windows will use .NET, and have been using (or would have used) Mono in order to run their applications on Linux. That is a significant chunk of potential mind-share and developer support culled at the stroke of Microsoft's legal pen.
You see it wrongly. This, and most of the fear in your post, only really apply if you think that Microsoft is going to sue you for using Mono. The levels of paranoia necessary to believe this are amazingly high. You are not important enough for Microsoft to sue. If you absolutely must have protection, you buy SLES--which, for an enterprise of the scale to have a legal department to mandate this paranoia, is cheap, and if you don't have a legal department screaming about it you're certainly not large enough to worry--and go on with your life, protected against the Big Bad Microsoft.
Microsoft wants Mono to succeed, because it increases the developer pool for their own environments too. None of this is a big deal, and Roy and the rest of his Boycott Novell monkeys are shitting their pants over absolutely nothing.
Sure! There's a lot of Mono development going on. Look at Banshee, F-Spot, and Tomboy. They're pretty nice GNOME apps--Banshee in particular is a really nice music player, I like it a lot. MonoDevelop is also a C#/Mono application, and while not up to NetBeans's standards, it's made a lot of progress in a relatively short period of time.
Since Mono is a Covered Implementation (Microsoft wrote this primarily to cover them!) and these applications do not use any non-ECMA Microsoft-derived libraries, even the Ubuntu complaints about them not being Free Enough(tm) should fall off quickly.
Of course they use more memory--you have duplicate code pages in different processes--but it's a fairly small amount.
I used to have a UID in the low 100000's, but I lost the password and the email address that tied to it. :-/
Gasp. The New York Fucking Yankees (yes, as a Red Sox fan the "Fucking" is required) screwing someone over?
I wouldn't spend money in Denver or Minneapolis on it, no. It's not a good investment because a) the teams are already in places where the capacity is basically enough for the people who go--the new Twins stadium in Minnesota is a fucking joke, for example--and b) you're not going to attract tourists in those areas because of it.
I'm from New England, so my teams are the Patriots, the Red Sox, and the Celtics. In our area, hooboy do we have people who'd sell their mothers for tickets, and people come from all over the country for Red Sox and Patriots games.
Feel free to be paranoid if that suits you. I was never credulous enough to believe that Microsoft would sue me, so I've been using it for quite a long time.
Process creation is much cheaper under Windows than it used to be.
And one crashed thread takes out all the threads, resulting in--gasp!--the current situation, as Firefox's tabs are nominally multithreaded.
Process segmentation is the only way to retrofit that bad codebase into actually some sort of working order when compared to IE8 and Chrome. It should also help their astonishing memory leaks too.
You've missed many things.
Just because you aren't crashing Firefox doesn't mean that it doesn't still crash very often.
The authentication store is controlled by the master process so other tabs can access it (at least in Chrome, though given Mozilla's determination to fuck up I would not be surprised if they had problems with this).
It only appears to be unnecessary overhead because you don't know what's going on. Try to keep up.
Except that this has nothing to do with threading at all.
You know, there was a time Slashdot actually had posters who weren't as fucking dumb as you are.
Miguel has said they're splitting Mono into two releases: the ECMA-compliant one (which F-Spot, Tomboy, etc. use) and the .NET-compliant one (with WinForms, etc.). The latter of these is not covered by the Community Promise (though personally I don't think it matters all that much, Microsoft isn't going to sue despite all the fearmongering), but is available if you want it.
While Mono began as ".NET for Linux," Mono is becoming much more than just that. It's turning into much more of a Java competitor, and doing so very successfully. It runs on the PS3, Mac/Linux/Windows, iPhone, and is almost working on Android.
Even if they woke up tomorrow and yanked all WinForms support because of Microsoft, it wouldn't bother me at all. I use Qyoto for Qt bindings for all GUI work, and that's cross-platform between Windows, Mac, and Linux. I don't use ASP.NET (I prefer PHP for web apps), and there are fine database implementations that aren't ADO.NET.
Good points. Wind is not a base load replacement. It's a supplement.
That said, we need to build more nuclear plants 'till we can't build any more.
sports team owners seem to expect the taxpayers should pay for their little athletic club
The "little athletic clubs" who bring in buckets and buckets of tax money, tourism, and municipal revenue?
Those ones?
Mono doesn't pretend to support .NET in its entirety. .NET 3.0/3.5 are only implemented where it remains faithful to what appears to be coming in the upcoming ECMA 334/335 revisions.
If Microsoft extends it, Mono might follow through, if it looks beneficial to them. But they certainly haven't with WPF (only Moonlight, which is a protected subset that falls under the Community Promise).
Microsoft owns .NET. They don't own the CLI.
Exceeeeeeept that this is a form of promissory estoppel and as such is quite literally the only legal defense needed regarding Mono.
If you're not using ASP.NET, ADO.NET, or Winforms (and GNOME's Mono applications do not), you are covered.
This is a form of promissory estoppel, which amounts to a legal defense. In layman's terms, there are no backsies allowed on this promise, and the courts will enforce that.
C# and the CLI are ECMA standards and therefore not proprietary, dumbass.
A legally binding promise. That matters.
Except that this promise is legally a case of promissory estoppel.
So you're full of shit.
Java had generics first, but C# actually has real generics (and not compile-time crap that can be broken).
And now, instead of invective you get a completely ECMA-standard package (which you also basically already have if you use Ubuntu or Debian), so you can quit your complaining.
Strange, I've written plenty of code in C++. I also vastly prefer C# because it lets me concentrate on getting the code done rather than worrying about the thousand stupid gotchas of C++. It actually makes programming enjoyable, as opposed to C++, which is a chore.
If there was a language as pleasant to use as C# that didn't use Mono (and no, Python isn't it, and neither is Vala), I'd use it. But there isn't, so I use C#.
If you don't want people to use C#, then provide a better alternative. None currently exists.
(Oh, and writing plugins for Gnome-Do is ridiculously easy.)
Actually, yes, it does. Read the post above yours.