Microsoft makes a loaded promise for C# and .NET

The "embrace, extend, extinguish" thing has already sort of happened. Many .NET programs assume they're on windows, and make calls into the win32 API. Those can never run in Mono (although they can run in a Mono-on-Wine environment which last I tried it was a disaster).

First you say this: "We're not lawyers of course, and those among the free software community who are lawyers have yet to review this move by Microsoft."

Followed immediately by:
"But it's not difficult to suspect that this is, in fact, an attack on open sauce, as well as a minefield."

By your own words, you paint yourself as a zealot who has no authority, or even references to back your statements.

I've been reading the Inquirer for years, and this sort of misleading FUD being presented from a tinfoil hat wearing zealot with no expertise on the subject brings the quality of the entire site down.

Next time, do some real research, maybe even find the opinions of people on both sides of the issue. But that actually requires work... Oh well.

I am wondering why people would want to use Mono in the first place?

It's not for portability; You can't run any .NET apps on Mono, because the "promise" doesn't cover the libraries.

It's not for performance: According to the "Computer Language Benchmarks Game", Java is several times faster than Mono, and C++ is even faster.

It's not for ROI: Java is the platform where you get maximum return on investment, because the Java community takes great pains to guarantee upwards compatibility. Not so with .NET. I don't know about Mono.

It's not for maturity: Java currently has the richest and most scrutinized set of libraries of any platform.

It's not for community support: Whatever problem you are trying to solve, you can almost be sure there is already a library for it, sometimes you can even choose from competing implementations.

It's not for process: The Java Community Process (JCP) ensures there is a specification and a reference implementation. The specification enables competing and improved implementations. The reference implementation provides a useful starting point immediately.

Again: Why would anybody use Mono?

Don't know how long you have been around the IT world but anyone who has seen the last decade or more (... when I say last decade I mean post graduate last decade not kiddy/teenage view of things) knows Microsoft's intent with OSS. OS has been the meat and potato of Microsoft's income and the tie-ins to it's proprietary technology is the gravy on the on the plate. If they loose the OS game then they will take a huge hit.

With things like Could computing Microsoft will eventually loose the OS since it isn't about the OS but the content in that view of the world. When this happens Microsoft needs a way to make money.... by setting up a fall guy before they fall. This is a cunning plan but anyone who has seen the changes over the years sees this as it is.

This isn't tin foil hat stuff, it's reality. Do you honestly think that human race has changed in the last millennium..... if conspiracies existed 1000 years ago they are still very well and alive today. All this to say people are and will/have always be devious. Microsoft has just brought it to an art form.

Seriously, if it's not LGPL it's almost worthless to your average code monkey. The liscense is so restrictive it's practically code poison.

Funny, the OSF disagree with you there. Depending on how much Stallman koolaid you swallow it's more free than the viral GPL as, just like BSD licenses, you can use MS-Pl stuff however you like.

But then here, just like the reg, once Mike left accuracy went with him.

By far the worst second half in an inq article i've ever seen. The first half had some facts, but then things quickly deteriorated. weak sauce.

The problem with Mono is one of image. A lot of programmers are obsessed with image, they are trying to look current and competent in front of their peers. Most of them don't give a toss about the principles of open source or patents, they just have some vague idea that using anything related to Microsoft makes you uncool. This is why there is so much irrational criticism of .Net by people whose only programming experience is hacking on lame brochureware content management systems written in excerable php.

Very poor article. At the end it is just the opinion of a writer who is uneducated about the issue.

.net is popular in windows and supportable in linux. If Microsoft is willing to say it won't sue Novell for making mono I think that's great. The whole world isn't going to convert to java, there's nothing wrong with java, but there's lots reasons why people like .net - personally I think every step linux takes to increased compatibility with windows is one step closer to what everybody wants, freedom to run whatever program you want on whatever os you want, be that windows or linux or mac os.

At last, an heavily opiniated article on the new Inq. I was starting to miss the old days. It doesnt really matter which side you're pushing. Just keep us entertained & thinking.

I would like to see more Windows apps running on Linux, too. Unfortunately, Mono won't help you there, because many important libraries are missing and cannot be implemented, because Microsoft doesn't cover those with their "promise". Java and Wine are the only available options if you want to run your Windows apps on Linux.

Some people just need something to hate. When MS made the announcement, I whispered that the anti-mono zealots would not care. Of course they don't. Reason does not matter. They just want to hate on something and have found something to latch on to.

The whole "mono is not portable" or the CP "does not cover libraries" is bogus. I've been doing c# dev since it was beta and mono dev since 05. It is portable. The only issue left is asp.net and winforms. Just don't use them.

The drones are just so lame and I would venture a guess that most of them have not written a lick of code whether c, c# or java.

Hate on folks, that is all you have left. This announcement is huge and removes any logical/legal reason for people to continue to fear.

Why don't you spend a little energy learning about what mono can do? If you open you mind just a little, you might be surprised what you'll find.

Those who have chimed in supporting the view that this is a good thing are "probably" right. After all, just because Microsoft has, in every instance so far that I can recall at least, attacked open source, funding SCO, suing TomTom, threatening Linux with patent FUD, threatening Novell, Xandros, and others into signing "protection agreements", forcing a non-open "standard" OOXML through ISO via bribery; this kind of pattern certainly does not guarantee that in this particular case Microsoft is up to no good.

But if we are talking probabilities here, I wouldn't bet a wooden nickel on anything but continued underhanded "embrace, extend and extinguish" tactics from a corporation with this track record. I guess a solution could be to dump all Microsoft code, and use unencumbered open source products (which I have already done).

Perhaps IBM will buy Novell, and really give Microsoft (and their SCO-puppet) something to worry about.

I have just made a 60 day evaluation of .NET using VS 2008 and correct me if I'm wrong, but is this not just another wrapper for running .NET by whatever means possible.

We scrapped .NET from our development because of the simple reason, it is inherently unsafe and not very simple to port to other platforms, regardless of what add-ons and environment wrappers you use.

Further more, the largest complaint against languages such as VB (Classic) was that it is a runtime interpreted language and thus very slow.

I have just recently written a DLL in VB 5 (yes in 2009) and this is faster than it's .NET counterpart even though I routinely do basic arithmetic on PRECISE integers in the range up to 2^8192 and above in 100% precision without floating points.

I am convinced a C++ implementation of this would be 100 times faster and more stable in classical C++.

Even so, the .NET development will not progress faster (which seems to be M$ main issue) as the development suit is not holding up on speed, quality and functionality as opposed to many other older VS suites.

Simply statements from the .NET development teams gives me the creeps.
Even in their own development introductions you can find statements such as "' The goal at Microsoft is one day to no longer have "Add/Remove Programs" in your control panel, and no longer have any pains of messy uninstalls or reinstalls "
- Ausley Belgin. Microsoft, NY /.NET Platform Developer Team.

In other words...

Surrender your application control to us so we see what you have.

This falls perfectly in line with the fact the intent from M$ is to see what you do as a developer, to whatever benefits that may give them, but be it that .NET is not a fully compiled language, but an interpreted set of instructions in MSIL, the only ones who know what happens behind the scene, are those M$ staff who know MSIL instructions.

Whatever they call it, however nicely they want to "play with Linux", I don't buy it anymore.