Re: Some more thoughts on Java vs Mono debate

[Trent Lloyd <lathiat bur st>]

This is kind of irrelevant

Whether the goal of achieving cross platform compatability is achived or
not, this doesnt stop it being used in its own Linux/GNOME specific way
and no changing of standards by microsoft will affect that

Mono isn't just a clone of .NET, it is its own thing.

Cheers,
Trent
Bur.st

>  The biggest problem with Mono is not the legal issues IMO, at least it's covered 
> under GPL license and Microsoft hasn't been too fond of using software patents 
> aggressively to kill competitors (and Mono is by no means a competitor to MS.NET).
> 
>  Rather, it's the question of who controls, or has power to control the 
> specification. If we're to adopt Mono to develop open source applications on it, 
> we're on great risk of submitting ourselves under MS's rule. Of course C# language 
> itself and some part of .NET platform are ECMA standards. But if you want to 
> develop anything other than console applications, you need those missing parts 
> which are proprietary APIs.
> 
>  Here's the dilemma Mono is facing. If all we want from adopting Mono is a nice
> high level language with GTK/GNOME bindings, there'd be no problem at all. 
> Actually we have GTK# already and I don't find anything wrong with it. But obviously 
> people who advocates the Mono's cause seem to have far more things in their mind. 
> 
>  From the homepage of Mono, it is stated cleary that they're intending to provide 
> *nix developers way of creating and deploying a cross platform applications, and at 
> the same time help Windows developers migrating MS.NET applications to *nix 
> platform. So I understand that compatibility with MS.NET platform has been a very 
> high priority in Mono developers.
> 
>  However, to achieve such level of compatibility they need to copy MS.NET 
> implementation including the proprietary parts. Actually they're implementing 
> many of the non-standard part of the MS.NET API like Windows.Forms or ADO.NET. 
> Indeed this fact alone puts open source applications developed on Mono platform on 
> somewhat dangerous position regarding patent issues. Even if MS plays nice and let 
> Mono freely copy all of their proprietary APIs, it's MS not Novell, Miguel, or any of 
> the Mono developers that decide the future direction of the .NET platform and 
> innovate the technology.
> 
>  It's a ever lasting catch-up game that can't be won by the Mono's side. If the 
> .NET platform succeeds, and if Mono plans to be a viable alternative to the MS.NET 
> implementation for enterprise developers, they need to faithfully represent every 
> single important new features and APIs MS might add to the platform. On the 
> otherhand, MS.NET has no reason at all to support Mono specific features and APIs 
> like GTK#. And as long as MS.NET application developed on Windows platform with 
> VS.NET can be deployed on Linux without much changes, I don't believe many of the 
> Windows developers want to learn GTK# or Monodevelop to create Linux applications.
> 
>  MS has long history of playing with the 'embrace and extend' strategy, and I believe 
> they'll play it again with the .NET platform if it gains momentum. One only needs to 
> see why there're so many web sites look ugly in anything other than IE even if IE 
> conforms to the W3C standards, and why you get so many javascript errors in certain 
> web pages so you can't navigate at all with non-IE browsers even if IE supports 
> ECMAScript which is an open standard. Anyone remembers how they tried to take 
> over the control over Java by creating Visual J++?
> 
>  I believe MS will add more and more Windows specific extensions to the MS.NET 
> platform so many developers who're not very careful or not very interested in cross 
> platform .NET development begin to tie themselves down to MS Windows products.
> 
>  I see Mono as a future version of Wine plus nice C# language bindings to GTK+ and 
> GNOME, but no more. If they continue to copy every API in MS.NET including 
> non-standard ones, they'll end up as a nice tool to run many of the native Windows 
> applications on Linux. However, as few dream about developing Linux applications 
> with Visual C++ with Wine today, there's no reason many would love to develop 
> them using a direct copy of MS platform and an IDE in the future.
> 
>  Innovation by free contribution of the community is an essential part of the open 
> source movement. If we were to copy blindly what MS has done, there'd be no Linux 
> or Mozilla today but maybe GnuWindows or OpenExplorer. Adopting Java has its own 
> problems in this regard, but compared to only subset of .NET APIs are covered by 
> ECMA standards, all the Java specfications are defined by an independent commitee 
> in open manner. And most importantly, Java has far more momentum behind it from 
> both coporate developers and open source community than .NET has.

-- 
[ Trent "Lathiat" Lloyd  lathi sixlabs org ]/ "You sure as hell shouldn't be   \
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