Attachmate Fires Mono Developers 362
darthcamaro writes "Love it or hate it, Novell's open source Mono project has inspired a lot of debate over the last 7 years. Mono brings .NET to Linux, with some interesting patent connections. The project is now at a crossroads, with news today that Attachmate had laid off the US based development team for Mono."
Re:Good. (Score:5, Informative)
Last I checked MONO was aiming to deliver .NET to Linux. .NET (platform) patents scare people, not patents regarding the language specification. I guess you can patent anything in USA and sue on ever more in Texas, but I do not think that the language specification contains anything patentable.
Have you read the patent statement? It says:
So, until you have Microsoft releasing GPL (w/ classpath or whatever assemblies you use on .NET exception) or LGPL code that compiles under Linux you really shouldn't be using it.
Re:I was considering Monodroid... (Score:3, Informative)
OK so you wish to live without dynamic language support, true generics, query expressions/LINQ, closures, lambda expressions, the new async/await, and a whole host of other features so you can stick with a language that hasn't seen a major new feature in a long time? One that continuously makes the wrong decisions just for backwards compatibility? (type erasure is idiotic, just make people upgrade their JVMs. the "lambda" support coming in 1.7 will suck for the same reason - it isn't true lambda expressions that make functions first-class citizens, its just syntax sugar on an anonymous class so non-final vars don't get hoisted because writing the changed value back to the caller would apparently be too much trouble.)
Basically Java is frozen in stone and will never be updated with anything worthwhile. Apparently anything that requires JVM support is absolutely out of the question. Especially if C# did it. And if by some miracle Java includes something C# did first, it will introduce incompatible syntax just to be a dick. (for/enumeration loops I'm looking at you!)
There is one interesting question... what will Microsoft do now for Silverlight Linux support? Will they drop it or just go ahead and produce an actual .Net runtime for *nix? They already had rotor, which was an independent implementation of the runtime for *BSD. It wouldn't be hard to do and if they did so there would literally be no reason to choose Java as the only thing it has going for it is that it runs on multiple operating systems. This doesn't necessarily involve the GUI framework or other such things... but the core runtime itself is fantastic.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Informative)
1) Do your research:
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/principles/osspatentpledge.mspx [microsoft.com]
http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/en/us/IntellectualProperty/IPLicensing/customercovenant/msnovellcollab/patent_agreement.aspx [microsoft.com]
2) Stop plagarizing Richard Stallman's quotes without attribution:
http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono [fsf.org]
Re:Good. (Score:5, Informative)
He is not. C# has versions, and so does .NET. As well, C# has an Ecma standard, and so does .NET (CLI) - they are two separate documents.
He is correct in that the most recent standardized (by Ecma and ISO) versions of both C# and CLI are 2.0.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Impact on popular Linux applications (Score:4, Informative)
F-Spot... easily replaced by... gThumb
I'm actually enjoying Shotwell. It's also a good advertisement for the Vala [gnome.org] language, which seems interesting.
Re:C# *and* core libraries (Score:5, Informative)
The FSFs stance [fsf.org], but since the FSF are just anti MS, Stallman following loonies (right?), here's Groklaw's stance [groklaw.net]. I'm sure you can find more with your friend [google.com].
But don't let the facts presented by people who understand the applicable law and the related issues stop your fanboyism.