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."
Good. (Score:3, Interesting)
It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use.
The problem is not unique to Mono; any free implementation of C# would raise the same issue. The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents. (See http://swpat.org/ [swpat.org] and http://progfree.org./ [progfree.org.] This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.
This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. Free C# implementations permit users to run their C# programs on free platforms, which is good. (The GNU Project has an implementation of C# also, called Portable.NET.) Ideally we want to provide free implementations for all languages that programmers have used.
The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.
We should systematically arrange to depend on the free C# implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing programs in C#. Therefore, we should not include C# implementations in the default installation of GNU/Linux distributions or in their principal ways of installing GNOME, and we should distribute and recommend non-C# applications rather than comparable C# applications whenever possible.
Re:Good. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't care for proprietary programming languages as much as the next guy. Take away the .net part of it, look at the principal architect of the C# language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg/> Sorry, URL formatting has me stumped, I've followed the syntax, but that's not the point of this post. You can find him. He was was heavily involved/ perhaps lead architect (I don't know as of now) of Borland's Delphi. A most wonderful development environment, and the only real competitor to VB at the time. So my suggestion is don't bash C# but rather the encumbrances places upon it, like .NET.
Disclaimer: I still write in Delphi. If I want to update a network of 100 systems I just copy over the .exe. (Still using Delphi 7). No need to roll out updates to every machine. No registry usage. None of the BS that comes with rolling out a .Net application. And my clients find my work very valuable. My impression is that Delphi is much more common in the EU and I don't speak at all to the crap that's happened since then with the selling to this corp or that corp. I only point out that the person developed by C# is a talented individual.
Impact on popular Linux applications (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking through the Mono application screenshots [mono-project.com], what I believe are the most popular programs impacted by Mono development slowing are Banshee, F-Spot, and Tomboy. Since this trio is easily replaced by Rhythmbox, gThumb, and Gnote, among other options, good riddance to the lot of them. In addition to the standard Stallman concerns [fsf.org], the high concentration of the development team within Novell was always a problem anyway. There are way too many similar applications within open-source operating systems, so culling out some of the weaker ones--from a development risk standpoint--is a net benefit as far as I'm concerned.
Re:Not many tears (Score:2, Interesting)
Professional full-time .Net programmer with extensive mono experience.
Mono's implementation of winforms is shit. But hey, winforms is shit!
Otherwise, I found mono to be entirely as good as MS' CLR, with the caveat that it lags behind by a short period of time. This becomes less and less important, as new language features are less and less important (generics was huge, linq was useful, type variance is nice...). Additionally, unlike winforms, mono's ASP.NET implementation is actually pretty passable.
Re:Good. (Score:3, Interesting)
Erm, Have you actually tried to deploy a .net application recently ?
Other then ensuring that the framework is installed, it is also generally as simple as copying a .exe file.
ClickOnce deployment is vaguely more complicated but its complexities exist to counter security problems. One can hardly blame MS for trying to be a bit more proactive about security either.
The largest (in terms of distribution) .NET program I've ever written had a target audience of roughly 40k computers. Our deployment process ? xcopy or download an MSI file if you weren't on the network.
Re:Good. (Score:2, Interesting)
Good Question. In all the MSDN conference media -which I do not define as MSDN proper, but programmer conference media-, Microsoft has not only embraces Mono but showcases it. Microsoft has no intention of developing a .NET solution for other platforms, but it is advantageous for them to support others who do so. Did you (not you who I am replying to but the original commenter) not see the recent Microsoft PDC conference video where Miguel De Icaza himself presented on Mono?
Re:Good. (Score:5, Interesting)
So why doesn't Microsoft sue? Because it would be a public relations nightmare - just as it was for SCO.
Perhaps you aren't aware that MS funded SCO's lawsuit. [eweek.com] SCO was just a proxy for MS. Nothing to stop MS from "selling" the patents in question to some patent troll and engaging in another proxy lawsuit.