MS .net vs Mono, Open Source 243
vinsci writes "Sometimes, reader comments to reporter-written stories are just as good as the stories themselves. Such as David Mohring's comment yesterday on ZDNet.com's story Mono & .Net: The odd couple. Since Microsoft are now using their licensing terms to stop GPL and LGPL free software, it would be a welcome sign of free software maturity at Microsoft if they actually resolved the Mono issue. The gist of his comment: 'Microsoft's CEOs have made it 'patently' clear that they intend to restrict competing .Net implementations by cultivating Microsoft's patents, [...]
Mono also implements parts of .NET that have NOT been submitted to ECMA and ISO standards. Those parts of Mono lack even the protection for IP infringement with re-implementation that ISO documentation licensing implies. [...] There [are] those that claim that .NET is open to re-implementation, but until Microsoft make a simliar public legal declaration to Sun's JSPA, any .NET re-implementation represents a pending legal mindfield.'
While on the subject of C# development, users of the GPL'd C# development environment SharpDevelop may also want to try Eclipse together with the Open Source Improve CSharp plugin for Eclipse. Eclipse also support C/C++ these days using GCC and GDB, thanks to the CDT. There are about two hundred add-on plugins available for Eclipse. Eclipse itself is available for many platforms, including Linux with native GTK 2 support."
The Devil (Score:3, Informative)
If you plan to sup with the devil, it is best to bring a long spoon
Re:...if the comments were insightful, that is. (Score:3, Informative)
Its worth noting that IBM had Microsoft's "good will" too. Then they got burned on OS/2, not once but twice. Once when Microsoft stole the code to make NT, and once when Microsoft threatened to stop selling IBM Windows if they continued their development efforts on any completing software. And they didn't break the law "on occasion", they broke it every single chance they got.
Sorry, but history shows that having Microsoft's "good will" is nothing more than a one-way ticket to an unpleasant death.
Has nobody read the ZDNet article? (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, it says "unofficial", but don't spread FUD until there's some updated (the Ballmer quote is from March) official information.
Re:WTF? RTFM! FAQ! LOL! (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/10/2/43
Microsoft's introduction is here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/pro
Mono's information is here:
http://www.go-mono.org/rationale.html
There are no legal swpatents in Europe, yet! (Score:1, Informative)
People are you reading this!?! (Score:3, Informative)
Asked by CollabNet CTO Brian Behlendorf whether Microsoft will enforce its patents against open source projects, Mundie replied, "Yes, absolutely." An audience member pointed out that many open source projects aren't funded and so can't afford legal representation to rival Microsoft's. "Oh well," said Mundie. "Get your money, and let's go to court."
and
"Heise report about Steve Ballmer's talk at CeBit. At a speech event together with chancellor Schroeder, Ballmer says that Microsoft owns lots of patents which cover its new DotNet standard and that it aims to use them to prevent opensource implementations of DotNet. The key phrases read, in translation:"
you've been duped (Score:4, Informative)
It's Blackdown Java. It is not a third party implementation. Sun simply dumped their source code onto a bunch of people outside Sun who then fixed a bunch of bugs and ported it to Linux.
IBM has had it's JVM for eons now. There are lots of embedded JVMs.
IBM does not have its own Java implementation--they have a license to Sun's Java implementation, and they replace some of Sun's components with their own.
(ii) Sun has tolerated those implementations for years now.
Sun hasn't tolerated anything. As far as I can tell, anybody who is shipping anything remotely resembling a Java platform implementation has a contractual agreement with Sun. In fact, merely to claim that something is Java, you need a contractual agreement with Sun (because of their trademark).
(iii) In the past, Sun has never shown to be anti-competitive as microsoft. They don't defend or promote Solaris at any cost the way microsoft does.
I see no basis for that statement. Sun simply isn't leveraging their monopoly because they don't have one. As a 15 year Sun customer, all the indications I have seen are that Sun is worse than Microsoft when it comes to cut-throat competition and intellectual property, they are simply not as successful.
Re:The Devil (Score:2, Informative)
Microsoft has a number of patents on the technologies in
in this case software patents are a real threat to innovation by US programmers
I don't see how copying
DotGNU ? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:you've been duped (Score:3, Informative)
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What you're saying isn't really true. IBM has 2 JVM implementations, the JDKs (J2SE) as well as J9, a whole separate Sun-code-free VM which implements J2ME and other custom class libraries.
Re:...if the comments were insightful, that is. (Score:1, Informative)
killed them [com.com].
If someone from Microsoft smiles at you, shoot them right away or you're the corpse
Re:worry about Sun patents, not MS patents (Score:2, Informative)
Python is a great language. It has problems, but not those you mention.
It does not have a clear cross-platform GUI (Tkinter doesn't work on OS X, wxPython isn't a standard part of the platform binary distributions).
Those that actually care about client GUI libs can install their own. In this respect, Python is no different from C, and in fact, has more GUI bindings than C!
Many packages rely on native code in shared libraries.
And your point is...? That's like saying "many parts of my house rely on the shared frame".
Python byte code is orders of magnitude slower than Java or C# code.
For real-world tasks, Python execution speed is more than fast enough. When it's not, the bottlenecks can be easily identified and moved to C, or optimized away by the machine using Psyco. Using Psyco, my neural net code ran 5x faster. But the real thing you're missing here is this: developer time is more valuable than machine time, as machine time can be saved using other methods.
Python does not have optional static type checking.
And I thank God it does not! Static type checking solves a very narrow programming problem and requires a tremendous amount of coding for the developer.
It is hard to make standalone, self-contained applications out of it.
No, it's not hard to make stand-alone, or to embed it in other applications. There are multiple proven techniques to bundle the interpreter with a parts of the standard library and third-party code. That you don't know this makes me believe you don't really know python, either.
Python does not have a well-defined language standard, nor does it have multiple independent implementations.
Oh, my! The language definition is quite well-defined and very consistent. And there are two open-source implementations on separate platforms: python in C [python.org] and python on Java [jython.org]
Python could be more of a contender if someone built a good native code compiler for it. None of the current attempts are very good or result in much speedup.
Psyco [sf.net] speeds up python by optimizing chunks of code at run time. The neat thing is that it does this against python code, so python becomes faster by more of it being written in python.
The way it is, Python is good for many scripting and prototyping applications. But for a general-purpose, high-quality programming language, we still have to look elsewhere.
NASA. ILM. Google. Please.