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."
Re:C# of the 2000s is the RPG of the 1970s (Score:2, Insightful)
Any company which invests in proprietary programming lanugages must not expect to be around very long, or is happy giving a cut of the profits to other companies forever.
Re:The Devil (Score:3, Insightful)
If copyright owners could determine the law, they wouldn't need to spend millions lobbying in Washington. The fact that they're lobbying like crazy illustrates the fact that users are bound by the law, not by the wishes of copyright holders.
Having said that, in this case software patents are a real threat to innovation by US programmers. This abuse of patents hurts the US public and is against the constitutional idea behind patents (the promotion of progress and innovation).
However, the open source community can't change patent law, so the only way to win this game is to follow the rules by the letter but creating the opposite result from what other players are doing. Maybe through something like a GPL for patents ?
Self assimilation (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft's strategy is to embrace, extend, and assimilate.
Isn't Mono just self assimilation? What does Microsoft have left to do if OSS just comits fratricide?
FUD? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:...if the comments were insightful, that is. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, and there was also Internet Explorer for Solaris, look how long that was supported.
And Microsoft has communicated with Miguel many times with regards to Mono
Why not communicate to the rest of the industry as to their intentions?
An interview with him on the topic is hosted on MSDN! This does not appear to be a prelude to a lawsuit.
An interview does not make a legal contract either.
Why send so much time and effort with no legal protections? All Mono has is the apparent "good will" of a company known for being overly aggressive to the point of breaking the law on occasion.
And that's not much!
Open Source Innovation (Score:2, Insightful)
worry about Sun patents, not MS patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun's patents are much more worrisome as far as I'm concerned. For example, patent number 6,477,702 [uspto.gov], held by Sun, would seem to be infringed by any conforming Java implementation. And Sun has pulled out of every and any process that would have required them to make a declaration or commitment on patent and IP issues related to Java. Furthermore, while Sun PR likes to talk a lot about openness, I have yet to see a legally binding declaration by Sun that would guarantee that third party implementations of Java may use Sun's patents.
I don't trust Microsoft any further than I can throw the entire stack of printed MSDN documentation (which is to say, I don't trust them at all). But, all things considered, I think the risk of patent infringment claims from Microsoft over Mono are very slim indeed. All that hot air from Microsoft CEOs and Microsoft PR folks doesn't change that. Sun, on the other hand, holds known patents that could create real problems for any non-Sun Java implementation.
If you are very worried about patent problems, there is a very easy solution: don't use either Mono or Java--there are plenty of other languages a round, many of them better. If you are slightly worried about patent problems, then Mono looks like a safer choice to me than Java. And probably, you don't really have to worry about patents with either of them.
Re:FUD? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes true, but there's no evidence that they won't either. In business you don't start projects with "well, maybe they won't sue us...".
With any .NET implementation, Microsoft holds the patent card, heck they hold the copyright card as well; a whole lot of them.
Any .NET implemenation that is not officially sanctioned by Microsoft in a legally binding way is making a very risky bet.
I say, Either Miguel knows something we don't, or he is being a bit callous with Ximian VC money in this case.
.NET potability? (Score:0, Insightful)
well, as i've tld the people who ask me - i'll only develop with
what's the point of developing a "portable" app if it's only going to ever compile or run on 3 platforms? i can do that NOW with Visual Studio 6, as long as i choose to not use assembly code.
Re:...if the comments were insightful, that is. (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft courted STAC, then killed them.
Microsoft courted Netscape, then killed them.
Micorsoft courted
Microsoft has never in it's history courted a competitor without either destroying the company through monopolistic practices or by suing them into oblivion.
The only survivor of a Microsoft attempt at technology murder is Java. And that was a close call.
Re:Eclipse and SWT on Monster (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Open any swing application
2. Right click the mouse button somewhere a context menu should appear, or click on one of the file menus.
3. Wait 3 seconds
4. Form the incorrect conclusion that Java is slow
5. Go back to using native win32 programs
Sun's been trying to "fix swing" for the last 5 years, and they've had no luck. What makes you think IBM has the magic bullet?
Swing will never be fast. The same abstractions that make it such a joy to program with make it terribly inefficiant. Print out a stack trace in a event handler function in swing and take a look at how deep it is. Every one of those functions had to be called before the event was process, and ever call had to be done through a table lookup. I'll avoid going into the whole native vs. non-native widgets debate, but forgive me if I remain skeptical about the non-native approach sun has been using with swing.
IBM (well, the company that wrote eclipse that IBM bought) did the right thing when they started from scratch to design SWT. Eclipse is amazingly responsive when compared to any swing application I've seen. Try it out yourself, I think you'll be impressed.
MS patents (all patents) are a potential problem! (Score:5, Insightful)
Another important thing to understand is Mono isn't the only Free Software project out there that is implementing the ECMA standards. DotGNU/Portable.NET [dotgnu.org] has a large par t of the ECMA specs implemented and the design goal of PNet is ECMA not the rest of MS's
So the conclusion to draw from this is: Patents are a danger to Free Software in every direction! Not just this one particular project...
Seriously, we need both (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't believe it's an either/or proposition. Do you honestly think there's a shortage of creative Open Source work? It seems to me that many more people are going for their own blue-sky ideas; so much so that I'm glad to see so many people are dedicated to more pedestrian (but more immediately useful) projects!
If people want to spend their time and effort making the MS interoperability systems they and others need to do their jobs, that's a good thing. If people want to spend their time and effort producing polished MS workalikes to help MS-raised users switch with the minimum amount of effort, even better.
The reason? Even super-programmers can't do everything. A large community of developers (yes, and users) is essential for working on more interesting stuff at the same time. An added bonus is a reduction in the pain associated with running a minority system -- e.g., wouldn't it be nice if all the latest games were available for Linux?
Everything we can do to make switching to Open Source easy will help us gain greater installed base in the short term -- which will make the task of those searching for the next killer app that much easier...
Third time lucky, will Microsoft listen (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, I am not alone in my concerns about Microsoft's patent threat, even Red Hat Chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik has said [crn.com] that Microsoft's legal efforts to challenge open source by employing patent infringement law represent a big threat.
Microsoft could settle this issue by making a simliar public legal declaration to Sun's JSPA.
Re:worry about Sun patents, not MS patents (Score:4, Insightful)
Mono also implements parts of
In comparison, Sun has granted the Apache and all open source developers FULL access to the specs, test kits and granted the full rights to develop competing products under the JSPA . Sun has also fully pened up the Java development standards process under the new Java Community Process (JCP) . Even to the point of granting full open source re-implentations of J2EE such as JBoss
JBoss received the green light last week, after Sun told ComputerWire that it would allow all of the APIs contained in J2EE 1.4 to be open sourced. Fleury had expressed concern that certain critical APIs, including Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 2.1, would be not be made available to open source organizations.
However, Java Community Process director Onno Kluyt said: "Sun's plan with 1.4 is that although it started before JCP 2.5, by the time it ships it will allow the creation of independent implementations. I don't think the APIs are that interesting, because the license that sits on top of J2EE will allow that [independent implementations]".
Re:worry about Sun patents, not MS patents (Score:3, Insightful)
- No support for value classes.
- Java generics are not type safe across compilation units.
- Java arrays require dynamic type checks.
- No iteration syntax.
- Does not have basic operator overloading (arithmetic operators).
- Does have non-operator overloading.
- Poorly thought out source file and binary file packaging conventions.
- Casts are prefix.
- No lexical closures.
- Java2D bindings to non-Windows environments are low quality.
- Some very poorly thought out core libraries: I/O, image handling, text/string.
These, and other problems with Java seriously limit its utility and scope. Java is decent for the server side hacking where it is currently popular, but it's a poor choice for things like numerical and semi-numerical algorithms. C# improves on it somewhat.Submarine patents (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The Devil (Score:3, Insightful)
You apparently forgot that new technology is based on and interacts with existing technology. If someone patented the recording and playback of a signal that can be displayed as a visual image before the VCR was invented, is the VCR really innovative?
If you don't think so then you need to check your premises.
Bad IP laws prevent you from building on other people's work and that inhibits innovation.
Regards, Ross
Re:...if the comments were insightful, that is. (Score:3, Insightful)
> Microsoft has already written
> platform (Rotor, for BSD.) And Microsoft has
> communicated with Miguel many times with regards
> to Mono. An interview with him on the topic is
> hosted on MSDN! This does not appear to be a
> prelude to a lawsuit.
No it doesn't, not at the moment, anyway.
But say Microsoft were to come out with a new version of their operating system based on the
Of course, you do remember what happened when you ran a non-Microsoft DOS under Windows, especially DR-DOS? How Microsoft put little tricks in their code to check for DR-DOS and spawn fake error messages? Do you really think they won't do that to Mono? They have done it before, and nothing, especially the government, is stopping them from doing it again. In the end, Linux and Apple (if not forced over to Intel and demoted to a mere Wintel OEM) would share the fate of DR-DOS, and Longhorn 95 would come along, with
Actually, I don't see Microsoft succeeding in this anymore than I see them making their customers happy with Licensing 6. But that doesn't mean they won't try something as gradiose and stupid as the stunt I outlined above. If you must use
"At this moment, it has control of systems all over the world.
And...we can't do a damn thing to stop it."
Miyasaka, "Godzilla 2000 Millennium" (Japanese version)
Microsoft and Mono. (Score:2, Insightful)
They could look at this as free marketing, because I didn't give a damn about
Jason Fisher
You know better that MS's CEO? (Score:3, Insightful)
You however, blithely dismiss all of this and claim to know better, eh?
Meanwhile, Sun is actively working on supporting groups for open implementations of Java and you attempt to disclaim it as "hot air". Please tell us what particular patents we "all know that Sun holds". Be specific as David was.
Then, finally, we troll off on a tangent by talking about C# and CLR. We all know that MS has submitted these two tiny portions of
This, however, isn't the issue. The issue is
Re:you've been duped (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but with people, you have some expectation that there are some that you can trust. With companies, there is no basis ever to have such an expectation.
Were such promises ever made? Not doubting you, but I do not remember them being made.
In 1996, when people like myself were deciding whether to get our companies to support Java big time, yes. Sun definitely told people that they wanted Java to become an open standard, that they wanted to encourage multiple implementations, that they wanted to open source it (but perhaps not under the GPL/LGPL), etc. None of that has really happened.
Can you provide URLs about these things? I am not familiar with them.
Look around JavaGrande.org [javagrande.org], and also take a look at pointers to Java Grande from Sun's site (via Google). Gosling and others were talking about these kinds of features even before the founding of Java Grande in 1998. The only thing that has gotten addressed is some floating point issues.
In any case, the overall point remains: C# delivers all the major points that Sun has promised but not delivered: standardization, full open source implementations (no thanks to Microsoft, however), and decent support for numerical programs (operators, subscripting, iteration, value classes). Furthermore, we know that the core of C#/CLR is not covered by Microsoft patents, while the core of Java/JVM is covered by some Sun patents. I think if openness and features are primary issues, the choice is clear.
I still use Java instead of C# for now, but only because we have a lot of Java legacy code and because the Mono implementation isn't quite up to snuff. In a year or so, I see nothing keeping me with Java.