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Comment by EvanPlaice | Hacker News Reader

Kinda funny how things work out.

Back when MS broadcasted OSX/nix compatibility for Visual Studio I felt it necessary to comment that .NET development has been supported in OSX/nix for over a decade.

In short, Miguel De Icaza should be awarded a medal from MS for his heroic effort in developing the Mono platform and tooling; in spite of the constant threat of legal action from Microsoft for 'patent infringement' of their supposedly 'open' (ie ECMA) standard languages and VM.

Hopefully, he finally receives public recognition and reward for all his hard work.

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Thank you for the kind words and the perspective.

Luckily, we will be joining a new Microsoft (pending regulatory approval), one lead by Satya which has a different vision for the company. We are excited about what this means for Xamarin's products, for our customers, for our users, for our employees, but most of all, we are excited about what we can achieve inside Microsoft for all of Microsoft's customers, and the rapidly growing open source community around .NET.

Cheers! Miguel

Thank you for all your hard work on Mono and bringing .NET to the OSS ecosystem.

Hopefully, the regulatory approval stuff works out without issue.

Microsoft needs better representation in OSS and I can't think of anybody better equipped to assist them in that direction.

He'd been pretty buddy-buddy with Microsoft for a while. Microsoft has owned patents on the underlying technology, but as far as I'm aware they never did anything to indicate that they might sue Ximian or Xamarin. As far as I can tell, the bulk of the concern about Mono stems from FUD-spreading by RMS.

> they never did anything to indicate that they might sue Ximian or Xamarin.

That doesn't mean Microsoft would never sue them or their users. If a Fortune 500 company using Mono receives a letter from Microsoft, they'll act exactly the same as any Android manufacturer that received similar letters.

I think Stallman's concerns regarding the subject were / are perfectly valid.

They aren't entirely invalid, though interestingly the only times something like this has ever happened were around that Java platform, not .NET. And yet, even though they're the ones who are notable for actually trying to do so, nobody worries too much about trusting Oracle not to try and torpedo any open source ecosystems for profit.

Which is why I'm inclined to think of it as FUD-spreading. It's not about a balanced assessment of the strategic risks involved in using a particular open source product so much as it's about how one company in particular has been mythologized into something approaching a Lovecraftian horror in the minds of many members of a particular subculture.

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