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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

As always, emotional and extremely hostile response to criticism against Microsoft... It's so predictable you could use it to calibrate a cronometer.

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It was emotional, and it was hostile. But, you know, emotion and hostility are sometimes the right reaction to someone else's behaviour. Microsoft has threatened open source in the past with lawsuits, and leaked Microsoft memos (the Halloween Documents) have talked about using that as a strategy.

Given all that background, it makes sense for people to be cautious -- though not unremittingly and unthinkingly hostile -- regarding Microsoft.

Now, for me, if I was developing on the CLR, I would very much consider using IronPython. Though having said that, I wouldn't consider developing for the CLR, because it isn't open source and doesn't run on Linux. Instead I might use the JVM, which seems to be acquiring a good ecosystem of languages (Groovy, Clojure) and tools (ANTLR, various IDEs) that run on it.

On a wider note, I do think the Halloween Documents heralded Microsoft's current weakness. In them, they said that they were going to compete with Linux and open source by using legal shenanigans. Nowhere did they say they are going to compete by writing better software and producing better devices than the competition so people would prefer using their products.

Instead MS though their dominance of the PC space meant they could relax and didn't need to develop good products. And now Apple is eating their lunch.

An irrational response is never the best way to disagree. I would rather start a debate.

I find it very sad that very nice tools like IronPython, IronRuby and the whole CLR stack have such threats associated with them. I would love to use them, but I find it risky and I do not enter any course of action that may empower Microsoft against the FLOSS community.

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