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Comment by migueldeicaza | Hacker News Reader

Neither Windows.Forms or WPF can easily be made portable, the code is really a thin layer on top of existing Windows services.

I know, because I did this before with Mono, and the changes would be highly disruptive to the codebase.

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If someone wanted to attempt it, it would make much more sense as a fork rather than part of the mainline.

Well, he started the Mono Project :)

So he did. I feel as if I've arrived - I just got corrected by Miguel de Icaza. :-)

Which is probably the reason they open-sourced it... Not much difference anyway.

Except people can contribute to features/bugs for the platform that they do support?

Not to be overly cynical, but this is kind of obvious: that means your contributions really only benefit Microsoft in the long run. Sure you might derive benefit, but Microsoft is the real beneficiary here, and they don’t even have any obligation to pay you.

"Is the current situation better for the customer than the one yesterday?" is the way I like to think about these things.

Name an open source freemium project run by a for-profit company which /doesn't/ benefit the company more than the individual submitting patches?

Would it be relatively easy to shim to use Wine (where available)?

You could already use Mono with Wine

The dotnet installer still needs hacks, right?

Use Python QT, it is portable. No need to invest time and effort in non-portable GUIs.

And their whole .Net is full of patents.

PyQT can be considered a reasonable (and in many ways superior) alternative to WinForms but what about WPF? Is there a modern cross-platform non-browser declarative 2-way-binding MVVM desktop GUI toolkit? I use PyQT mysef but I really wish I could use binding instead of just handling events manually.

Why not just use Qt then?

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