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Comment by bradhe | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, mono is a really curious thing to me. Maybe someone can explain this to me: Why doesn't MS commit to it?

One of the tenets of .NET was that it was to be platform-agnostic a la JVM but the story seems to be that they just didn't...get around...to implementing a Linux or Mac stack for various reasons (tight coupling to Win32 and existing COM servers, maybe?).

Now, Mono is reaching a state of extreme maturity. Why doesn't MS invest in this? It seems like their best way forward is dropping their single-vendor-stack mantra? Or perhaps they don't need to do so strategically yet -- once people really start demanding *nix and mac support they can "suddenly" change heart on mono?? This confuses me...but I'm not much of a strategist.

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They promised not to sue them, thats something I guess.

I always wonder how binding that promise is.

legally binding actually.

Any restrictions in the promise? Does it cover all of Mono or just some parts? Does it cover all of .NET or just a subset? Does it impose any restrictions on what you do with the technology, what products you can build with it?

It only covers Novell and its customers, IIRC.

Actually, it covers all implementors (the community promise does, that is).

Here's the text with full list of covered technologies. http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx It's not the same as the Novell deal which happened before the promise.

In short it's - as long as you conform to the specs, you're ok (no limits). On the other hand "Partial implementations are not covered.", so in practice anything could be argued here ;)

Does it covers supersets of the spec? I understand not all of the .NET platform is part of a formal standard.

.NET is platform agnostic, MS makes one implementation. This is actually rather like the JVM. While most people are familiar with the implementation that does run on multiple desktop platforms, there are other implementations out there (android being an obvious one, blackberry's another, IBM has several).

Anyone wishing to run .NET code can write a VM for it (like mono). As hard as this sounds, it's still easier than reverse engineering all of MFC (like wine).

Yeah, what I was trying to get at was I thought the expectation was that MS would produce/maintain them.

I think you were looking for tenets--quotes not necessary.

thanks, corrected.

> Why doesn't MS commit to it?

Because MS can't sell overpriced linux licenses to mid tier businesses?

Actually Microsoft has done that in the past!! - http://www.crn.com/blogs-op-ed/the-chart/208402155/microsoft...

Funnily enough I was a Novell shareholder back then. From what I remember the Microsoft sales team outsold the Novell sales team on Novell sales licenses.

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