Comment by drewcrawford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drewcrawford | Hacker News Reader

This is absolutely absurd on its face. Far from facing patent problems, the only interaction Microsoft and Mono has had is for Microsoft to officially support Mono/Moonlight as the official Linux silverlight client.

Jo Shields wrote an excellent rant a few months ago that completely destroys the patent argument (among other things): http://www2.apebox.org/wordpress/rants/124/

If RMS was being ideologically sound, he would oppose the use of C/C++, on which patents are held by the convicted monopolist AT&T. Instead, he only opposes languages like C# and Java, the success of which poses a credible threat to the vast quantity of C/C++ code the FSF controls.

For those of you who don't know, C# is an EMCA and ISO standard, protected by numerous pledges not to sue, and the use in question is a Debian desktop app to expand and promote Debian Linux as a viable desktop platform; everything is 100% free software all the way down. By RMS's own purported ideological views, this is a great thing.

All I can say is, it feels like I'm trapped in a dreamworld where somehow RMS and MS have switched places; now MS is pushing open standards, and RMS is railing against them and spreading FUD. WTF?

Why would you expect Java to be supported by RMS and the FSF before it was fully open sourced? That's fairly basic to their worldview. Throwing out absurd accusations about them trying to protect C/C++ makes you seem a bit partisan on this issue.

It's one thing to complain before gcc.gnu.org/java/, kaffe.org, etc showed up. However, once there is an open source compiler and JVM it's time to complain about something else.

The standard library?

Java is fine as free software. There is a reason. The JVM's specification was always open. So as long as you write a custom VM adhering to the JVM spec you are good. There are a few competitors to Sun claiming to have faster VMs.

While Sun's JVM only recently went open source, the spec was always open and sun does not have a history of suing open-source competitors to oblivion to prevent competition.

What this guy is saying is that C# is not like that. You take a risk when using C# that eventually you might wind up being forced to use proprietary windows-only software.

I still think the rant is rediculous. MS will never kill mono. MS wants to give everyone a first hit. Then they come in in shining armor with bags of coke claiming that now that you know mono, check out these libraries; now that you know these libraries writing windows-only programs is super easy.

Essentially C# + .Net is MS' Objective-C + Coca. They don't want it to die. The fact that people REALLY like .net and ported it to linux is an indication that .Net might be a good piece of work if anything. come to think of it... if Objective-C is so wonderful why is it not widely used in linux??? In fact I never heard of objective-c in linux (does it even exist?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUstep

When was the last time you've seen a C# app that conforms to the ECMA standard? Most apps written in C# make such heavy use of the Windows API that they are as importable as possible.

If you believe that MS is pushing open standard, you are at best naive.

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