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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

Once again the whole KILL MONO FUD was the actions of the Open Source Community in the last 5 years. I never understood how in the world they got this is a trap from everything that was happening.

I don't agree with RMS many times but in this one way he was 100% wrong when he targeted mono.

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Microsoft originally only released a specification for V.2 of C# and the Common Language Runtime (ECMA-334 and ECMA-335) - attached to it a promise that they would not sue, iff the framework was "implemented in whole" - which was very vague in that it didn't specify what could be included or omitted in order to make it compatible with other platforms. The clause was obviously added to prevent fragmentation of the platform though - ensuring that it stayed compatible with MS's product, and thus they'd continue to hold control over it.

C# 2.0 is nearly a decade old now - and mono certainly hasn't limited itself to it. Absolutely none of C# 3, 3.5, 4.0, 4.5 was ever released as an open specification or as open source software until now - yet these are the versions mono and everyone was using.

So the "MONO FUD" was never actually FUD, it was legitimate concerns about the lack of openness of the technology. Those are no longer concerns (about this release version) - and we can be glad that RMS et al were "wrong" about this one (When they were in fact, absolutely right at the time.)

Are you referring to this? It doesn't sound like he was trying to kill Mono, he just didn't want to depend on it because of the patent issue.

https://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono

So, five years later Microsoft makes another step in the right direction, and you think he's wrong because he didn't want to risk building the open source environment around something that could go away with a simple threat.

Btw, doesn't Microsoft make more money from Android patents than Microsoft phones? Microsoft does exercise their patents.

Speaking of which, have the patent concerns about ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows Forms gone away yet?

ASP.NET MVC and Web Forms are licensed Apache 2.0, as id the Entity Framework. I don't think ADO.NET, WinForms, or WPF will go the same route, and I also don't think they need to.

Not to mention that in 2009, when RMS wrote that, the TomTom lawsuit recently happened.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._TomTom_Inc.

RMS is not part of the open source commuinty. He doesn't advocate for open source. He advocates for free software.

Edit: why the downvotes? If I started a social movement and everyone associated me with a watered-down alternative that tries to silence my views, I would be a little miffed.

You honestly don't get it?

I really like microsoft products and I use them every day, however the business model is too lock people in to their ecosystem so that you have to purchase licenses for their products.

Mono clearly undermines that b/c it allows you to "easily" jump ship to a free platform.

Unless I'm somehow completely misunderstanding their business model - killing Mono just makes business sense.

The KILL MONO FUD was coming from the Open Source community not from MS.

I think you misunderstood the parent. They are talking about the open source community and RMS, not Microsoft trying to kill Mono.

I guess I left out the obvious connection.

It's all part of the same thinking. RMS et al think - not unreasonably - think that this is Microsoft's business plan, so they really don't want the open source community investing their time on a platform they think will get clamped down to work only on a proprietary system.

Red Hat, for instance, makes a ton of money off the reverse model, where they let CentOS give away their core offering for free (heck, they're even paying people to work on CentOS now), and they make their money off clients who have money and are willing to exchange it for support and such for otherwise free offerings. There's really no reason Microsoft can't do something similar here (and they seem to be trending in that direction, although not quite to the extent Red Hat has) -- a mix of free-as-in-beer and open source tools for a "core" offering, so people can get into the Microsoft developer ecosystem, and a variety of paid offerings on top of that as their needs grow. And the extent of Microsoft's partnership with Xamarin shows just how much Microsoft is depending on Mono for their strategy, it'd be senseless at best to kill it.

You honestly think Microsoft it trying to shift to a RedHat-like business plan? That they'll switch to becoming a support provider?

I think what RedHat is doing is nice, but it's really not on the same scale to what Microsoft does; not to mention that they essentially have no monopoly/lockin - b/c anyone can start doing what they do (ie. start providing support for CentOS).

The synergy of microsoft services is closely tied to their ability to lock in developers and customers. Devs like C#, they write code to run on windows, windows gets more OS-exclusive software, more people buy Windows and Office, etc. etc.

Mono means people can run their C# work on free software, which mean they stop looking any better more appealing than the competition

I mean, they're not going to open source the NT kernel anytime soon. But look at what they're actually doing. They have their Azure cloud services, they have their Visual Studio development tools, they have their new WinRT platform that doesn't have nearly the penetration that their legacy Win32 platform they want to kill has.

So look at what they're actually doing, right now: they're open-sourcing key parts of the .NET platform, and they're partnering with Xamarin to support even more open-source elements that makes the .NET platform appealing to new kinds of developers. So there's a low barrier to entry to getting started with .NET development and getting into that ecosystem. Once you're on the hook, as you grow you'll run into more and more things Microsoft can sell you. Microsoft can sell you their line of Visual Studio development tools, which provide the best .NET development experience. They can sell you Azure hosting for your .NET apps, which will likely offer the best .NET hosting possible (and even if you're not on .NET or are mixed between .NET and something else, Azure is getting very competitive with Amazon and Google). And if you're writing phone and tablet apps for iOS/Android using Xamarin, Microsoft is right there for you to expand your reach by porting to Windows Universal, where you can get your app on Windows 8 tablets and PC, Windows 8.1 phones and the Xbox One. That's Microsoft's vision of the future.

And yes, if you're running ASP.NET on Mono on Debian via AWS, to support your iOS app developed in Xamarin using Xamarin's IDE, Microsoft doesn't really benefit there. But that's also the case if you're running Node.js or PHP on AWS to connect to an iOS app written in ObjectiveC. And people in the former group are still much better PROSPECTIVE customers for future Microsoft endeavors than people in the latter group. (Not that Microsoft doesn't want to sell the latter group stuff too -- look at Azure.)

Put together with this "Parsing Microsoft’s Decision to Cut Windows Fees"[1] It may well be that MS is feeling enough pressure from Android and to a lesser extent linux to give it a go.

1. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/parsing-microsofts-...

Or profiting enough from Android and ChromeOS royalties to see it's a profitable model.

More like they're moving to a combination of Adobe's tooling + Amazon's AWS offerings... MS makes a fair amount of money from MSDN licenses, and if their tools can be used to build/deploy service oriented backends that happen to be easy to deploy on their Azure platform, they still make money when the clients are more Android and iOS based.

They're looking longer term in the face of declining Windows/PC sales, and stagnant phone/tablet sales. It makes a lot of sense to improve/expand the platforms that their tools can target. They do have some really nice tooling, and imho Azure is a bit easier to use for a lot of things compared to alternatives.

It's not perfect, but they definitely have a strategy in place with the future in mind.

No, not really. It's clear to me we are moving to a devices and services model. More people writing C# means a broad reach on everything from netduinos to iphones to desktops to the cloud.

* I work for MSFT, on the Cloud.

Any way we can get some clear story on Mono or where the direction is going? Maybe this has already happened as part of this Build event.

Ask Miguel, but it would make sense technically if they adopted Roslyn as a compiler.

Yeah, it always amazes me that MS fans would be using the term FUD to refer to people wary of MS vendor lock-in given that there is plenty of historical precedent for MS using exactly that approach.

This current move from MS suggests that they may not be being evil in this case, and that's great, but it doesn't make people with concerns about MS FUD-merchants at all. In fact, that's kinda insulting - most people accept that past behaviour is a good predictor of future behaviour so being cautious and sceptical about MS was not an unreasonable stance.

I work at Microsoft, in Azure.

What I hear privately from the people I meet who work on the .Net and Visual Studio side of things is consistent with what the company is now saying publicly.

Basically: "We luvvv Mono" :-)

Give Mono 1st class support and you have me willingly locked in into MS.

> Mono clearly undermines that b/c it allows you to "easily" jump ship to a free platform.

You know, I tried that. I've tried to run about 3 .NET programs, written for Windows, under Mono on Linux. They all have had some library that was never part of the "open spec" that, therefore, ruined their chances of running on anything but Windows. The experience(s) put a nice, neat pin on the board as to what "open" meant when it came to Mono. It was a lot of double speak. And it's exactly this long-suffering characteristic about Microsoft that makes people like me take these current announcements with a large grain of salt.

I get pretty tired of writing a bunch of open-source C# code and getting flack for it. I'm glad there's finally no foothold left for the Mono FUD crowd.

Trust takes years to build, but moments to lose. MS has a long way to go.

Not depending on them for anything is, has been, and will be a fine strategy.

Microsoft would never make the moves it does now if not for being scared of becoming less relevant.

Until they really make free enough licenses not only for the core stuff but for the crucial libraries nobody can expect to be off-the-hook of the traditional lock-in.

And even if they do all that, it doesn't mean anybody was "wrong" only that the conditions are changing and allow reconsideration.

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