The FSF warns (again) against Mono: and correctly so [LWN.net]

The FSF warns (again) against Mono: and correctly so

Posted Jul 19, 2009 16:12 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: The FSF warns (again) against Mono: and correctly so by AlexHudson
Parent article: The FSF warns (again) against Mono

I'm sure plenty of people won't see the benefit in using Mono. For the most part, they are not the target audience for it anyway: the target are those vast hoards of developers who are competent in Visual Studio but who would run screaming from vi/emacs.

And for that constituency, Mono will fail unless it slavishly keeps up with Microsoft, feature-for-feature. The people you're talking about are first and foremost Windows developers, who will deign to port to non-Windows platforms as long as it's a no-brainer. They won't show the slightest interest in Mono unless it can be used to port Windows apps effortlessly. And this is doomed to failure.

Mono and C# have lots of risks and no benefits for Linux users. Likewise, they are not yet suitable for Windows developers looking for an effortless port. All Mono and C# do is waste developers' time when they could be working on more valuable free software projects.

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The FSF warns (again) against Mono: and correctly so

Posted Jul 20, 2009 11:47 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

The offer is "use your Windows dev skills on other platforms". That's why we've seen take-up of Mono in places like the games industry: it's about transfer of _skills_, not transfer of _source_.

Sorry, I don't buy this. Any competent programmer can pick up a different language and environment fairly quickly. I own a software company, and I'm in charge of hiring developers. Any developer who is scared off because we use a different language or don't use Visual Studio would automatically go into my "do not hire" list.

What a lot of people call "Windows dev skills" are nothing more than dilettante-level noodling around with pretty IDEs. Once such "developers" run smack into any non-Windowsism (which they will), they get stuck and panic. I've observed this several times in my career, which is why I no longer bother hiring developers unless they have some non-Windows experience.

The FSF warns (again) against Mono: and correctly so

Posted Jul 20, 2009 11:56 UTC (Mon) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]

Whether or not these "dilettantes" are people you would hire is entirely orthogonal to the fact that they exist or the desire to support them, even if we limited the argument to that subset alone.

In any event, it's not entirely about capability (though there would definitely be people entirely stuck moving from VS to [for example] vim). It's about transferability of skills.

To much argument about Mono is "I don't need/like it therefore nobody else should do either". It misses the point.

The FSF warns (again) against Mono: and correctly so

Posted Jul 20, 2009 14:05 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

To much argument about Mono is "I don't need/like it therefore nobody else should do either". It misses the point.

The point is that Mono does nothing very useful for the Linux community. It's also very risky for that same community, and it commits the Mono developers to slavishly following proprietary standards set by a company very hostile to free software.

So really, I don't care if people use Mono on Linux. I would care very much if Mono were installed by default on a Linux distro, or became used for critical components of a Linux distro. That's crossing the line.

The FSF warns (again) against Mono: and correctly so

Posted Jul 20, 2009 21:43 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

If you were to force me to use vi I would get stuck and panic: the
keybindings simply fall out of my skull. But everyone knows Emacs is a
religion as well as an editor, so forcing me to use anything else would be
religious intolerance. :)