Will Mono Become the Preferred Platform for Linux Development? (O'ReillyNet) [LWN.net]

Will Mono Become the Preferred Platform for Linux Development? (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Mar 12, 2004 19:51 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227)
In reply to: Will Mono Become the Preferred Platform for Linux Development? (O'ReillyNet) by pointwood
Parent article: Will Mono Become the Preferred Platform for Linux Development? (O'ReillyNet)

Did you read the article? The patent issue is moot. The patents only apply to certain parts of the API, not the core runtime (which is licensed to ECMA under non-discrimatory terms).

Even if certain widely used (in the Windows world) APIs become patented, that doesn't destroy the usefulness of Mono. Mono still would offer a very high class set of languages on top of a very powerful and performant VM (not to mention the JIT compiler), along with a slew of very useful APIs like C#.

If you don't beliece the usefulness of these, look at some of the C# applications floating around already using Mono and, more importantly, notice how quickly they were developed. Doing the same things in C or C++ would take much, much longer (especially when you toss in the extra debugging time caused by things like memory mismanagement and buffer problems and all that other fun stuff C# gets rid of), and doing the same things in Python/Perl/etc. can result in much less performant code, for applications in which performance matters.

Additionally, even if certain APIs become patented, that will be a small percentage of them, so porting applications between platforms can still be quite easy, at least compared to trying to port a complex C/C++ app that uses platform-specific APIs.

No, Mono/C# isn't a magic silver-bullet end-all ultimate development platform, but it *is* still very useful. I don't think either C nor C++ are going to be dead anytime soon, anymore than Java or Python or anything else killed them, but those latter languages *do* see a lot of use because of the advantages they hold over C/C++ in certain development contexts.

Mono is just another tool in the programmer's arsenal, one many of us are glad we now have. :)

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"reasonable and non-discrimatory" terms are a problem

Posted Mar 12, 2004 20:56 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Perhaps you missed the recent W3C battles, in which the position of the free software and open source communities was that RAND licensing is not adequate. If Microsoft has promised "reasonable and non-discriminatory" licensing, this still permits it to collect patent fees, as long as the fees are "reasonable"; it just prevents Microsoft from using patents to take competing products off the market. Unless Miguel can point to a firm commitment from Microsoft to allow open source competition, he's playing with fire. He needs to extract a promise of royalty-free terms, with no other restrictions that would bar GPL implementations, before Mono should be allowed into the heart of Linux and GNU software.