Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 29th May 2009 22:32 UTC, submitted by lemur2
If there is one technology in the Linux world that ruffles feathers whenever it's mentioned, it's Mono, the open source .Net clone. Since .Net comes out of Microsoft, and has some patents encircling it, it is said to be a legal nightmare. Supposedly, you can obtain a "royalty-free, reasonable and non-discriminatory" license from Microsoft regarding the patents surrounding Mono. iTWire decided to look at just how easy (or hard) it is to get such a license. Turns out it's kind of hard.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
"Do you think the Mono and Moonlight devs would be wisting (sic) their time doing this if it was pattent (sic) riddled? Thats not the way linux users/devs work."
Yes I do, because that's the way professional software developers work. The people working on Mono and Moonlight are, by and large, paid to do so, so the risk isn't theirs, it's their employer's. The developers get their paychecks no matter how badly Microsoft sues Novell.
More importantly to this conversation, any other software developers out there in the broader community who choose to use Mono as their runtime of choice have hopped aboard a ship that might be torpedoed at any time, for any reason. Microsoft's and Novell's lack of transparency here is all kinds of scary.
For example, it's readily acknowledged in one breath that the "extra bits" like Windows.Forms are probably patent-encumbered (Microsoft and Novell won't be too specific over which parts are verboten), but it's quickly explained that you don't have to use them. Then Mono pushers go on to tout the ease of porting from Windows to Linux. Of course, unless you're porting some server software with no interface (rare in the Windows world), you *must* use the patent-encumbered bits.
So if I want to port a Windows app with a GUI, I'm practically guaranteed to be treading in dangerous waters. And if I don't, what benefit does Mono provide me over, say, Java (or Python, or Ruby, or Perl, or...)? Hell, if you only want the prettiness and ease of C# syntax on Linux, Vala runs your stuff faster than Mono ever could, with the ability to easily use any C library to boot.
And all this stuff is beside the point that the direction of .NET as a whole is decided entirely by Microsoft, so Mono will be forced to play perpetual catch-up if it wants to keep bragging it's cross-platform.
It's a losing proposition any way you slice it. Nice toy, but definitely not worth wasting substantial time or effort porting apps to or writing apps for.