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:
2006-04-22
No one said Mono or C# were crap. No one. No one said Miguel was stupid for liking the technology. If Mono were just Miguel's pet project because he thought it was fun or cool I'd definitely applaud and encourage him.
What people are concerned about is that Miguel is saying that it is *safe* and trying to push it into the Linux desktop when it is not clear at all that it is safe. *That* is what makes Miguel a Microsoft shill.
And, no one is comparing Java to C#. However if they were Java even in the past would still have been way safer than MS because sun in fact did clearly state that competing implementations were never going require a license of any kind. Very different from C#.
And you seem to conflate these issues very easily and quickly. Be careful. There is a difference between good software in a technical sense and a legal sense. Mono and C# are great technology. I'll say it, no problem. They are also under a dark legal cloud and owned by a company that has a long history of utterly destroying its competition in very mean ways (remember how they were *convicted* of illegally abusing their powers as a monopoly???)