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Excuse my ignorance but just how popular is Mono usage ?

It's pretty common on Linux desktops these days. F-Spot, Beagle, Banshee, and Tomboy all use Mono.

a few program use it

not really a must to have

Yes they are doing great work. Pity that MS isnt doing that work.

Imagine MS said "ntfs is open, you just have to reverse engineer it." Why are MS not releasing some of the code to Mono? To duplicate work is just plain stupid. Mono will never catch up with the latest MS .NET version.

Because MS want to keep what they made to themselves like they always do, seriously did i need to tell you that?

MS have said that parts of .NET are open specifications. These parts are ISO standards even.

In typical MS fashion, though, only parts of the .NET framework are open:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework#Standardization_and_lic...

Specifically, CLI and the C# programming language are ECMA standards (ECMA 335 and ECMA 334) which later became ISO standards.

However:


Interestingly, Microsoft has made available much of the source code for the .NET Framework Base Class Library (including ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows Presentation Foundation) under the shared source Microsoft Reference License.

That is a red flag, right there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Reference_License#Microsoft_...



Since Mono 2.0 includes Systems.Windows.Forms 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0 and ADO.NET 2.0 I'd say pretty much that anyone who installs Mono 2.0 on their Linux system has what Steve Ballmer refers to as an "undisclosed liability" to Microsoft right there.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleB...

http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2006/11/microsofts_ballmer_l...

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/11/17/ballmer-linux-users-.html

The easy thing by far to do then is to avoid Mono like the plague, and don't use SuSe Linux.

Personally, with most GNOME distributions now including Mono applications (Tomboy notes, Banshee, F-Spot, Beagle search et al) by default, I'd make it even simpler and just use a KDE distribution.

Edited 2008-10-06 13:18 UTC

Because .NET is more than just about the framework. It's also about the OS, the web server, the database, etc.

But the more pragmatic answer is... because it doesn't make 'business sense' for them to do so.

Actually, Microsoft are releasing some portions of .NET under a Free Software-approved license.

For example, just recently they released MEF under the MS-PL. They've also released parts (all?) of the DLR and the Silverlight 2.0 Controls will also be under MS-PL if I'm not mistaken.

that's pretty much the point.
If you want the latest and greatest you have to use Windows.

you are absolutely right. mono is a great thing to have on the linux desktop.

if mono can handle the code there are a lot of mission critical business apps written in .net that won't be worried by a move to linux.

linux must be compatible with windows in at least some way to let people know that there IS an open and free choice.

Good for mono developers.
but i am afraid Mono usage in server side is nearly zero. My belief is, .Net is (has been and most likely will be) an MS-Windows thing. Mono may be fine for some gnome desktop applications but thats it. Sure mono will be used and fed by MS as "hey look we are multi platform" to the end. but thats another story..

Novell and Microsoft have a collaboration project going on so I'm pretty sure there are no legal issues there. MS even posted a patent waiver for Mono/Moonlight users.

Novell is not really profitable I think and currently it largely runs on money from MS (my speculation)...

Why would anybody want to do that though? If you have an ASP.NET app, why not just run it under IIS?

I believe that things are best run under the platform they were designed for. I recently wrote two web apps for organizations who, for whatever reason, insisted on running them on IIS. One app was written using RoR and the other using Django; neither of which were designed to run on IIS.

I got the apps to run, but the configuration was a pain in the butt and the organizations both had to buy a 3rd party application to make IIS emulate mod_rewrite. It would have been cheaper and easier to just run the apps on something like Apache or Lighttpd (and on an OS that supports symlinks) instead of trying to shoehorn them into Windows and IIS. I would think the opposite would be true with ASP.NET on Apache (or some other web server) running on a Linux box.

Why would anybody want to do that though? If you have an ASP.NET app, why not just run it under IIS? I believe that things are best run under the platform they were designed for. I recently wrote two web apps for organizations who, for whatever reason, insisted on running them on IIS. One app was written using RoR and the other using Django; neither of which were designed to run on IIS. I got the apps to run, but the configuration was a pain in the butt and the organizations both had to buy a 3rd party application to make IIS emulate mod_rewrite. It would have been cheaper and easier to just run the apps on something like Apache or Lighttpd (and on an OS that supports symlinks) instead of trying to shoehorn them into Windows and IIS. I would think the opposite would be true with ASP.NET on Apache (or some other web server) running on a Linux box. "

You make an excellent case.

I have but one query ... doesn't Microsoft charge a "Client Access License" fee for every separate connection to one of its IIS servers?

If you have an ASP.NET application, isn't it the case that you will have to pay Microsoft (in terms of CALS for IIS) for each user of the application ... even if the ASP.NET application is actually your own in-house developed application?

It would have been better to develop your application on a LAMP stack ... but given that you haven't, isn't there now a business opportunity to provide a way to run an ASP.NET in-house developed application hosted from a Linux server?