Good readable article about mono/moonlight

[Goeroeboeroe]

http://www.h-online.com/open/feature...ht-904464.html
I think this article gives a pretty good oversight about the dangers for less techincal people like me.

[Telengard]

Re: Good readable article about mono/moonlight

some leading distributors, including Fedora, still see Moonlight as a potential hostage to fortune, and exclude the software from their distributions.

Finally, a straightforward answer to the question I've posed no less than three times. Well, time for me to give Fedora a second look. If Canonical is going to turn Ubuntu (and Kubuntu by association) into a vehicle to promote Microsoft technologies, then I'll have nothing to do with them any more.

Linux is all about choice. We can choose to be free, or we can choose to enslave ourselves.

[Ole Juul]

Re: Good readable article about mono/moonlight

Yes, interesting article:

Not surprisingly, the Mono developers have appeared to gain strength and unity from adversity and see themselves as united against the rest of the world.

As someone who belongs to "the rest of the world", that means they are against me.

So, for instance, at the end of his triumphant account of the 21 day hacking spree that gave rise to Moonlight, Jeffrey Stedfast felt impelled to write: . . . "If, after that reflection, you still wish to resist change: no one is forcing you to use Mono - you're free to remain in the stone age, living in a cave, trying to write software by scraping coal along the cave walls."

To me, that kind of immature language is inappropriate, and I hope it does not represent the other developers. However, it turns me off enough that I don't plan to listen to any more from any of them.

@Telengard: Yes, good thought about Fedora.

If Canonical is going to turn Ubuntu (and Kubuntu by association) into a vehicle to promote Microsoft technologies, . . .

Well, as someone pointed out in another mono related thread, Kubuntu could perhaps be Shuttleworth's escape plan.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Good readable article about mono/moonlight

It should be possible to see Moonlight in the same light as other tools and plug-ins for proprietary technologies on the Linux desktop, which some use and some refuse, but like Mono, Moonlight is beset with bad publicity, and it seems unlikely that the majority of free software developers are going to rush from their caves, kitchens and offices to welcome Moonlight, or Mono, as the perfect tool for developing desktop applications.

It "should be possible", but it is not, because Microsoft is NOT like most proprietary software houses. Microsoft has proven over and over that there is nothing they won't do, legal or not, ethical or not, to destroy competing technologies and "cut off the air supply" of competitors.

As far as being the "perfect tool" for developing desktop applications, such claims are total nonsense. Currently, MONO is a kludge of .NET and GTK technology. Indeed, without GTK# bindings to give MONO a GUI window and dialog capability, MONO is no better than a console terminal. To use the PATENTED .NET WinForms, ASP and other non-EMCA 334 & 335 technology, de Icaza has thrown caution to the wind and included it in the coming release of MONO, although he claimed on two different occasions in the last five years that he understood that those components of .NET were not legally available to Linux, and said they had been "removed", mainly to lessen the affects of criticism that MONO is tainted with patented technology.

To paraphrase Forest Gump, perfection is as perfection does. In the spring of 2008 Microsoft paid for some ads at LinuxToday, and other Linux media watering holes, in which they boasted about .NET's "triumph over Linux" in being chosen by the London Stock Exchange to do their real time high volume stock trading. The ad featured a pseudo photograph of a newspaper called "The Highly Reliable Times' which had the braggadocios headline in big, bold font. Although the ad lied and Linux wasn't even under consideration, it didn't stop the Windows fanbois, journalists, etc..., from rubbing the Tux's nose in it. In the fall of 2008 the trading application written by Microsoft and one of its partners, using .NET, experienced a colossal failure, costing the London Stock Exchange over $1 BILLION Dollars! The LSE was offline for 7 hours.

Today I read where the LSE has begun moving its trading functions from the .NET application to one written BEFORE the .NET application yet is 4 to 5 times faster, because it is a Linux application that runs on Linux. And, it cost them less than half the amount to buy the entire company which wrote the Linux application than it did to buy the .NET "solution". It should have been a clue to the IT person at the LSE that their trading competitors had already been running that Linux application for several years and never experienced a single failure or unscheduled downtime, in addition to turning in transaction times which were 3 to 5 times faster than the target time .NET was "scheduled" to hit by the end of the year in which it failed. But, Windows was the only technology she knew, so it was the only one "under consideration". Now, she is history at the LSE, and .NET will soon be. BTW, remember that the losses the article reports that the LSE is currently experiencing is occurring on the watch of the .NET application, which is still being used to do the trading. The article makes it appear as if the downturn in trading is because of the move to Linux when, in fact, the move has only started. You should also note that it is probably no coincidence that Microsoft's surrogate, Novell, has a animated graphical ad in the middle of the story.

SilverLight is "perfection"? I always think back to last year's Olympics in China. The HUGE Bird Nest Pavilion with the gigantic overhead screen on which the videos and scores of the events were being posted suddenly shows a BSOD. SilverLight had crashed their entire Windows network. It's a fitting tribute to a company which can't write a secure browser and to make matters worse we find out that since NT and right up to and including Win7 they've had a security hole in their OS. The 'workaround' is to either patch the register or, for Win2003 users, edit the group policy. Both are tasks which are beyond most Windows users. Either fix disables the MS-DOS subsystem, the source of the problem. ANYONE who values their financial health and reputation would be crazy to continue to use IE as a browser or Windows while it is connected to the web.

With those two shining examples who would want to rush to MONO/MoonLight as their prime dev tool on Linux? Especially since GTK and Qt4 have brought forth excellent results, along with Python, Ruby, and other tools.

I still have a hard time believing that the individual who made the comment in the sig at the bottom of this post is the same person who signed off on making future Ubuntu desktop remixes dependent on MONO. The disconnect is blaring. However, as long as Kubuntu allows me to scrub all of MONO off my installation without doing ANY harm to my KDE4 desktop or the utilties underneath, I plan to stay with it. If I can't, then I will probably move to Fedora which, I understand, does not include MONO in its distro or repository.