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Why Mono is Technically Inferior for Development and Why Microsoft Keeps Promoting It

Mono car analogy Picture from guest poster [1, 2]



Summary: A look at the latest news about Mono/Moonlight and what we can learned from the pertinent observations and facts

IS Mono "best of breed" or just a suppressor of productivity? According to this one developer, development with Python and Django has proven to be twice as fast as development with C# and ASP.NET. To quote: [via]



Given equal-sized teams, Django allowed our developers to be twice as productive as our ASP.NET team.


We are always aware of Novell's attempt to push its Mono-based media player (Banshee) into distributions like Ubuntu and we wrote about it last week. Those who usher Banshee should be aware that only Novell customers are eligible for use of the program because of Microsoft's limitations with software patents.

“Those who usher Banshee should be aware that only Novell customers are eligible for use of the program because of Microsoft's limitations with software patents.”Novell also promotes MonoTouch for hypePhone and hypePad, even though Apple is blocking it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. There might be loopholes, but they won't last forever based on how Apple intercepts access to hypeTunes, for example.

The Examiner has more to say regarding the MonoTouch situation and David Worthington, a booster of Microsoft and by association of Mono [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], has contacted Microsoft's MVP (Miguel de Icaza) to produce an article/post that defends Microsoft/Mono in the face of Apple (he included a photo of a rotten apple).

History shows us that Apple will do what it wants regardless of what anyone says, but Novell's case has technical merit. For that matter, Adobe might too. I don't know much about how its Flash-to-iPhone cross compiler works. My takeaway is that Apple should be flexible with Novell, and at least let it make its case.


Of course it's his position. He has been bolstering Microsoft's and Novell's position for well over a year, without exceptions. He even visited the companies and had lunch with them while they fed him with 'scoops' and connected him with their analysts who lied to him for publication purposes. To show another example from the news, watch how Moonlight is being promoted by known Microsoft boosters like Marius Oiaga, not by GNU/Linux Web sites.

How long should it take anyone to realise that promotion of Mono and Moonlight comes from the very same people who promote Microsoft? What does that say about Mono and Moonlight?

"Every line of code that is written to our standards is a small victory; every line of code that is written to any other standard, is a small defeat."

--James Plamondon, Microsoft Technical Evangelist. From Exhibit 3096; Comes v. Microsoft litigation [PDF]



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