06.07.11
Microsoft Proponents Promote Xamarin While Microsoft is Abandoning .NET/Mono
Summary: Mono is being phased out of sight and out of existence despite deparate attempts from Microsoft proponents to breathe life back into it
EARLIER today we wrote about Microsoft betraying those who adhered to its APIs, including Mono/Moonlight boosters. The biggest Microsoft boosters at Novell created a poorly-funded startup called “Xamarin” [1, 2, 3]. It is almost nowhere in sight*, except for the ‘Microsoft press’ (advertising) and other Microsoft-boosting ‘news’ sites (pushing Microsoft promotion as ‘news’). Mono is clearly beneficial to Microsoft, but it is good for nothing else. Its CEO is a former Microsoft employee, as we noted before. Part of the funding comes from a Microsoft MVP. Techrights wishes to draw attention to the following new articles:
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The parting of Linux and Mono
As .NET’s sun sets, its open-source counterpart Mono may be fading on Linux, too.
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gnote performance
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Ubuntu font family now has MONO
Let us hope that the first article’s contention is correct and that, given C++ advantages over Mono, Tomboy will be removed from Ubuntu. There is no future for Mono and even Microsoft is not rescuing Mono. █
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* These are just the only new articles we found about it; there is no intent to hide anything as means of fitting to a generalisation. Upon second look (just before finalising this post), Timothy Prickett Morgan did touch on the subject (more recently), albeit in a different context:
Just after Attachmate’s takeover of Novell and just before it did the breaking of that company into two divisions, SUSE selling Linux and Novell selling everything else, Attachmate told the people working on the open source Mono project they were no longer needed at the company. But it is a lot harder to kill an open source project than taking away techie paychecks, and a new project has sprung up to carry on the Mono work.
Will said,
June 8, 2011 at 12:26 am
Correction: That third link, “Ubuntu font family now has MONO,” has nothing to do with Mono the programming language. It is about the Ubuntu font family’s monospace font.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
June 8th, 2011 at 1:08 am
Yes, I know. It does seem like the author was having a go at Mono, though.
Will Reply:
June 8th, 2011 at 8:28 am
You’re probably right about that. It would be at least the 2nd or 3rd time I’ve seen a Linux-related (but not Mono-related) post put the word “mono” in the headline either as a joke or to get more page hits.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
June 8th, 2011 at 9:21 am
Simon Phipps: “Mentioning Mono in my article was an interesting experience. It was like mentioning Scientology…”
NotZed Reply:
June 8th, 2011 at 10:05 pm
In the US (at least) ‘mono’ is what they call glandular fever. So it’s also a culturally specific disease joke, and probably what the author intended.
Here ‘mono’ means a wheelie, or at least did when I grew up.
Needs Sunlight said,
June 8, 2011 at 2:04 am
Hasn’t this happened before, those that followed COM or DCOM were also left hanging?
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
June 8th, 2011 at 2:23 am
Got links to back this with? Might be handy….
Needs Sunlight Reply:
June 8th, 2011 at 3:30 am
No links off hand. This was back with XP SP2 broke darn near every app written for earlier versions of Windoze.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
June 8th, 2011 at 9:23 am
Thanks anyway.
Needs Sunlight Reply:
June 8th, 2011 at 11:13 am
To get the links you’ll have to track down a Windoze user who can help track it down. SP2 was more like full OS upgrade. It was a service pack only in name. Those that followed M$ own APIs got screwed again with the change.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
June 9th, 2011 at 4:29 am
There’s more on this subject coming shortly.
twitter Reply:
June 8th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
SP 2 was released before I started keeping failure logs. The release of XP convinced me to get off the upgrade train and I was naive enough to believe that the rest of the world would soon follow given how obvious the performance difference between gnu/linux and Windows was.
Slashdot provides some stories. Google search order is generally gamed towards positive and fluff articles but Slashdot was relatively straightforward at the time. Things are always worse in Windows land than gnu/linux users can imagine because Microsoft’s spin machine is effective. Here is a small list of things goofed up and why/how:
Firewire performance degraded – article links to Microsoft page that states, “This article applies to a different operating system than the one you are using. Article content that may not be relevant to you is disabled.” The fix is a patch and tedious registry editing. Microsoft promoted the technically inferior USB over Firewire, probably to harm Apple.
An article complaining of widespread breakage. Broken networking is listed specifically, comments are spammed.
“Business Programs slowed down. Microsoft boosters claimed the 22% performance hit was for security and they still do but what can you expect from a company that called Vista “the most secure OS ever”?
SP2 was not more secure, had a terrible performance hit due to a buggy “processor driver” (probably ACPI “degrade” problem later complained about by Intel people), and Microsoft blamed malware for their problems.
In 2005 Microsoft made it impossible to run XP without SP2 and also published a partial list of software that would be broken.
There you go. Outside of the last link, I saw no specifics.
Microsoft’s jerk around is more than breaking user’s applications. They often break their own code and the higher up in the Microsoft abstraction layer you get, the worse off you are. Windows 95 api remained relatively stable through at least 2002. Microsoft’s Foundation Class was not so stable, ever. Visual Basic broke things between every release, so coders had to fix everything all the time. I can only imagine how miserable .NET and Silverblight users are. Part of Microsoft’s control of mental input is to make their dependents so busy keeping up with changes that they never have time to consider fundamental change, like choice of OS.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
June 9th, 2011 at 4:30 am
Thanks for sharing this research.