Summary: Microsoft's .NET is still promoted by Microsoft boosters from Novell, who helped Microsoft devour important scientific lectures under the pretence these would be available to all

MICROSOFT MVP Miguel de Icaza enthusiatically announces another release of a .NET clone which nobody truly needs. "Was .NET all a mistake?" That's what some are willing to assert and as we showed last month, it increasingly seems to be the case. To quote:

It is time to reconsider the recent past and ask the question "was .NET just a forced detour on the road to another technology?"

Before anyone explodes I'd better say that I don't have a definitive answer to the question that the title raises - how could anyone have such an answer. However the recent unsettling behavior at Microsoft has caused me to re-evaluate my .NET experiences and think hard about where it all came from and where it is all going. It is interesting and I promise not to be too provocative just for the sake of it...

.NET is just a lousy copy of Java, which matured over the years after Microsoft had been nailed for subverting Java, deliberetly fragmenting it (this was shown in internal documents we have in our wiki). The same goes for Silverlight, which is an imitation of Flash. It never really took off, so Microsoft resorted to exploiting dead scientists like Feynman (covered here before).

As one GNU/Linux advocate put it some days ago, Feynman's videos "used to be on youtube but they were removed when Feynman's heirs wanted to make some money from them (something Feynman I'm sure would have objected to).

"Bill Gates steps in and buys the rights to them and puts them on the Internet for free."

The outcome: "Sorry, Silverlight for your browser is not officially supported."

In conclusion he writes: "So to view these videos I would have to infect my PC with Microsoft SW. That's too high a price to pay."

What about using Moonlight, which Miguel de Icaza and Microsoft used to pretend Silverlight was cross-platform (they help the same illusion for .NET, also pretending it's "open")? Does Xamarin maintain Moonlight? Of course not. Now it's time to buy Windows for Silverlight, which they pretended was available to all platforms. ⬆