What stand will ubuntu and redhat will take on mono ?

Yes, their response after the Mono spill-all-beans would be fascinating.

“Actually Microsoft paid Novell the $350 million dollars. Which is why Novell isn’t interested in backing out of the deal.

Make no mistake, Novell made out like a bandit. It received well over a quarter of a billion dollars in cash, it became the “preferred Linux vendor” for Microsoft’s sales associates, and SuSE Linux is now differentiated from all of the other Linux vendors because Novell has a patent deal with Microsoft. This differentiation has allowed Novell to snag some big clients that almost certainly would have gone with Red Hat otherwise. Novell doesn’t have even a tiny bit of buyer’s remorse. Novell just wants to be able to keep the Microsoft deal and not lose the trust of the Free Software community that it relies on for more Free Software.”

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=479898&cid=22681124

I hope they do what is right…

The cat is out of the bag

can’t see this, other, less religious, humans do.

Well, all righty then…

“I saw that internally inside Microsoft many times when I was told to stay away from supporting Mono in public. They reserve the right to sue”

–Robert Scoble, former Microsoft evangelist

.NET/ Mono and C# are clearly rip-offs of Java, which is a ripoff of C and small talk.

So what? Thats how the world works. Humans take what came before, then we make it better.

What makes .NET / Mono revolutionary is that it combines the best of all that came before it in a way no other solution has. It doesn’t matter if you can’t see this, other, less religious, humans do.

Those advocating .NET are probably just justifying their own choice/company.

most of the kick ass languages and frameworks are available for *FREE* in FOSS, and m$ charges a hefty price for everything.

most of it goes in the hands of lobbyist, politicians, patent dogs, PR people, lawyers, management and personal wealth of the top dogs at m$.

check out ruby, python ,rails, php, perl , mysql, openoffice, firefox …all available for *FREE* !!!

Linux should take the best ideas and use them without respect to their source.

yeah right…and then get sued by those same people i have mentioned above.

do you want your money to end up in those hands who claim to serve you, but their only goal is to serve themself first ?

You mentioned Apple. Is OS X being built using .NET? Heck, even Vista was not built using it (and that in itself became a mockery at the time).

.NET / Mono and C# are revolutionary software development technologies.

Apple ignored pre-emptive multi-threaded to the point it nearly destroyed their company. I don’t advise the Linux community to do the same. Linux should take the best ideas and use them without respect to their source.

Ignoring .NET/Mono is the classic “biting you nose to spite your face” response.

A bit on the ranty side as you yourself note, but on the whole a pretty amazing association-feat between FOSS, Richard Dawkins, freedom, marketing and religion/science. I like it. Thank you.

Mike’s the name, but Miks will do

Below is a quick draft of a piece I wrote for a blog I’m finally getting around to setting up – “You’ve gotta have a blog!”. It’s about the argument that .NET is the greatest thing since sliced bread…

————————————————————
“.NET – the (not so) new religion”

My absolute favorite of comedians, George Carlin – the most to-the-point guy, who, by the way, also does naration for children’s DVDs(!) where he sounds just the nice guy he is, has this to say about the phrase “the greatest thing since sliced bread”:

“So, this is it? A couple of hundred thousand years [of evolution of the human race] – ‘sliced bread’?! [...] Even a lava lamp, to me, is greater than sliced bread. What’s so great about sliced bread? You’ve got a knife, you’ve got a loaf of bread…slice the f*¤%#ng thing, and get on with your life!”

Now, this guy, arguably, has a way with words; an ability to put into perspective the things we take for granted. And he has an important point to make, not only with his musings on the things we say: Its about the repeated patterns we practice but aren’t really in control of. And control, of course, is what it’s all about.

First things first:

To me, .NET is a religion, with all that being a religion entails. It’s as popular and as easy to establish as any other religion is, in a society where most people are brought up to be self-centered. And self-centered we most certainly are- brought up or not. Religion just plays on this, exagerates it and makes it so pronounced an attribute of human nature, that we cannot but live by it. Here’s the deal:

In any country of the western world, the average citizen honestly believes that he or she is special; that is YOU I’m talking about, be you religious or not. The modern marketing machines, of which the establised, organized religions are perhaps the most effective representatives, cater to your need to feel SPECIAL.

Thus, you believe that YOUR life out of roughly 6 billion, in one country out of close to 200, on one planet out of possibly trillions, around one star out of definitely trillions, in one rather insignificant part of the Milky Way, which is one out of an estimated 500 billion galaxies, in one remote part of the universe – that THIS life is SO special that SOMEONE who is larger than EVERYTHING (this “god” thing) actually took the time to care about YOU.

It’s anthropocentric to the MAX, and it’s the joke of all times!

But the same people will cast their vote on anything that makes them feel special, and in the US, this includes ITEMS. The golden calf from the “good” book is old news, but all we’ve done is substitute the old “primitive” form of item praise with the praise of technological “wonders”. Anyone that actually knows his stuff (anyone who cares to take a look or two – ask a question or two), and doesn’t have that need for security in feeling special – that “there is pre-determined, special purpose to my life”, will recognize such practice for what it is: Established to fulfill a basic human need; the need to be in control.

This is why people will jump the latest pre-packaged box in the store, pay to have the colored carton box with the nice logo and the 2 cent slip of regular paper called “Quick Install Guide”, so that they may feel in control. It’s why some people still think vinyl records are better than CDs – “they sound more together”…when actually, they just sound “different”, and that “different” is the sound of the scratches, white noise, flutter, wow, and the compression that the medium lends to the music. We may like it, but it’s not “better” in a general sense, just different.

And the need for control comes out of one thing, and one thing only: FEAR.

This is what policitians, market strategists and other nice representatives of the human race realized long ago: If you want to get something done, strike FEAR in people – make them think they’ll burn in hell if they don’t do what they’re told. Thus we see the FUD – fear, uncertainty, and doubt – strategies of Microsoft at work – because they do work!

So, how come we hold on to vinyl records and other old stuff that “works better”, but seem to constantly grasp for new things to hold on to? More importantly, if the latest thing was really that great, how come new things are popping up all the time?

The answer is strikingly obvious – the new stuff is there to establish new markets to saturate. That is the sole reason for .NET.

Microsoft never made money from software that works. Given a choice, from a purely business perspective, what would you rather sell: An item that lasted 50 years once, or an item that lastet 5 years 10 times?

Problem with the 50-year item is, it would have to cost the consumers a fortune to pay for Microsoft employees’ salaries for 50 years, and to uphold the huge dividents the Microsoft stockholders demand. This, your average consumer cannot be asked to shell out. But paying a fraction every 5 years is entirely within the average consumer’s grasp. We see this at work in the banking world. It’s known as a “loan.” The 10 x 5-year items are much better from a logistical business perspective, but more importantly, they are a way to make you buy things you can’t afford up front, by distributing the cost (at a further cost) over a much longer period.

So, how do you establish the demand for new things every 5 years? Well, in Microsoft’s case, the answer is simple:

Write crappy software(!).

- Then tell people (the consumers) you’re “discovering” new solutions that will make their life easier (than your former product did!), when in fact, all you’re doing is inventing ways to make people dependent on fixing problems you created in the first place!

So here’s the oddest part:

The people behind Linux – and the other open source software – work the OPPOSITE way, and are driven by an entirely different set of needs: They strive to find the BEST solutions (as opposed to “most expensive”), the “truth” if you will. In this respect, they work quite like scientists, chipping away at the rocks to uncover more truth about the world.

In other words, what drives them is something which is at odds with large corporations like Microsoft; something you CAN’T BUY. Thus, from Microsoft’s perspective, something that doesn’t play the game they excel (no pun intended) at playing; the game of POWER through PURCHASE.

So, saying that big corporations selling software can benefit from supporting free, open source software, is ludicrous – that is, unless they stop selling the software and start selling services. Microsoft could do that, but that’s not nearly as profitable as sellling software. You need more employees to provide better service, and employees are, by far, the biggest expense a company has.

Compare that to spending a few billion dollars ONCE every 5 years writing a piece of software containable on a 50 cent CD, then selling 100 million copies (CDs) at $199-399 a piece. This means your investment may be, say 10 billion dollars (Microsoft quote), but your revenue is 20-40 billion. Quite nice for 5 years of work, isn’t it? And the development costs include salaries, mind you. The earnings solely benefit the stockholders.

From these figures, one would be entirely excused for asuming that our public establishment Microsoft was in fact part of the entertainment business. Hollywood does generate large revenue from the Big Ones (Titanic, The Lord Of The Rings, Star Wars, Matrix, etc.), and it does come in a slick package, with nice advertisements – sometimes years ahead of release, usually only mentioning the best parts, and pushing the merits of “award winning” and “from the makers of”, as if these same referential arguments through testemonials ever proved a thing.

But Hollywoord never generated earnings like these…

So where does it originate, this ability to generate revenues that belittle that of Google, Sun, Apple, Oracle and Adobe combined? What makes 40,000 employees generate more revenue, and thus far greater earnings, than the good 300,000 employees of IBM?

This is where the oldest of strategies comes into play:

Constantly selling the congregation (the consumers) new versions of the same old story, in ever nicer packaging, but with the same flawed innards, is the tried and true purpose of THE CHURCH. It’s NOT what open source is about, and it’s not what the ACTUAL seekers of truth – the scientists – are about.

It’s quite as Richard Dawkins so beautifully lays it out, in his books and many lectures: Is religion and science able to “work together”, co-exist? No. The goal of science is, by definition, to abolish belief and in its stead present knowledge. This means that, as science progresses, religion will have to degress.

This is precisely what we have seen over the past 400 or so years. Using referential arguments like “Newton was religious” or “Einstien said ‘God does not play dice’…” says nothing of the matter. Science will uncover, religion will always try to cover up.

Microsoft is, therefore, most easily understood as just that – an, arguable very well established, church. Watching Steve Ballmer do his stunts on stage only serves to underline this fact.

It’s “testemonials” that litter the Microsoft campaigns, not “facts”. It’s the machine of american marketing practices that forces us to believe. It’s NOT, and never will be, about the absolute truth (if such a thing exists outside of logic and mathematics). It’s about selling a product, preferably at a very high price. And I’m not talking about the price in dollars.

What Microsoft is selling is chains, cells, prisons and guards, and what we’re buying is a place in one of those prisons. Our most prized possession, our freedom – the ability to think for ourselves, to make choices for ourselves, to live our own lives, we are selling at $199 for something called “Windows”…

And if this seems as scare tactics from some lunatic fanatic (me) with the (not so) hidden agenda of persuading people to choose an alternative that allows them to retain their freedom – be it Linux, BSD, Haiku, Syllable, or any other of the many good choices available, if it seems like all I am doing is trying to create another fear in you, you should go to the local library and pick up a book or two on history, a couple on marketing, at least one on the structure and psychology of large corporations, and most importantly on evangelical organisations.

Have fun reading, and look yourself in the mirror afterwards. What you’ll see will hopefully be a representative of an intelligent species, not an ignorant excuse for a life that needs others to define its existence so desperately, that you are eager and willing to pay someone to take your freedom away from you, so that you may live happily ever after, in blissful unawareness.

KDE seems to be doing quite well writing applications in C++.

Mac OS X does quite well with Objective-C applications.

And, if performance isn’t #1 issue, then Python (w/ PyGtk for instance) does quite well for writing applications (even on Mac OS X with PyObjectC)

And thats just in answer to the disparaging remarks about those languages. As Miks quite nicely pointed out, there’s a plethora of others to look at. Let Windows developers write Windows applications with C# if they like, we as Roy quite nicely put it, have a choice (of so many better languages in this instance)

Just my 0.02$…:-)

D – a better C++. Google “D programming language” or go to

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/

and read up on it. Compiles to native, runs at C/C++ speeds, has a bunch of bindings, garbage collection, and is fully buzzword compliant. Of course, it doesn’t run in a 100 MB vm, but what…

If you want something different, try Perl, Python, OCaml, Clean, Haskell, ML, Lisp, Scheme, Erlang, Pike, Ruby, BETA, Ada, Free Pascal, or any of a huge number of alternatives to C# out there.

If you think you need a vm to write software, you are ignorant. If you think C# is the best language because it supports generics, you need to study the alternatives. Nothing in C# is new, nothing is particularly inventive.

Learn to code in C. Write your own compiler. Write your own parser. Then help the Parrot people out – see if Larry (Wall) needs a hand. Or talk to the guys behind Clean – they are short on money (low salaries) and could need a hand on developing their i/o library. Or how about lending the X.org guys a hand? What’s with all the “hands”? You’ve got two – use them. Don’t know C yet? Well, what are you waiting for! Linus does it, so can you.

Now you’re helping the F/LOSS community. Be inventive, for once.

Or believe in the holy cow of the Church of Gates *yawn*

Too bad this site is a waste of this country’s precious resources and you guys are taking up way too much crack.

Remember what Microsoft said about:

1. Having to control the standard (they meant de facto standard)
2. Having to get people “kind of addicted” so that Microsoft can “collect some time in the next decade” (Gates reference)

I see the same patterns in Mono, which Microsoft views as its IPR, regardless of your personal views on IPR. Do not underestimate the power of Washington and Brussels lobbyists, let alone the influence of a Foundation that invests in political candidates through their pet charities.

I’d feel safe about Mono only if Larry Lessig ran for president and got reelected for a lifetime.

You call me stupid? At least I’m not supporting the destruction of Linux via MONO.

The only fool here is you.

@soot: my bad. I took Mark’s word blindly.