"Pearly Gates and Em-Ballmer
One promises you heaven and the other prepares you for the grave."

--Ray Noorda, Novell

NOVELL'S INFATUATION WITH .NET is a truly bizarre thing. Why would a company that was repeatedly betrayed (back-stabbed or illegally abused even) by Microsoft suddenly just follow its footsteps? As blunter authors would possibly ask, "what is Novell smokin'?" It's almost paradoxical.

To call Microsoft "a success" is to confuse ubiquity with technical merits. Among the many reasons that Microsoft 'succeeds', one must account for the illegal deeds and political manipulation. 4 days ago, a person who is cautious not to be seen as Microsoft hostile (which he is not) said with high confidence that "Microsoft is just not ready for the enterprise."

In my last post I had made some comments about the Microsoft Windows not being capable of enterprise high performance computing. In the comments (upon request) I had posted some details on the SCSI subsystem of the Operating System, talking of the scatter gather lists when sequential SCSI commands are being coalesced just prior to being sent to the SCSI-based media. I wanted to continue on that topic and focus specifically on the NTFS file system and why it too is not intended for enterprise class usage. [...] With these limitations well known, then why do we still try to deploy Microsoft Windows in environments it was not suited for? The answer is familiarity. Microsoft for the most part owns the client/end-user market and with that the end-user has gotten too familiar and too comfortable with its platform. In turn what was built for home (and to an extent small business) use has leaked into an environment where it is not ready for. Please understand that I am not trying to preach against Microsoft and attack them. As many others in the high performing server/storage industry I have come to understand where certain problems originate from and that includes the limitations of the Windows platform. If you, the reader, feel something different with Microsoft and their role in enterprise class computing please feel free to comment. I know that I may not always be correct in my viewpoints and if you can shed any additional light I would very grateful.

Also, based on this bit of news from CMSWire, Microsoft's current agenda is all too clear. It wants to become a necessary part -- or the stack rather -- of an already-successful but lesser advertised technology.

Despite the efforts Microsoft has made, there is still a high degree of animosity amongst those involved in open source projects towards the software company. For example, Microsoft has a no-charge version of SQL Server available, but it's rarely used in the open source world. This edition of SQL Server isn't fully open source -- perhaps, this is part of the issue. Microsoft hopes to sway LAMP-based developers to use parts of the Windows web application platform for certain uses. LAMP developers are known to utilize particular technologies for different needs. For instance, sometimes a developer will use Perl for one application and PHP for another. Will a typical open source developer look Microsoft's way? Not until Microsoft establishes some credibility and trust within open source circles. Until this happens, most open source advocates are nervous, now knowing what Microsoft's true motives are.

Bearing all of this in mind, Novell's continues to just imitate Microsoft with Mono and other Microsoft-inspired technologies, turning a leading platform into 'cheap Windows'. Why is Novell doing this (if not just to empower its new ally, Microsoft, just like its strategy requires)? We continues to be concerned whenever Mono tries to creep into KDE. In this 143^rd issue of KDE commit digest from Danny Allen (it's the latest one), C# makes yet another appearance:

Support for on-the-fly compilation of Plasma data engines with the C# language bindings.

The person who pushes Mono 2.0 into Ubuntu is also doing this to Debian GNU/Linux. DevX has this new article which even promotes it.

The Mono 2.0 Offerings for Debian GNU/Linux

Find out how much of the Mono 2.0 (and beyond) platform is available for Debian users who want up-to-date .NET compatibility.

Mono is not about better development; it's about turning GNU/Linux into "Windows for poor developers" (and users). There are many other issues. â–ˆ "There is a substantive effort in open source to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property associated with that is available to Novell customers."

--Bob Muglia, Microsoft Senior Vice President