Summary: Microsoft lock-in still enters GNU/Linux, with Novell's sponsorship

A QUICK look at Planet SUSE always fascinates because decent proportions of the posts there are not about SUSE. But it's not to do with people who write about banal things in life, either. It is about some people who are employed by Novell to advance .NET and -- by inference -- Windows as well.

Some of the posts in Planet SUSE are purely about Windows development, with some that combine Mono and Microsoft. For example:

In Visual Studio 2010 they added much better support for targeting multiple frameworks, allowing us to target .NET 2.0 and 4.0 from the same solution, which also gives us the ability to target runtime's such as Mono.

The examples above are from this guy, whose interests are:

C#, ASP.NET, Mono, .NET

Open/SUSE seems to be losing its focus. A lot of .NET content reaches the project and more examples are not difficult to find.

The debugger integration in MonoDevelop is progressing, lots of work in the past weeks. I'm going to show what is supported right now, altough much work is still left to make everything stable.

Here is a new example of development of MonoDevelop for Windows. The problem is that most Windows developers will use the lesser version of Visual Studio, not MonoDevelop. Regardless of Novell's intentions, this only promotes .NET. It helps Windows [1, 2, 3]. As Robert Pogson correctly points out:

"We do not need Mono or anything else connected to that other OS," blogger Robert Pogson told LinuxInsider via email. "Developers love GNU/Linux, which is why they are migrating to it in droves."

GNU/Linux was "designed and created by developers from all over the planet and over many decades, stemming from UNIX," Pogson explained. "There is nothing wrong with Mono except that it gives M$ more power over GNU/Linux. Any corporation that threatens litigation over software patents should be avoided like the plague."

As comments on the article above (titled "Is Linux Suffering From Mono?"), consider Rainer Weikusat who wrote:

In my opinion, .NET is a pretty typical example of 'Microsoft designed APIs': It is both weird (for instance, there is a 'web client' superclass which has 'ftp client' and ' http client' subclasses) and hellishly complicated (at least one person whom I had to work together with during the last couple of months was literally incapable of using .NET CF to accomplish something as simple as transmitting a HTTP POST-request) and those students would be much better of with learning a few other languages and especially, with getting used to the terminology based on 'the internet standards' (ie the IETF RFCs) than to some Microsoft-only bastardization of them which only helps to ensure that nobody can talk to a '.NET-developer' about these topics except another .NET-developer and that the .NET-developer will have at least some troubles trying to understand the actual specifications of the protocol he or she is expected to work with.

GreyGeek adds:

LinuxInsider leaving a pro MS slant. In this case, a pro MONO/.NET slant. Kevin Dean is the quoted source taking over for Jo Shields as the point person calling everyone who opposes MONO in Linux as "fanatics", etc...

[...]

In other words, Canonical CANNOT take Ubuntu commercial and still include MONO.

That last point is indeed a potential issue because "civil disobedience" would not work for a business, which is subjected to sanctions. Here is a person who is moving to Fedora because Fedora is removing Mono.

There’s a lot of hype/war on the “Mono issue” lately but I don’t want to get into all that. My opinion is, yet again, simple: nothing related to Microsoft, please. Microsoft proved themselves to be evil every step of the way. They don’t like free software, they don’t like people using free software, they don’t like companies that bundle their hardware with free software. All of these can be fine until they start bribing judges, pressuring governments (governments for crying out loud!), blackmailing OEM’s, using their licenses against every single computer user they can. We have seen a couple of their trojan horses of licenses (just a quick look at http://www.groklaw.net/ would suffice) which means we cannot and more importantly should not trust anything coming from Microsoft.

"Some people always blame mono," says this bug report, but the point worth making is that there is no reason to lean on Microsoft. Java is the more mature software for those who require it. Microsoft is lagging in terms of programming, so to imitate it is just plainly absurd. To Novell, it is a matter of repaying Microsoft.

Even people from Microsoft don't support what Microsoft does to programming. As Fewa showed us last night, there are testimonies too.

If you’ve ever used Microsoft Access or Excel, you have likely used a product that Mike Gunderloy had a hand in developing. The irony is that Gunderloy himself doesn’t use those products anymore. He’s given up Microsoft for open source — and he’s not going back.

Gunderloy, an Evansville, Ind.-based freelance developer for the past quarter century, goes way back with Microsoft. “I was never a full-time employee, but have several times been a contractor with a badge and [Redmond] campus access,” he says.

His contracting work — on the order of half a million dollars, Gunderloy estimates — led to a substantial amount of code contributed to the Access and Excel versions of Microsoft Office 97 and 2000. He’s also worked on other, more obscure parts of the Microsoft software empire, including SQL Server, C#, and ASP.Net.

Fewa explains:

He refused to "contribut[e] to the eventual death of programming."[7] He states: "Microsoft itself represents a grave threat to the future of software development through its increasing inclination to stifle competition through legal shenanigans."

Sounds like Mono. ⬆