The reason is that there have been concerns about “submarine patents”, in other words, hidden, patented technologies which Microsoft could use later to destabilise the Linux platform by making patent claims against important Linux applications

…and…

Another reason is that some people regard time and energy spent in reimplementing Microsoft’s technology as a waste when Microsoft will always be one step ahead as they are the inventors of the software, while Linux has its own technologies both for network and desktop development.

Sorry for invading your blog; I saw it whizz by and thought I should chip in. First - and perhaps most important - I think it’s important to re-iterate that when it says “Paul says…” in the magazine, it really is me tapping away: what you read is my personal opinion, and I’m a pretty opinionated chap. Saying “I fail to see how the editor of one of the world’s major Linux magazines can write such nonsense” is a bit disingenuous - I’m a Linux user just like you, and I have my own opinions, rather like Linus’s previous opinions about KDE and Gnome.

With that out of the way, let’s tackle the meat of the issue here. You’ve made two important and valid points, and I’d like to address them individually:

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I have three problems with this statement.

1) Microsoft has said that its Community Promise covers all the parts of Mono that we care about. Of course, this is by no means water-tight - as Bradley Kuhn from the SFLC pointed out to me when I talked to him last, IF Microsoft sells .NET outright to another company and IF that company chooses to sue Mono and IF there are indeed patents that are infringed, the Community Promise won’t help Mono.

That is absolutely true, but each time Microsoft takes another step towards freedom (such as when it released the .NET Micro Framework under the Apache licence, which includes permanent, worldwide patent indemnification), doubters just find ways to add more “IF”s to the conditions and thus keep the fear alive. So: I don’t think all those ifs are likely, and thus Ithink the Community Promise is sound, but I understand why others ignore it.

2) Can’t other things have patents too? Microsoft has flat out stated that Linux infringes patents, but no one is saying we should switch to BSD. Microsoft has contributed huge resources to help the PHP developers, but no one is saying we should switch away. To be blunt, Adobe owns (and has successfully sued for) patents involving tabs in applications, so I think it’s very likely that PHP, Perl, Apache, Linux and who knows what else also violates these so-called “submarine patents”.

When you get right down to it, Mono/C# isn’t exactly much different from PHP: it’s a C-based language with garbage collection that gets compiled to byte code then executed, and it has stacks of helper functions. Why is Mono any different to PHP if, as you say, “the reason is not just because it’s based on something originally developed by “Micro$haft””?

3) The very concept of “submarine patents” is fundamentally flawed. Let me flip it around for you: Steve Ballmer and other Microsoft employees have repeated stated that Linux infringes Microsoft patents. What are these patents? Who knows - they won’t say. So the Linux community laughs and carries on as usual, just as it did with SCO’s legal threats.

And yet here we have the same thing: people are saying that Mono might infringe patents, but they don’t say which patents. They just threaten from afar. They say that Mono may one day be threatened with patents, and so should be avoided - despite the fact that Linux itself has already been threatened with patents and continues to be threatened with patents.

So: while I think it’s great that you’re taking a stand for what you can believe in, I hope you can understand why I just don’t find the patent threat credible at this time.

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This is a very common strawman argument, and I just don’t understand why it crops up so often.

Listen: Microsoft has released .NET 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5, with 4.0 due out sooner or later. They have an incredibly fast pace of development, largely thanks to their large development resources. And I absolutely agree that if Mono’s goal was to tail Microsoft, then MS would indeed always be one step ahead.

But please think about what you’re saying. For all the years Mono has been around, how many Windows apps have been made to run on Linux using Mono? Hardly any. In fact, I doubt most people could name even one. Isn’t that a bit strange if the Mono guys are trying to re-implement the whole .NET stack on Linux?

Instead, what we find are apps like F-Spot, like Gnome Do, like Docky, like Tomboy, like MonoDevelop, or like Banshee. These are all written using Mono, and these are all written for Linux. Sure, thanks to Mono working on other platforms it means that MonoDevelop now runs on Mac and Windows, but these are all desktop Linux apps. Microsoft can release .NET 5.0 tomorrow, .NET 6.0 next week and .NET 10.0 the week after, and it wouldn’t matter - those apps work perfectly fine right now, and will carry on working perfectly fine even if Mono never adds any new features from .NET.

You see, when you said “Linux has its own technologies both for network and desktop development”, you really hit the nail on the head: Linux has wonderful technologies like SDL, like Gstreamer, like D-Bus and more, and Mono has support for all those and more. It doesn’t matter what Microsoft comes up with in the future, because Microsoft compatibility isn’t a goal. The Mono site states clearly that the goal is to “lower the barriers to producing great applications for Linux”, and I think it’s doing just that.

I’ve taken up enough of your time, so I’ll leave you to it. Thanks for reading the magazine - if you’d like me to print a (shorter) version of your opinion in the magazine, drop us an email at the usual address.

Take care,

Paul

Is there any weight behind these concerns or is it just Linux zealots fearing everything from the big bad M$?

“Another reason is that some people regard time and energy spent in reimplementing Microsoft’s technology as a waste when Microsoft will always be one step ahead as they are the inventors of the software, while Linux has its own technologies both for network and desktop development.”

By making it possible to develop against .Net and running it on both Linux and Windows the Mono project saves more time for the end developers producing regular software. This by making it possible to develop for 1 framework and making it run on serveral
os instead of rewriting it. Must it be a competition between Window and Linux who has the latest version? Does it matter? I find .Net to makes me very productive as a developer and so I want to use it.

“I don’t have a particular bee in my bonnet about these issues…”

Don’t pretend to be neutral when you’r not.

“…, although I prefer good open-source software to good proprietary software, because the latter is less well-scrutinised and is more likely to be buggy.”

Yeah sure. Just becouse you make it open-source several developers will scrutinise your entire codebase and find all your bugs. This statement screams Open-source zealot.

“It’s true, there are those who want everyone to use free software all the time and talk of the proprietary solutions as “temptations”, when in fact not everyone has the ability to go away and write their own replacement”

You make it sound like the goal, that you should build your own. Do you build your own car, chairs, tables, bed … ?

The OpenOffice alternative has always been dreadful in my experience. It, too, is bloatware, but in its case you can really tell: it always seems to take forever to start. Understandable on my Pentium III laptop, perhaps, but not on a dual-core desktop. Maybe I’m just unlucky.

I much prefer AbiWord, but it doesn’t handle large documents very well. No doubt there are other alternatives, but for me, nothing really matches MS Office.

Of course, I can say that because through Microsoft’s employee purchase programme (a licensing deal with the company’s largest customers), I got the full Enterprise version for £17.50. I am sure if I had to pay the full price, I’d be the biggest advocate of WordPerfect or StarOffice.

Here I am reading your article, 10 minutes after starting up (yes, I can’t sleep) and the Ubuntu Update Manager has popped up to announce 158 updates ready for installation. Ooh, and there’s the popup asking for my password. I don’t notice a huge difference from Windows. Both are annoying, but it’s not that bad; Windows, like Ubuntu, lets you postpone the restart if you’re not ready.

I’m not sure I buy the claim that proprietary software is more likely to be buggy than open-source software. There are good and bad examples in both camps. Sometimes it is quite clear that software has been developed by scores of volunteers in their spare time. Scrutiny is great, but sometimes there’s no competing with a million dollar budget. Give me MS Office over OpenOffice any time.

Frankly, sometimes the devotees to different computer platforms are just fanatical. You don’t have to buy into the creed of “Free as in freedom” to use the software. Some of us are just cheapskates who insist on parting with as little cash as possible to get a job done.

Personally I can see the value of Mono. Our clients require us to develop a lot of .net applications - a situation replicated throughout the business world. As employees of a large organisation, we don’t have to worry about the cost of VisualStudio etc, but what about the freelancer? Yes, there’s the free Express version, but it has its limitations. It’s easy to say they should be writing apps in PHP/MySQL, but in the real world it’s the client that pulls the strings.

The Linux inquisition can cry heresy if they wish, but many people just choose Open Source software because of its impact on their livelihood. For many it is an alternative to using pirated software (I didn’t realise, until I raised the question of affordability in response to an an article on web design, that many freelance web designers use illegal copies of Adobe Creative Suite).

Ugh, I’ll call it a day. My browser has just been updated and needs to be restarted, while Update Manager is nagging me to restart the computer altogether. I think I’ll just turn off, full stop.