10.31.07

Is Mono a Reimplementation of Java, by Association?

Posted in Microsoft, Mono, Patents, SUN, Java at 8:12 pm by Roy Schestowitz

Watching the flow of so-called ‘intellectual property’ (software patents)

The Register presents some solid arguments in a new article about .NET’s roots in Java

How ASP.NET began in Java

So why did Microsoft deny it? I’m guessing, but maybe the company felt that “Project Cool” was related to Java in people’s minds, and wanted to emphasise that .NET was 100 per cent Java-free. Any resemblance is purely coincidental, as novelists like to say.

In retrospect, this is interesting. Microsoft seems to have signed a deal with Sun Microsystems because of Java patents. Patents, right? So there’s an inheritance of rights going in the Sun » Microsoft direction. Another key point to make (backed by the assertions above) is that .NET was in some sense “copy Java” project, just as “Indiana” (OpenSolaris) is considered by some observers a “copy Linux” project.

Now, mind what Matt Asay says in response to recent Mono/Miguel de Icaza criticism, e.g. [1, 2].

You [Miguel de Icaza], personally, would convince more by going back to the innovation in GNOME that originally made you one of the most interesting developers on the planet. I want the old Miguel (and Nat - where has Nat Friedman been?) back, the one who demo’d Nat’s Dashboard with Nat at OSCON. The one who led and pushed GNOME forward for so many years.

The one who still has the potential to turn the industry on its head. But not by being Microsoft’s best friend. Nor by being its acrid enemy.

Rather, Miguel de Icaza can turn the industry on its head by putting his knowledge of interoperability and open source to work on developing the next-generation desktop (and not by recreating the “best” of Microsoft on Linux). It’s not worth much to you, Miguel, but I think highly of your talents. That’s why I’d like to ask you to get back to innovation, not the somewhat futile (meaning, few to no real customers will use it) Microsoft clone-ware you’ve been engaged in.

Is Miguel truly copying the .NET framework? Is it Java? Whose concepts are being copied? This is by no means an attempt to defend Mono, but if this ever reaches a point of dispute involving Microsoft and Mono-using distributors/users, shouldn’t Sun get involved? Shouldn’t Sun have the right to call shots and maybe be merciful towards those who were careless enough?

“What happens when Silverlight objects hit/invade/infect the Web? They already do. “As another reminder of reasons to step away from Mono, consider the talksbacks in LinuxToday. They say a lot more about the recent critiques, but they are also less polite and constructive.

You may think that it’s easy to just avoid Mono, but it’s getting integrated into more and more Linux distributions. What happens when Silverlight objects hit/invade/infect the Web? They already do. That’s .NET right inside the Net — the ‘bread and butter’ that is an (X)HTML World Wide Web with JavaScript. This means trouble. Moonlight, for example, is built upon patent-encumbered Microsoft technology. To make matters worse, it’s quite tightly coupled with the desktop, so Linux users are bound to be mistreated. Watch this new blog item on hidden goals.

I have found in this comment to the Microsoft post something very similar to my thinking:

MS says “Write a web application using Silverlight and you can get desktop integration”. Adobe says “Write a web application using AIR and you can get desktop integration”. Mozilla says “write a website *without* doing anything special, and *we* will take care of desktop integration”.

As Sam pointed out the other day, someone is not telling us the whole story about Mono. Would you not suspect that behind a lot of this agenda, money is also involved?

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