10.16.09
Simon Phipps on “Monomaniacs”, More Reactions to Jeremy Allison’s Mono Prognosis
Summary: More people have their eyes opened now that Mono enlightenment spreads; .NET and Hotmail failures revisited
AS EXPECTED, Jeremy Allison’s article about Mono has brought a lot of feedback and although there are many comments, there is clear absence of opposition to Allison’s remarks; it is almost too hard to refute or to disparage the character.
Simon Phipps from Sun Microsystems adds the following:
Monomania
Jeremy Allison argues that Mono is dangerous to free software distributions and should be relegated to the “restricted” repositories along with other software with unsafe licensing and/or patent contexts. He makes rational arguments, avoids emotion and thus when he is inevitably dismissed with a hand-wave by the Monomaniacs like the rest of us it will be especially telling.
To be fair, Phipps has little or no reason to like Mono. Phipps promotes Java for obvious reasons.
Others too have been moved by the column from Allison:
Mono a mano – Many of us are wrestling with this, I suspect
[...]
Allison’s contention is that while he can understand original Mono creator Miguel de Icaza’s reasons for wanting to code GUI apps in C# rather than C or C++, Allison would rather that the open-source community turned to Java instead in its quest to build out the graphical environment. There is some talk about, at the time Mono was started, Java not being available under a free license, but Allison contends that it has more to do with potential or real rivalries among developers wishing to use Java or Mono/C++, as well as control over their respective projects.
[...]
On the other hand, seeing Mono as the “Miguel de Icaza-who-works-for-Novell Show,” keeping in mind that I know little about him and have never met him, doesn’t give me a good feeling about how GNOME is tipping every more closely into becoming a Mono-powered world.
Over at ECT we find this new article about the massive loss of .NET (and perhaps of Mono, by inference):
Android on the Rise, While .Net Takes a Blow
[...]
Back in July, reports surfaced that the London Stock Exchange had decided to abandon its Windows-based TradElect system after suffering a debilitating software crash the previous fall.
TradElect is a custom set of C# and .Net programs created by Microsoft and Accenture.
Instead, news came out last week that the LSE will switch to the GNU/Linux-based MillenniumIT system, even going so far as to purchase its developer in the process!
We wrote about this before. Other parts of the UK public sector are currently being hurt by Microsoft software. Now it’s the national health system, again:
Microsoft’s Hotmail ‘blacklists’ NHS email – again
NHS staff can finally send emails to Hotmail accounts again, seven days after some healthcare workers complained to Microsoft that their messages were being blocked.
It’s not the first time the NHS has been shunned by Microsoft’s Hotmail. In May this year all addresses in the nhs.uk namespace were reportedly being blocked following a complaint about email originating from one of its IP addresses.
We wrote about the previous incident right here. NHS connections with Microsoft UK [1, 2, 3] are leaving lives are at stake (yes, British patients sometimes die as a result) and there is never a defensible reason to use Hotmail. █
Needs Sunlight said,
October 17, 2009 at 4:35 am
I’d never heard of anyone having the gall to try to compare Samba and Mono before, not even the “monomaniacs”.
Samba solves an interoperability problem. It occupies a niche different from other network file systems (also it does many other things). It fits nicely in a migration strategy away from proprietary technology, especially in the infrastructure.
Mono appears to implement Microsoft technology for no other reason than it is from Microsoft. It competes, through poor imitation, with Java. It fits in no strategy except deeper dependency on M$ products.