Archive for the ‘.net’ Category
Mono is not a Wolf in Sheeps Clothing
I think people are missing the mark a bit on what .Net and Mono are, in terms of whether they’re a threat or not a threat to Linux and F/OSS. Hidden in all the speculation and conjecture of why Microsoft is budding up with Novell and SUSE to help support Mono is this one unarguable fact.
Without Mono, .Net is a one trick pony. .Net can only run on a Windows server stack. Java, the piece people seem to be missing here, can run on pretty much any stack. In fortune 500 land, Java == Enterprise. Microsoft wants a piece of this pie, but .Net all by itself on a Windows stack, is no Java.
I think Microsoft saw they had a weakness with .Net vs. Java, and tried to close this gap by extending a olive branch to Mono. Think about it, Microsoft had been slamming Linux and F/OSS prior to the announced deal with Novell, they could never create this capability directly in house, without losing all credibility. What’s their next best move? Partner with someone on the outside who can deliver .Net capabilities on other OS stacks. All the while Microsoft can keep bad mouthing these other OS stacks, just enough so they remain credible with their customer base.
The real battle ground? I think going forward the true battle ground for Linux and F/OSS is in delivering solutions that are F/OSS. What do I mean by this? I mean that we as a community need to make sure that we implement solutions that use generic off the shelf open source bits for whatever we deliver. By doing this we guarantee that nothing we implement can be locked in by any one vendor.
So, for example, if you need to create any software for a client or for yourself, you should be using things like Java, or Ruby on Rails, or Perl, or Python, or Mono. You shouldn’t be developing directly against the latest version of .Net on the Windows stack. In using any of the above software stacks that I just mentioned, you can pretty much be guaranteed, your software project will be portable to any OS stack.
