Microsoft/Novell Partnership

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Nov 02, 2006 at 10:20:18PM -0500, ted leslie wrote:
> As a programmer who doesn't want, "write once, write anything***,
> deploy anywhere"? and not recompile, and don't have ifdef's from hell.
> (where *** is  scripting, web apps, GUI apps, browser plugins, and c#
> isn't to much of a departure away from C, so you can stay in the loop if
> you have to write any linux kernel stuff, which will be C for probably
> another 20 years at least). 

Lets see: people writing code for embedded systems don't want that.
They want something small and efficient.  People writing games don't
want that.  They want something efficient so they can make their game
run faster and have more effects so it looks better than that other
games.

> At the end of the day , for a classically trained programmer, Mono  (C#)
> just  works, its the holy grail.

Until someone invents the next one.

> I see Mono (and this SUSE deal), and the trojan horse we are pushing
> into the Microsoft fortess, and in time we are going to jump out and do
> some serious head kicking :)
> Not sure about the High Level issue, to me c# is high level, how much
> higher does one need?
> I guess by high level you mean what you give a highschool student to
> learn programming in school? in which case VB on Mono will do, until
> they learn c#.

If it becomes a problem, microsoft will change the rules.  They are used
to doing that when things bother them.

> Also moving drivers into CLI will allow HP, Epson, Canon, and small
> shops, to write once and deploy drivers on Linux and Windows, which will
> give Linux much needed driver support for little odd ball peripherals,
> as well as get the full features of the drivers put out by the HP's and
> Canon's etc, who right now treat the Linux drivers as a bit of a 2nd
> class priority. Might be tricky gluing a User space CLI driver (part) to
> a kernel space C part. However, the things like the HP's all-in-one
> applications, like fax viewer, printer status, etc,etc, if HP could
> write that puppy in c#/.Net and that would bring the best of the HP
> printers abilities to the Linux and Windows users, due to that common
> CLI (.Net & Mono), that goes a long way to making Linux become
> dominant.

A print driver for windows needs to tie in to microsofts GDI (or
whatever it is called now) print system.  On Linux and MacOS they want
drivers that can output based on postscript instead.  Not sure how much
it would be worth trying to combine those into one bloated driver.
Maybe for some of the other features of an all-in-one device, but not
for the printing.  besides does mono have access to raw USB or scsi?

Interesting illusion though.

--
Len Sorensen
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