Microsoft/Novell Partnership

Fri Nov 3 17:47:56 UTC 2006

On Thursday 02 November 2006 22:20, ted leslie wrote:
> The only reason Linux can't win, is it is by marketing lingo,
> a disruptive technology. very disruptive.
> Great, but disruptive. Mono is a really nice bridge.
> Now that OpenSuse.org was named (in the MS release) as able to use
> the MS IP as well as SLED, etc,

I suspect all the blather yesterday about IP on the part of Microsoft 
was just to spread more FUD about Linux and to attempt to divide the 
Linux community by blessing Novell and implying other Linux distros 
and their users and developers were somehow rogues and didn't respect 
Microsoft's IP. It may turn out that Novell will be marginalized by 
the Linux community and will effectively be a fork that no one cares 
about. The safest course of action for open source may be to not 
accept contributions from Novell employees because of the possibility 
of taint but that will hurt Novell more than it hurts the rest of the 
community. Novell code could be seen as damaged and the open source 
community will figure out a way to work around the damage.

> I can write my code in mono (c#) use Windows Forms,
> and deploy it, with out change, on Linux, Windows, and MacOSX (ok
> there might be an issue with MacOSX).

So how is it "cross-platform" then if OS X might be a problem?

> Kinda like Java was supposed 
> to be before MS slipped it a poison pill.
> wrong, but in the grand scheme of things, .Net/C# is just basically
> Pascal, with a few things, "remoting", "reflection" it bought along
> the way. (well ok i am over simplifying it but, pedigree wise not
> to far off).

I don't see the comparison to Pascal at all. I see C# as Microsoft's 
reimplementation of Java. If MS really wanted to play well with 
others, it could have contributed to Java (not that I really care 
about Java either) instead of sabotaging it.

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

It remains to be seen who has pushed a trojan horse into whose 
fortress. I'll bet the folks at MS believe they have pushed one into 
the Linux camp. Given Microsoft's successful track record at gaining 
the upper hand against "partners" (and Novell's lack of same), it 
would be foolish to bet against Microsoft.

> Not sure about the High Level issue, to me c# is high level, how
> much higher does one need?

Developers who use dynamic languages might take issue with C# 
allegedly being "high level".

> 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#.

You're trying to portray languages that high school students might use 
to learn programming as somehow unfit for real, he-man programmers. 
Considering that one of the more long-lived and influential 
languages, Smalltalk, was originally created to teach even younger 
children, that portrayal is just elitist nonsense. But, I don't use 
Smalltalk. I use Python, which is a perfectly viable language for 
doing just about anything other than kernel programming and writing 
device drivers. It is more portable than the CLI and certainly 
doesn't require a 20M runtime just to print "Hello, world!". Anything 
that is performance-critical can easily be replaced by C or C++ and 
incorporated into Python. You may argue that C# would perform better 
than Python, or other dynamic languages, but at the same time, you 
also argue that multi-core CPUs negate the perceived or real 
inefficiencies of the CLI. You can't have it both ways. By the way, 
I'm aware of IronPython but until every standard Python module is 
reimplemented in C#, it is nothing more than an interesting Computer 
Science exercise.

> As far as Windows clone? i am thinking more a gnome desktop (in
> Mono), deployed on a Windows OS, with apps written in Mono, giving
> a MS flunky a choice, and power, that eventually they realize, "hey
> I can just install Linux (for free), and I will have the same
> thing", and there's your non-disruptive technology.

And for those of us who don't care about Gnome, tough luck I suppose.

> MS windows --> MS windows .Net --> MS windows (gnome Mono desktop)
> with .Net/Mono apps --> Linux (gnome Mono desktop) with .Net/Mono
> apps Nice easy migration.
> Might take 6 years but .......
>
> 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.

There have been binary standards for x86 drivers long before .NET 
existed but Microsoft was never interested in supporting that 
standard because it would mean that competing operating systems 
wouldn't have to waste time reinventing the wheel.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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