I still believe this is a victory for Microsoft!

Since everyone’s so extatic, I can’t ignore it: it is happening! Microsoft makes C# patent promise to unblock Mono:

Microsoft have announced that the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Infrastructure will now come under the Microsoft Community Promise, a legally binding promise not to assert any patents or other rights related to the implementation of those standards. This means that the controversial issue of Mono, which at its core is an implementation of ECMA 334 and ECMA 335, should be clear of patent issues related to those standards.

Señor de Icaza is jubilating, fedora-mono is calling Boycott Novell names, plenty of people are optimistic, y compris on OSNews.com.

I am more than skeptical and cautious. First of all, only the ECMA-covered parts are “guaranteed not to bite”. That’s C# and CLI.

The stupid GNOME guys who believe that life didn’t exist before Gtk# can now happily continue to develop their petty GUI applets who implement things that are doable in any of the other languages and frameworks available under Linux (and GNOME). But when they’re need to do something serious, such an enterprise Web-based application…

Not to mention that Mono does implement parts of ASP.NET, but not fully. So finally, when some business mindset would ask something “really enterprise”, what could a system architect think? “Since I do know C# already, we could buy Microsoft Dynamics and add our in-house ASP.NET extension modules written in C#… .NET, not Mono.” That’s both expensive and Microsoft.NET. But even if the ASP.NET support in Mono improves, I don’t see any rational manager approving a project who would use Apache+MySQL+Mono (for ASP.NET) to implement a huge ERP+CRM+Financial, etc. solution that would be 100% unsupported and 100% in-house.

So the major advantage of Microsoft giving to the public the message “we won’t enforce our patents” is that everyone will feel the need to learn and start using the “tremendously unique” Mono/.NET technology. C# is not a bad language for those coming from C++ and Java, and the gullible people will be tempted to start enjoying their hello-world-in-mono applets in Linux, BSD and whatnot.

WinForms or not, I bet Microsoft doesn’t care about the small GUI applications people would develop, regardless of the target OS. What they care about — and what .NET is really good at in this knowledge-based era — is to have as many companies as possible into the ASP.NET business portal-type of solutions. They’re currently aggressively marketing Microsoft Dynamics, which allows them to sell: Windows Server, SQL Server, extra server or portal modules, Visual Studio, training and expertise (sort of). If this modular-portal-supposed-to-be-extensible-to-do-anything sells well, there will be a strong need to have ASP.NET developers. Frankly speaking, for this kind of projects you’ll really need the full version of the latest Visual Studio .NET, and you’ll never consider the mimicking capabilities of Mono. You know, after all… the .NET Framework is free — only it’s not cross-platform.

I am already laughing sarcastically when I imagine the faces of those Linux developers who, after having told their boss that they know C# and Mono, will be assigned to an ASP.NET project… on a Microsoft platform that uses the genuine .NET! Because this is what will happen!

And when you think that, after the initial unknown motivation to start developing Mono, the whole thing took exposure after some moron wrote Tomboy!

Therefore, believe me or not, my twisted radar tells me that in the long run, Tomboy and F-Spot are going to boost the sales of Microsoft Dynamics, which is a .NET range of products. Good work, Steve, and good work, Miguel.

This entry was posted on July 07th, 2009 and is filed under Software. Tags: Linux (Generic), Windows.
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