All,
It was interesting to read RMS's take on Mono, DotGNU and the whole
Microsoft's patents on .Net CLI runtime.
<short story>
Use the C# code implementations in a free platform (Mono, DotGNU) but
don't create new code in it. Just like mp3 - consume mp3 in free
players, but don't encode.
</short story>
It is no news that RMS has termed Miguel de Icaza - the person behind
Mono (who was also behind GNOME) as a "traitor to the free software
community" for being part of the Mono project.
I'm a fan of .Net platform. I personally feel Mono runtime is an
awesome experiment to bring C# into non-Microsoft platforms. C# as
such is a wonderful language and would love to see a complete .Net 4.0
runtime implemented in Mono (currently Mono is fully compatible with
.Net 2.0 and some specifications of .Net 3.0). The interesting side
effect with mono runtime is that with little effort it was possible to
bring *other* .Net languages to Linux such as F# and Visual Basic.
With Miguel in the forefront Mono runtime is bound for some big
things.
With Moonlight (Silverlight in Mono) and Monotouch (.Net platform for
iPhone and iOS 4!) the Mono suite gets really exciting.
I would like to hear from ILUG-C about their take on Mono runtime and
whether what Miguel did is useful or not. Please discuss..
P.S: Lets talk in technology!
Thanks,
Balaji