On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 7:09 AM, Vamsee Kanakala <vkanakala@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Monday 19 July 2010 12:00 AM, openbala wrote:
I'd have to disagree, really. As far as I can remember, the real reason why
Miguel and Nat started working on Mono (as stated in their presentation) was
that they were worried that there wasn't truly useful RAD-style development
environment for Linux (both for desktop and webapps) at that point of time.
Meanwhile, MS was supposedly going to take over the world with its
new-fangled .Net thingy. The idea was to implement .Net CLR in Linux, and
create a whole toolset around it (which led to MonoDevelop, I believe).
In other words, the whole of Mono project came about because people feared
MS was going to take over the technology world (I suppose it seemed real
enough in early part of the century). But the patent issues would always
stalk it, and not everybody bought into the Mono vision that we have to
re-implement MS standards, with a good amount of skepticism that we're
ultimately serving MS' agenda after all.
With Moonlight (Silverlight in Mono) and Monotouch (.Net platform for
iPhone and iOS 4!) the Mono suite gets really exciting.
As somebody already pointed out before, why do we have to bother with
extending a single company's strangle-hold over any part of technology
stack? Be it MS or Adobe, open technologies now have enough weight and
momentum to drive their own standards (Flash vs HTML5/Canvas). With a lot of
enlightened companies like Google (ok, in their own self-interest of course)
truly embracing the open technology platforms, why bother with
backward-looking, proprietary software sanctioned by a single company?
Coming to Monotouch, is it even legal to make apps with it, given the
dreaded Section 3.3.1 of Apple Developer License agreement? Which kind of
rounds out my argument in favor of not supporting/re-implementing
proprietary platforms - companies like Apple can turn around and screw you
in the end, no matter their love of all things open.
P.S: Lets talk in technology!
Sorry I didn't talk purely technology - by asking to comment on Miguel's
actions/motivations, you also made it a subjective/political issue - but
these issues indeed go beyond the technical merits/non-merits of the
platforms or intentions or actions of a single person - however influential
they are. We believe in open source for a reason, and trusting technology
companies not to look out for their own interests in the end, over and above
whatever their professed love for developers and their interests in these
days (after so many scary stories) is being extremely naive.
Vamsee.
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