Slashdot | Miguel de Icaza Talks About Mono

Slashdot | Miguel de Icaza Talks About Mono: "Re:MONO is a disaster. (Score:5, Interesting)
by Omega1045 (584264) on Monday February 14, @12:03PM (#11668789)
I really disagree with your point. If anything, Mono helps fight MS. One way that MS locks people onto Windows is with proprietary developer kits and languages like VB and Visual C . These rely on Microsoft libraries. When a company develops some custom software with ASP, VB or VC they are locked into Windows (with the exception of some 3rd party stuff that lets you run some of ASP on Linux, Wine, etc).

MS Actually let .NET and C# become ISO standards unlike many of their past developer tools and languages. So when a large company develops an ASP.NET application and then decides that they don't want to have to continue support IIS or Windows, they now have a choice to migraite to Linix!

Mono provides choice for those that are currently developing for the Windows platform. So does Java. Mono is FOSS. Is Java?

I am currently working on a project that uses C# for the GUI. Our customers use Windows workstations, so we are writing software for Windows. We are actually moving away from Java which was the old language of choice at my company. You may argue the reasoning behind this, but it is the decision that was made and we are using C# instead of Java. I am hopefull that a more mature Mono (in a year or so with full System.Windows.Forms) may provide us with a way to run our client programs on Linux workstations, if requested by a customer. Mono will give us back some of the choice we lost moving away from Java.

Mono creates great competition for Java. Perhaps this will be another reason for Sun to finally make Java FOSS. Competion is a good thing."