[Mono-list] I give up / Mac OS X PPC support

[Gregory Junker]

This is a rather short-sighted viewpoint, I have to say. If you were
talking about today, Monday April 12, 2004, then ya, sure, "if the
election were today" then Windows.NET would win hands down. That's not
what this project is about however. 

I strongly disagree with the statement "if Mono PPC doesn't work right
now, today, then you should just give it up". If Mono had the same paid
development staff of the same size that Microsoft has dedicated to .NET
just on Windows, then you might have a legitimate gripe. 

I hear a lot of sour grapes here, a lot of "glass is half empty". I
predict that two or three years from now you'll look back to this time
and wonder why you were worried at all. And if you need Mono to run
reliably on MacOSX before then, well, like you said...you need to run
Windows (or, increasingly, with each passing day, Mono/Linux). 

I rarely boot back into Windows unless I have to (gaming), and then, as
soon as I am done, it's back to Linux. All of my desktops have both
Fedora and Win2K on them, and they spend 99% of their uptime in Linux.
Not because I am a religious fanatic; I didn't have a single Linux
machine in my business until about 18 months ago, and I only recently
eliminated the last Windows server from the shop. I started in .NET and
C# in the second beta version of VS.NET, and liked it a lot, but did not
care to run it on Windows servers, so until I found out about this
project, and the level of its maturity, I more or less ignored .NET
completely. Now that I can run it in a commercial-license-free
environment, I am far more interested in employing it in our projects. 

You mention beating MS at their own game; MS themselves realize the
reality of the evolutionary path: the actual OS longer will matter in a
matter of a few short years. Businesses care about what it will take to
get the work done, not how it's done, and since the movement is
inexorably moving towards "software as a service", and since .NET is a
frontrunning technology towards that end, the fact that it runs on Linux
(and only gets more complete and stable with each CVS commit) means that
no longer will IT departments have to care about what latest-and-
greatest gee-whiz-bang-gizmo Microsoft puts out and expects us to buy:
it simply won't matter. 

In other words, in a Mono-enabled .NET world, Microsoft themselves
ironically become irrelevant. That's why Mono/Linux is important in and
of itself: weaning from the dependency on a single-source vendor for
what admittedly is a desirable technology. 

And best of all, you can still use VS.NET if you wish to develop apps
for Mono/Linux (and other platforms when ready). And even that
dependence is being addressed. 

So for me, and, I would imagine, for a significant portion of those
interested in developing applications under Mono (and for Novell itself,
I believe), it's not a religious fervor that drives this, not a hatred
for Microsoft. It's just the opportunity NOT to have to rely on the
whimsy of Redmond to "take care of business", as it were. It's about
freedom, simple as that. 

For me anyway...

Greg


>         On x86 hardware, I prefer windows xp/2003. Sorry, I love *nix,
>         butlinux doesn't do much for me on x86, especially when x86/
>         windowsoffers 100% compatibility and killer dev tools.
>         Frankly, there is noreal reason to host asp.net apps under
>         apache, when my XP box doesbetter after locking it down. No
>         religion here folks, just reality.
>         
>         I appreciate the new features and the roadmap, but if all mono
>         has tooffer is x86/linux stability, then mono has only
>         succeeded in doing isproviding a 'free' implementation of
>         the .net runtime that runs on thesame commodity hardware that
>         a fully supported and commercial versionruns on.
>         
>         the same hardware. Believeit or not, most windows shops
>         adopting .NET don't care about OSlicensing costs or security.