[Mono-list] ASP.NET - usability/robustness/safety

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> 1) Is the ASP.NET mono sections + apache plugin "ready
> for primetime" -- i.e., has this stuff been "load"
> tested, is the security there, can it scale to handle
> a fairly large website?  

There are some people using it for medium sized applications, but this
is definitely an early adopter group, so possible kinks might not have
been worked out yet.

We have done a best-effort to make sure that ASP.NET and mod_mono would
be secure, and there is a continuous effort to improve its performance,
scalability and robustness, but like any other 1.0 product, it is too
early to give you hard numbers on this.

Today Novell and Mainsoft work as a team in improving the ASP.NET
support, and we are both committed to improve the same code base.

> 2) Are any other non-hobby sites using mono's asp.net
> implementation?

Volcker is using it for rolling out its asset management software to the
city of Munich (we talked about this on the Mono announcement, details
are there) and the mono site uses it to run a couple of web services and
applications.

A few small companies have used it, but we only hear from them when they
run into a bug, so it is hard to track down the deployments.

> 4) From what i've read, ASP.NET is not covered under
> ECMA specs and therefore is not as legally safe from
> lawsuit from MS as the compiler/JIT/corelibs are.  So
> would it be stupid to risk using mono's ASP.NET
> implementation for a commercial venture -- i.e., too
> risky legally?

The story is a long story, and this message should not be taken as being
legal advise.  If you want legal advise, you should consult a lawyer.

That being said:

Any software that does anything remotely interesting today is likely to
infringe on a dumb patent in a way or another, specially web sites.

If we are ever notified of a patent infringement by the patent holder in
Mono, we will follow the regular process:

	* Identify whether we do effectively infringe.

	* If we do, find prior art, to determine whether the patent
	  would hold in court.

	* If the patent would hold, then we would rewrite the code to
	  avoid infringing the patent claim.

	* if the above is not possible, we would remove the patented
	  code altogether from Mono.

Now if the patent holder (Microsoft or a third party) is willing to
license the patent under reasonable terms, we would likely offer a
service to Mono users by which they could obtain a copy of Mono with the
patent-using software.

Miguel