[Mono-list] Is Mono ready to compete with MS .NET in realbusiness?

[Bryan Porter]

Salutations All,

My company has been experimenting with Mono for some time now, with
great success. We like the ability to cross deploy to different
operating systems and architectures, and in fact that was our primary
purpose in evaluating Mono. Save for System.Windows.Forms, the major
things all seem to be there, and our systems administrators our much
happier having our ASP.NET applications hosted under Apache.
Additionally, our Linux users in the company have been beta testing a
GTK# version of our proprietary customer service system, and are quite
happy with it.

I suppose when it comes to "supported" it really comes down to what your
personal comfort level is. I don't know what support offerings Novell
has for Mono, but you should always take into consideration that
*having* support is all well and good, but do you ever take *advantage*
of that support? I myself have never once contact Microsoft because of a
deficiency or error in the framework (of which I've reported and worked
around many).

Bugs in frameworks are inevitable, no matter who writes it, and as
programmers I feel that its our duty to report when possible, workaround
as needed, or (in the case of open source software) correct the issue
yourself if you can.

Funny story, I once had a problem with the EMU10K soundcard driver in
one the 2.2 or 2.4 kernel series, I don't remember which. Regardless, it
was throwing all sorts of errors on me, and after sifting through the
source for about 4 hours, I noticed that Alan Cox had done a lot of the
work on the driver. So, frustrated, I said "Screw it, I'll email him",
not honestly expecting to ever get a response.

Surprise Surprise, 4 hours later the man who wrote the thing wrote back
and said "Oh yah, sorry about that, there was a bug in this that or the
other - here's a patch."

Now, that's what I call support! Your mileage may vary, of course, but
that's true with any corporate or open-source support offerings.

Cheers,

Bryan Porter

-----Original Message-----
From: mono-list-admin@lists.ximian.com
[mailto:mono-list-admin@lists.ximian.com] On Behalf Of PFJ
Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2004 3:55 AM
To: mono
Subject: Re: [Mono-list] Is Mono ready to compete with MS .NET in
realbusiness?

Hi,

> Mono 1.0 was shipped awhile ago, and I'm really excited
> about that... but now the natural question is:
>=20
>   "Is Mono ready to compete with MS .NET in real business?"

Depends on the context. For winforms, no. 1.2 will have that and it
should rock.

> ... and one more question is
>=20
>   "Will Novell provide support, documentation, etc.?"
>   "If yes, by when?"

monodoc already has the documentation. As C# is already a standardised
language, whatever is in the ECMA standard or the MS documentation
should follow.

> Behind MS .NET there is a huge development team,
> support, documentation, and continuity... and I
> think Novell should offer the same, but till now
> I don't see anything in that way.

There is with Mono. The big difference is that (I would guess) the
majority of those working on Mono aren't on the Novell payroll - it's
the biggest difference between Open and Closed source. Take OpenOffice,
there are well over 200 people actively working on it, yet only about 15
work for Sun!

TTFN

Paul
--=20
"If I face my God tomorrow, I can tell Him I am innocent.
I've never harmed anyone. I have cheated no one.=20
I have deceived no one. I have hurt no one.=20
Except myself. And that He will forgive me." - Hans Holzel