That’s a classic case of not being able to see the forest through the trees. Yes, Roy’s “articles” use links to other websites, but his headlines, articles, and poorly rendered artworks are where the hypocrisy, lies, distortion, spin, fanaticism, and just plain stupidity shine though.

The irony of sites like BoycottNovell is that while Microsoft talked about evangelism long ago, Linux zealots actually practice it. It’s one thing to have a foolish idea, but it’s much worse to follow through with it.

What I find most disturbing is that they actually believe their own crap. “making macintosh applications more powerful” “unix applications less expensive to develop”. Win32? They’re fucking joking!

Oh brother. There is a line beyond which ‘tech evangelism’ just becomes ‘religion’, and I think that’s a pretty good indication they crossed it.

“so overwhelming that the choice of our standards seems obvious, or (ideally) that the developer is not even aware that a decision was faced, and a choice made.”

I think this is particularly telling as well. Since the dawn of mass-media marketers have been perfecting this craft, manipulating people’s decisions without them even knowing it. MS has been particularly adept at it.

>> But little by little, more new projects are being written in .NET. Other vendors in our domain are exposing their APIs in .NET. We don’t have a choice. Good or evil, .NET is an incredibly productive stack.

Everyone has their incredibly productive stack.

These developers might be in love with MSVisualStudio and its support for dotnet, rather than for dotnet itself.

A real productivity boost comes from moving to open source development. Reuse and share work.

I would not downplay “evilness”.

>> Regardless of whether his apology was sincere, he hasn’t worked at Microsoft for years.

>> Somewhere on the internet is a quote from a microsoft employee saying how great FOSS and Linux are. If I provide this quote does this mean we should all trust microsoft? Likewise, if some other employee condemns FOSS should we ban all microsoft technology?

Except that he was tasked with teaching other employees how to go about things. His statements are also consistent with information about Microsoft behavior as discovered through other sources (eg, USDOJ antitrust trial; numerous company lawsuits; ISO manipulation; etc). We aren’t talking about opinions or theory only.

Here is a video interview that I found interesting (I got it from boycottnovell). It concerns DRDOS. http://ia311511.us.archive.org/2/items/Richard_Williams_testimony_in_Caldera_v_Microsoft_1998/Richard_Williams_testimony_1998_small.ogg

Bill Gates and Microsoft have had a bad reputation for many years.

How about a translator?

The first thing to observe is that C# and Java are remarkably similar. The syntax isn’t all that different, and the runtime libraries have many similarities. Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a translator that would take our C# source and generate Java source that “Just Worked”?

I started by exploring ANTLR, a very cool parser generator that can output C# code. But along the way I realized that mcs (the C# compiler from the Mono project), would make a much better starting point. I simply need to make it generate Java source code out the backend instead of IL (the Intermediate Language used by the .NET runtime).

So I started hacking. I spent two days adding a new backend for mcs, and I realized that while eventually we could make this work, it could take a long time. Beyond the syntax conversion challenges, the Java code converted from C# was still trying to call the .NET Framework, but those libraries didn’t exist in the JVM.
Enter Mainsoft

In the end, we decided to purchase a solution to this problem from a company called Mainsoft. Their product—Mainsoft, Enterprise Edition—happens to do exactly what we want. (I have no affiliation with this company other than the fact that SourceGear is their customer.)

Mainsoft’s tool is a Visual Studio add-on which compiles C# to Java byte code instead of to IL. They include a class library that provides support for .NET Framework stuff.

I was ultra-skeptical, but in practice, this tool is working surprisingly well. We had to make very few changes to the OpsLib code, all fairly minor, and the port took about three weeks. The resulting Java version of OpsLib passes our suite of regression tests, and that speaks volumes about the quality of work Mainsoft has done. Those tests are truly sadistic.

In the end, we’ve got a pure Java solution, nothing but a collection of jar files. We can run them on Windows or on Linux.

By purchasing Mainsoft’s product, we allow ourselves to keep our primary focus on four core product development. That’s a big win. Since June 2007, SourceGear offers full support for Visual Studio and Eclipse clients on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

>> You might want to consider what it means to “own” a platform.

I’ll address this and most of the rest of your comment.

The “short” answer is that…

With patents, mono people are screwed. Adding new API does not remove from play features that likely are patented by the inventor of dotnet (Microsoft). These extensions would likely still leverage the core dotnet spec. Microsoft extension patents on the core dotnet spec would likely be violated in many cases. This is made possible thanks to the generalities afforded patent claims by the USPTO. Microsoft covenants are weak. In particular, none of them protect against patent troll companies, eg, owned by Bill Gates or by Nathan Myhrvold, coming after you. The actual covenants themselves also preclude forking and leave much to the mercy of Microsoft (insofar you want protection from Microsoft). Remember, Microsoft is not like other competitors, who don’t own the ballgame and are willing to leverage Linux to gain market share. Microsoft’s fat margins come from minting money at monopoly prices.

The problem with the OIN is that the backers don’t seem willing (or able) to press the nuke button. Most customers and small players (and large ones as well) will likely settle in Microsoft’s favor. The OIN is used to give you some leverage in negotiations, but such negotiations run counter to FOSS. It’s inefficient and Microsoft even works to isolate licenses like the GPL. IBM isn’t a huge fan of the GPL. Novell (another OIN supporter) already has struck side deals with Microsoft that give them a unique role.

Without patents (or even with them), Microsoft still owns monopolies they leverage through interop issues. Only after you knock them from this perch do you have a quasi-level playing field.

But remember that Microsoft has access to all of mono because mono is open source. To beat Microsoft at market share you have to attack where they don’t have an established (and reinforced) monopoly and a commanding lead. Mono shares with Microsoft, but Microsoft doesn’t share with mono except to an extent to fight off other standards by keeping mono devs hopeful and mono competitive with other FOSS offerings, eg, based on merit [or so would be the idea; as Puppesurferen stated, where merit won't cut it, deception might].

To gain on Windows (ie, to break monopoly holds), you have to have an offering that competes competitively directly with Windows. Mono can never do this by itself (ie, don’t try to write a competitive OS with mono). Linux (the full platform) can. Mono could be a piece of the puzzle; however, mono is less mature than Java/C/C++/etc, produces apps less speedy than with C/C++ despite the source code being very similar in appearances in many cases.

What I see is this: with patents, avoid mono and as many MS “inventions” as possible. Without patents, focus on Linux — in other words, on Linux integration so as to compete when Microsoft tries to clone the features within their closed source products. In this case, mono would be but a tool and there would be no need to follow the dotnet standard except to that extent one would think that would help migrations away from msdotnet.

Today, patents exist. I do not support mono today at all.

>> The vast majority of enterpise Java is using things like JBoss or Spring etc which have NOTHING to do with Sun.

Sun is not Microsoft.

Sun was not in a market position to leverage neither patents nor monopolies against most desktop users in a way which would involve significant prohibitions or money. Microsoft owns the desktop.

Essentially, Sun was in a position to be nice and play the David to the Microsoft Goliath. Also, historically, and perhaps a reason why Sun was not in Microsoft’s position, is that Microsoft is more ruthless, deceptive, and ambitious than most companies.

The quotes from James Plamondon are regrettable. They are also quite dated. He later apologized for those statements. Regardless of whether his apology was sincere, he hasn’t worked at Microsoft for years.

Somewhere on the internet is a quote from a microsoft employee saying how great FOSS and Linux are. If I provide this quote does this mean we should all trust microsoft? Likewise, if some other employee condemns FOSS should we ban all microsoft technology?