

What's So Evil About Mono? - bdfh42
http://blog.linuxtoday.com/blog/2008/10/whats-so-evil-a.html

======
krschultz
My problem with mono is that few apps are really compatible with it unless
they were designed specifically for mono. Yet the existance of mono in any
state allows microsoft to advertise .NET as cross platform. Look at what
happened this some with nbcolympics.com as a warning of the danger.

Besides Sun really has a cross platform ecosystem with 1st party support of
Linux and it is not that embraced, why bring another stack in that is
inferior? Mono provides little that Java doesn't and there Linux support
doesn't make you feel like a 2nd class citizen.

~~~
sapphirecat
> Besides Sun really has a cross platform ecosystem with 1st party support of
> Linux

You may think so now, but for a long time, Sun didn't allow distributors to
include Java in their repositories. If you wanted Java, you had to go download
it yourself. And all your users did, too, whether from Sun or from the JRE you
bundled with your app. In other words, if you chose Java, you also chose bloat
and a tiny userbase. Not to mention, Java is a second-class citizen on the
Mac. You never know what's going to happen between Apple and Sun.

Another obvious candidate, Python, was already on everyone's machines. But to
be cross-platform, you have to code carefully and ask your users to
find/install GTK2 and dependencies on Windows. With Python, the bloat (from a
user's POV) is only confined to Windows.

Perl is widely available, but not really cross-platform. They're still
struggling with Neopolitan Perl to support Windows without relying on the
goodness of ActiveState.

So Java becoming useful has been about 5-8 years too late, and it's still
beholden to Apple on one platform. Other alternatives also suck, so the FOSS
world has continued using C/C++. Without a clear winner, what's the point of
switching languages?

And as far as cross-platform goes, even if something was perfectly cross-
platform, I wonder if FOSS developers would support it. Projects like Inkscape
are torn between the increased userbase from Windows, and the increased tech
support for windows that those users would require, when the developers often
don't have Windows machines to develop and test on.

~~~
shadytrees
> _They're still struggling with Neopolitan Perl to support Windows without
> relying on the goodness of ActiveState._

I think Strawberry Perl has solved the pain of installing Perl on Windows.
`cpan` actually works out of the box since the installation includes `gcc` and
`make`. (I just wish it wouldn't automatically install to `c:\strawberry`.)

~~~
sapphirecat
Interesting. I see it's finally out of beta. I would even try it if I were
still stuck in win32.

------
bootload
_"... The Samba project, like Mono, provides a cross-platform alternative to
closed Microsoft technologies. It is equally vulnerable to the (increasingly
toothless) Microsoft patent threats and arbitrary changes in the protocols.
Yet Samba is admired ..."_

It's not evil, just !C. Part of the reason I have problems with Mono is the
choice of language the libs are written. The applications are first rate but I
hate the fact I have to download a bucket load of extras ( _"in the past - it
comes standard with Ubuntu"_ ) to run say great bits of software like Tomboy.
It rubs against the grain of gnu's C bias ( _"are there mono-bindings for
c-based apps?"_ ) Now Gnome desktop and it's libraries created by the same
team thats another story.

~~~
jauco
You might find it interesting that Tomboy was written in mono with the goal to
force a discussion on how viable it was as a platform

 _I also had a political agenda. I wanted the question of Mono or Not to be
brought forward and answered seriously, instead of foundering in the grey
waters of FUD. I didn’t honestly care about the outcome, just that there was
one. I thought a killer Mono-based app would push the issue._ [1]

[1]: <http://www.beatniksoftware.com/blog/?p=84>

------
AlexTheFounder
I tried mono myself this summer for quite a complex web front end/back end
application written in .Net on Windows. What I found was:

1) the core mono libraries are extremely good, I was able to drop the binaries
on Linux and get to work immediately 2) projects on top of the core libraries
and requiring integrating with other services (web servers like Apache, nginx)
can turn out a nightmare. While I managed to setup everything on Cent OS and
Ubuntu, nothing was really working as it should

So, personally I'm a big fan of mono and already looking for trying some
winforms stuff there, but ... mono needs more resources I guess to get
polished

------
Hoff
If you're an end-user or a vendor with .Net portability or coexistence
requirements, then nothing. You simply want Mono to work, and to work right.
Or you're porting code out of .Net.

If you're not using .Net, then most folks don't care about Mono.

Or you're a partisan of some flavor, and of which we seem to have a surfeit.

Nothing to see. Move along.

