.NET and Mono. Call for action: ask for retraction

[Jeff Bone]

Bob Drzyzgula wrote:

> I don't think that it's just Hailstorm that's the danger.
> The danger is in growing dependant in any way on any aspect
> of Microsoft's implementation of .NET. This is too much
> like Charlie Brown depending on Lucy to hold the ball.

Upon reflection, I tend to agree with the specifics of this statement:  we
shouldn't depend on any aspect of Microsoft's *implementation* of .NET.  But
that's just common good sense, regardless of the politics, for any developer who
needs to be on multiple platforms.  Specs and standards to the rescue!  C# and the
CLI have been submitted to ECMA, and despite Microsoft's lawyers' grousing, it
looks as though implementations *to spec* can be done without license
restriction.  Whether or not this will happen or be sufficient to build useful
software on remains to be seen;  but just as a developer wanting to write
cross-platform UNIX / C code can achieve their goal by conforming to the POSIX
specs, so the hope remains that the ECMA specs provide a similar platform ---
independent of MS' implementation in the same way that POSIX description of *IX is
independant of any particular kernel implementation or distribution.

jb