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

[Jeff Bone]

Bob Drzyzgula wrote:

> I'm sorry, but I've gone through this too many times with
> Microsoft. They simply are not to be trusted, period.

I'm not saying M$ to be trusted, at all --- and Nick's point is a good
one, and nobody should build open source stuff that relies on Passport.
But .NET != Hailstorm;  it's just a language-neutral deployment and
runtime environment.  Just as you can write, say, C without running UNIX,
so you should be able to write .NET services (in just about any language,
hypothetically, modulo the availability of lang->MSIL compilers) without
ceeding the services game to Microsoft.

> This isn't to mean that you are wrong about Petreley being
> wrong. This could in fact be the one time that Microsoft
> has nothing up their sleeve.

I'm not making the claim that they have nothing up their sleeve, and
Petreley being wrong is independent of whether they do or do not.
Petreley's position --- as most of the .NET critics I've seen --- is based
on the fundamental confusion that Hailstorm services are necessarily
intertwined with and required for .NET as a development platform.  They're
two separate things, and for the latter Microsoft has submitted
specifications to ECMA.  (Their legal department apparently wishes they
hadn't, now, because it appears that they've let the cat out of the bag,
enabling 3rd parties to create license-free implementations.  Hence my
theory about some bright techies in M$ trying to route around what would
otherwise be corporate braindamage.)

> Microsoft is like a malignant suburban whore, enticing
> a john to go with her to a motel and remove his clothes,
> whereupon she will whack him upside the head, steal his
> wallet, dispose of his clothes, and scurry away back home
> to get dinner ready for her struggling husband and adorable
> kids. "Gosh, what a great wife you are, dear; I just don't
> know how you manage to make dinners like this on my salary..."

Believe me, I'm with ya.  I was telling people how dangerous M$ was back
in '88 or so, and nobody was listening...  but I can begrudgingly
acknowledge technical excellence when I see it even despite politics;  and
while it's rare to see anything of any substantial technical elegance or
quality from Microsoft, I have to say that what I've seen with .NET is
superb work, very useful, and again --- may be a tremendous boon for
cross-platform development, esp. if Mono succeeds.

jb