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

[Bob Drzyzgula]

On Sun, Jul 29, 2001 at 01:29:34PM -0500, Jeff Bone wrote:
> 
> 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.)

I think that you're forgetting about the lawyer-friendly
.NET v2.0.  This undoubtedly-planned product contains
proprietary extensions which only work properly in the
presence of a Windows 2006 Enterprise Server. It will
of course be fully interoperable with .NET v1.0 servers
and clients in a backward-compatible or "mixed" mode,
but in those modes 80% of the new functionality found
within Windows 2006 ES will be disabled. 

Open-source implementations of v1.0 servers and clients
will of course continue to be usable indefinately. However,
Windows 2006 Professional machines will not be fully
functional in a pure .NET 1.0 environment, and new Windows
XP & 2002 subscriptions will have been removed from the
market. Just think of .NET 1.0 as Microsoft's gift to the
open source community.

IMHO, FWIW.

--Bob