Open Source .NET?

Late last night I was surfing though a bunch of the O'Riley Network sites and I came across an interesting article about .NET, and the opinion of a prominiant person in the opensource community (GNOME's Miguel de Icaza). He had quite a bit of praise for .NET, which I thought was suprising. The most interesting thing though, was the announcement of a project to make an open source version of .NET called mono.

His basic rationale was that the open source community has always had better tools than Microsoft. With the .NET platform, he now see's Microsoft surpassing the open source community in that regard, and the the open source community needs an answer to .NET.

How does all of this relate to perl? Well I don't see any direct relation. But with the issues that have arisen with perl running on .NET (now it seems they will still exist with Perl 6), an opensource version could possibly address this. If mono succeeds, it will allow for much better multi-language development, which means a greater ability to couple perl with other languages.

On top of that, I think it will provide a much more full and robust environment for developing.

I'd be interested to hear anyone else's thoughts on this.

Rich

Comment on Open Source .NET?

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Re (tilly) 1: Open Source .NET? by tilly (Archbishop) on Aug 13, 2001 at 05:57 UTC
From what I have heard so far, it seems that Microsoft still thinks that it is in their interest to have Perl run on .NET. As long as they think that, ActiveState will have funding and technical support. Of course when Microsoft changes their mind, well the history of vendors who have tried to work with Microsoft on anything resembling a shared standard is not good. Personally I am with the hordes of people who think that Miguel is making a horrible mistake. My bet is that he will get support from Microsoft until the moment that they decide they have enough momentum to pull whatever patents they have on .NET out and try to get a lock on the market. Call me cynical. But Microsoft has a long history in which they have demonstrated that their top priority is getting a lock on any defacto or real standards. As long as they have that, they will have opportunities later for outrageous profit. .NET is their attempt to own the internet, and hosted standards. Suffice it to say that, no matter how well thought out it may or may not be, I will be hesitant to become dependent on it for anything...	[reply]
Re: Open Source .NET? by jepri (Parson) on Aug 13, 2001 at 00:47 UTC
It does have something to do with Perl, in a roundabout way - SOAP is fully compatible with MS COM and (in theory) can be used as either a .NET server or client. I've never tried it, I've just read the reports. Also, there is a 'dotGNU' project. How this differs from 'mono' I'm not to sure, but you can read about it here. Update: After bouncing around the net for a while, I found the homepage here. The author calls for someone to implement a new crossplatform virtual machine that compiles under gcc. Perl sounds sufficient, and already has many of the libraries needed. Anyone who feels bored and in need of something to hack on should take a look at the page.	[reply]
Re: Open Source .NET? by Sniper (Scribe) on Aug 12, 2001 at 23:37 UTC
I think the relation with Perl is the Activestate's Visual Perl which is a plugin for .NET for coding in integrated env 'ala' Visual Something and PerlNET to make a .NET plugin in Perl see more at : Visual Perl PerlNET Visual Studio David "Sniper" Rigaudiere	[reply]
The power of a good name? by nop (Hermit) on Aug 13, 2001 at 04:03 UTC
I wish they'd chosen a better name. OK, "mono" because they like monkeys, but at least to me, the name evokes memories of an unpleasant highschool illness.... yuck. Disclaimer: my native tounge is Enlish, not Spanish...	[reply]