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Main | Next day (Oct 16, 2003) »

Wednesday Oct 15, 2003

Mono aware.

Comments[2] by Dave in Microsoft
Ben Maurer In that spirit, I make a plea to the Open Source community: please, please, think about other platforms. In the end, making your software not run on Mono will just hurt both projects, helping no one. I realize for a Windows developer who has never programmed for Linux writing with compatibility in mind does not come naturally. If there is enough community demand, I would be happy to write some guidelines and pointers for software authors to ease this process.

Can Dot-Net developers be convinced that cross-platform portability is important? I'm not talking about "it runs on Windows 2000 and Windows XP" type portability, I'm talking about the real deal. Sounds like a hard sell, doesn't it. Most Microsoft devotees seem to believe that "cross-platform is a silly concept that only works on paper." And don't forget, Microsoft is the company that made it so easy to build non-portable applications with Java that the Justice Department ordered them to put warning popup in Visual J++.

Maybe Mono and Linux will succeed where Java and the Java platform failed. They will finally make convince Microsoft and Microsoft developers that cross-platform works, or at least the Windows/Linux part, and is no longer just a silly concept. There is some evidence of success. Ben Maurer of Ximian has been working on porting Dot-Net applications to Mono and hasn't thrown up his hands in frustration quite yet. Jason Alexander is working the evangelism angle and urging Dot-Net heads to be Mono Aware. As Jason Alexander's co-star might say "good luck with all that."

Update: due to my sarcasm and poorly chosen words, at least one person did not get my meaning. I certainly don't believe that cross-platform portability is a silly concept. I made some changes indicated by strikes and underlines above to try to clarify my point.

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