[ILUG] Fwd: Re: [ILUG-Social] GNOME to "embrace & extend" .NET !

[Ruairi Newman]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
Subject: Re: [ILUG-Social] GNOME to "embrace & extend" .NET !
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 12:22:57 +0000
From: David Golden <david.golden at oceanfree.net>
To: bofh at tech-mad.org


Ruairi Newman wrote:
>Ooh Microsoft are going to LOVE this....  ;)
>
>
>".NET solves a number of problems we've been trying to solve in GNOME," he
>told us today. "Instead of wasting our time trying to create a new standard
>we're embracing .NET and extending it for our own purposes."
>
>Miguel De Icaza
>
>http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-07-10-004-20-PS-CY-MS

One thing I'm not to sure on is whether it's a good idea to clone .NET.

J2SE already does pretty much everything you'd want on the client side, and
J2EE's proven its worth on the server side, and is available now on
linux, with
 independent source-available (though not true open source) implementations
from IBM and Sun,.and there's already significant development on the true
open-source Java front, with gcj and kaffe still trucking along.  So
wouldn't it be better to
throw the weight behind an open-source version of Java, rather than
playing a
2-year catchup to MS-led technomolology?  I've looked over C#, and in my
opinion,
it offers no significant advantages over Java.  And the existence of
many other languages
targeting the JVM shows that the CLR is hardly revolutionary (and Amiga/Tao
have a much better language-independent VM already, that inlcudes Java
support -
that would be worth cloning...)

While C# has ECMA backing, some of the .NET APIs that make the language
useful aren't
standardised  (particularly the client side GUI libraries
System.Windows.Forms or whatever),
 leading me to believe MS will pull its usual bait-and-switch on the
APIs front periodically - I'd
say they realised that Win2k wouldn't cut it on the server side, so
that's why they announced the BSD port
of the server-side portion (they didn't explicitly _say_ it was
server-side only, but if you look at the
API subset they're including...), while keeping their client side lock.

If anything, the Java stuff is already guaranteed a de-facto standard,
due to the existence
of multiple implementations from competing vendors.

If Sun or IBM were to GPL-release a J2SE or even better J2EE implementation,
it should kill .NET anywhere but Windows stone cold dead, and even if
they never do, surely
building on the exisiting open-source Java stuff is better than getting
diverted into a lenghty
wheel-reinvention?

The only part of .NET that's worth cloning is the authentication
services, and, once agian,
we already have most of the code written for that, thanks to open-source
directory
projects combined with open-source digital signature programs..

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