If Mono innovates then I’m the King of Canada

How is Microsoft considered an innovator? They buy out companies and developers to produce their substandard software. They hired Anders Hejlsberg who was Chief Engineer at Borland who worked on Turbo Pascal and managed the team who made Delphi. He was used to corrupt the Java standard with J++ (leaving out Sun features). After that he was put in charge of creating C# when Microsoft was forced to start over after being sued by Sun for it’s dirty java tricks. When developing C# they basicly copied the innovation of Sun’s Java. Silverlight is a copy of Adobe’s innovation, and will be trumped with HTML5.

Upon inspection we came across an article on the SD Times website which was explaining what it was looking for in the SD Times 100 nominations which I will quote below:

The SD Times 100 looks for companies, non-commercial organizations, open-source projects and other influencers that have determined a direction that developers followed. Last year, 100 companies were recognized in 14 categories.

Source: SD Times 100 Nomination Announcement

I also have a problem with the Mono Project being on the list. What have they actually ‘created’ or ‘innovated’ up to now besides copying everying Microsoft has done? They haven’t determined any developer direction as C# has been slowly growing. In the TIOBE index its highest rating was 6.258% on December 2009 which has slowly grown from 0.384% since August 2001.

Mono is nothing but a copy of Microsoft’s C# language. Any direction in C# would be attributed to Microsoft only. They own both the standard and the patents based on it (including the non-ecma patents which only Novell can legally use in Mono).

Novell attributes the success of the Mono Project to the February 2009 launch of Moonlight 1.0, the September 2009 launch of MonoTouch 1.0, the November 2009 launch of Mono Tools for Visual Studio and the December 2009 launch of Moonlight 2. Source: Novell News.

Earth to Novell: Moonlight isn’t an innovation, it’s a copy of Silverlight. Silverlight isn’t even popular at all among developers (even Flash is more popular). Both technologies are hitting the backburner as HTML5 has been hitting the news more than Silverlight and Flash. The only thing historic about President Obama’s historic inauguration on Silverlight is that it’s the first time the public caught his lies about open technologies.

Other bad examples were MonoTouch and Mono Tools for Visual Studio. Did Apple not just recently ban stuff not written in C/C++ or Objective C? How great can Mono Tools be to the world when C# is only 6.258% on TRIOBE? and it’s an addon for someone elses innovation?

In the end i’m not totally surprised. The article mentioned the use of Twitter which means that people were gaming the system in favour of MSFT and Mono by ganging up together to retweet Mono-related news.

I wonder what we will see from Microsoft and the Mono Project in the future. Perhaps this will entice them to actually innovate? Much like Obama’s ‘Call to Action’, where receiving the nobel peace prize inspired him to work harder. We can only wait and see.

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