Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

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From my perspective here, you're shifting the goal posts. In particular this conversation began with you apparently thinking that Mono lacked full implementations of ASP/ADO/etc. And I think that might justify the original comment that Linux implementations have been treated as second class citizens. I say might since ADO/ASP are not really part of .NET, but rather independent projects built on top of .NET. But in any case, that hasn't been an issue for many years now.

You have now shifted into claiming that your issue is that the licenses Microsoft released their code under were insufficiently permissive. I could argue against this, because it's at best misleading -- different code was released under different licenses. You can see an archive of one of the CLI releases [1] with the license it came with. Or this [2] is a blog from the Mono founder expressing thanks for Microsoft and ECMA members releasing code under open source licenses. That blog was from the huge 2.0 release, in 2008.

But ultimately that feels like a red herring, even if a fun one! You seemed to believe (as did the person I was responding to) that C# was a Windows only thing. That hasn't been the case for a very long time, and it is completely ridiculous now a days. In either case, it might seem we agree if you think that people are basing their views on obsolete information. But that then rather begs the question of why is that so especially the case here. If I was discussing e.g. javascript frameworks from the perspective of somebody 4 years out, let alone a decade, I'd be quite justifiably skewered. In other fields, 4 years ago things like TensorFlow did not even exist as public projects. 4 years is a very long time in software, so why are people so particularly slow on the uptake in this instance? Bias, bad marketing, something else?

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20060421052106/http://www.micros...

[2] - http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Oct-06.html

You asked for possible reasons for why you are being downvoted for your reply to the following comment by woolvalley: "It has been for the longest time been a closed source MSFT only thing. It wasn't open source and running on linux was a second class citizen. Not sure if it is still a second class citizen."

Your reply was: "Why do you think it's been closed source with minimal cross platform effort?"

I don't think you can argue that I'm shifting the claim to the topic of being insufficiently permissive when that was part of the original thread.

The license[1] that you pointed to is not open source. It says "You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in any form for commercial purposes".

Again, just because the source code is available, that doesn't mean it's open source. There are few that would agree with you that the early Microsoft licenses you pointed to meet the usual criteria for "Open Source" as it's used in the industry.

Your argument seems to be that things have changed and we should forget about the history. As woolvalley's comments were made in the past tense ("wasn't open source", "was a second class citizen"), I think you could have made a better reply along the lines of "a lot has changed since you last looked into C#", rather than the more accusative approach you did which challenges a viewpoint which seems to be historically justified.

I find the idea that "4 years is a very long time in software" to be laughable.

I've been using Python since the late 1990s, and am still going through the Python 2->3 upgrade cycle. My primary development environment of a Unix-like terminal environment and emacs would be recognizable to people in the 1980s. I've been developing and selling my software product for 8 years, with essentially the same core codebase.

Or, going down that rabbit hole, Alan Kay is famous for arguing that there is little in the way of significant new inventions in computing since 1980. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-i... .

In hindsight, something I think I should have emphasized in our discussion earlier is the exact state of Mono. Everything else is mostly tangential as 'the Mono question' essentially closes the discussion of whether C# was a 'mostly closed source Microsoft only thing.' And I think the evidence is bountiful and evident that Mono has long since been a very well developed production ready environment.

Just listing a few projects built on it should really suffice to make the point. The Sims 3 was built using Mono and launched in 2009, Second Life went live with it in early 2008, Unity swapped to it after their initial 'front end' language began, in their words, "proving to be too slow and unwieldy." Their original language, quite appropriate for this topic, was Python! There's really an infinite room for discussion about this, but I think it's all a subset of the 'The Mono Question.' For instance your issue on exactly what open source license is used is completely redundant given Mono.

As for your divergence on 4 years not being a long time. I personally do agree. But our agreement stands in contradiction to the standards of software today. Entire languages are born and die in this span, libraries that didn't exist become ubiquitous, and in general 4 years is certainly far longer than necessary to expect some reasonable evolution of adaptation and opinion. The fact it has not is a peculiarity I find bemusing, and fun to consider. If nothing else, it leads to enjoyable discussion - which I suppose is the ultimate point of these forums.

Yes, that would have been appropriate as woolvalley specifically brought up Microsoft, and your reply talked a lot about Microsoft's source available release as if it were meaningful counter-example to woolvalley's reference to "closed source."

You wondered why you got downvotes? That's why.

I have no dog in this race.

If you "personally do agree" then why do you bring up an argument that you disagree with, in order to justify your views? It comes across as if you are making the argument to win some sort of rhetorical point, where the end - your advocacy of C# - justifies any tactic.

I do not care to follow up on this discussion any longer.

Mono is a product of the open source nature of C#, not the cause. In general, I think its wise to go as close to the 'first party reason' as possible. But the nuance there makes it surprisingly intricate, and nuance is often lost in online discussion...

As for '4 years being a long time in software', there's a difference between considering the industry at large, and individual experience. I, like everybody, have anecdotal experience and opinions that run contrary to the norm. And in this case my personal view is that 4 years is not really a long time in terms of software, yet for the industry and people as a whole, I think that couldn't be further from the average truth.

Sure, been a fun discussion!

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