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Mono is open source, so anyone can continue developing it.

If your concern are licensing the patents, MonoMac only uses the ECMA core and the MS-PL bits. If you want to use stuff outside of this and you are still scared of Microsoft going after your very profitable enterprise, remember that Microsoft is open to licensing their patent portfolio to anyone that wants it.

If Mono were to be discontinued, there is a business right there for an enterpreneur: negotiate with Microsoft a license deal for their patents, add a markup, pocket the difference.

That is the worst case scenario, you have to pay the patent holders.

That being said, you do live in a dark, sad and terrifying place. You harvest what you plant, and this fear and horror that you plant can not be good for anyone's health.

>Mono is open source, so anyone can continue developing it.

"Can" but who will? You already implicitly concede the point that mono has no community strong enough to survive without the Novell employees. Your hypothetical entrepreneur that fills this gap is charging money. Hasn't that just incurred an extra cost on the person who built their business on a free Mono? That's if this guy turns up on time for the crucial expansion to your business; if he turns up at all. There may well not be enough users of Mono to support such a model: I can't name a single big or medium sized group using Mono besides Novell itself.

Edit:

I think you have conceded my point against using Mono for a startup i.e. there is a real chance you are going to incur future costs of an unknown size. I don't live in a dark place either, please drop that language, I said I wish it wasn't this way. It's just that, given there are plenty of other options, why pick the horse lagging behind with vultures circling it for your business?

Edit2:

Also, to score a cheap point, I will highlight your use of language "fear and horror". Not only am I planting garden variety fear, but also horror. A new, and more terrifying, breed of FUD. FHUD - Fear, Horror, Uncertainty and Doubt. It's catchy.

    I think you have conceded my point against using Mono 
    for a startup i.e. there is a real chance you are going 
    to incur future costs of an unknown size.

And do you think that those (possible/unknown) patents that might apply to Mono cannot be used against whatever platform you're using?

Think again ... at least one of the Oracle patents (IANAL, but have been reading the independent claims) applies to any VM that starts interpreting code before doing compiling, which applies to many tracing compilers (from my understanding, LuaJIT, JavascriptCore are good examples).

You think you're safe, think again.

> I can't name a single big or medium sized group using Mono besides Novell itself.

What about Unity (http://unity3d.com/) and all the games based on unity. I'd say that is at least a medium size group.

Edit, links to relevant information Unity's website:

* List of some of the games made with Unity: http://unity3d.com/gallery/game-list/

* Where it says that unity is Mono based: http://unity3d.com/unity/engine/programming

> Please don't give me the stuff about MS promises against suing, it's totally unrealistic.

You're wrong. It would be pretty much impossible for Microsoft to sue over Mono at this point, even if they wanted to. You gloss over the fact that Microsoft has issued a thorough, unrevokable, legally binding Community Promise to not assert patent claims over .NET implementations:

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx

The purpose and implications of the Community Promise are clear. Microsoft has sanctioned Mono, and no court in the world would let them take the CP back and say "nah, we were just kidding."

> What I am peddling here is FUD, but it's warranted FUD, there are too many unknowns for what amounts to a buggy C#.

Oh please. Ignoring the fact that you appear to be confusing C# and the CLR here, do you actually have any concrete complaints about mcs, or is this just more unwarranted FUD?

>"do you actually have any concrete complaints"

Yes, the central point of my comment that you didn't address.[1] That is, Novell looks like it's going to be acquired and there seems to be no reason for the purchaser to continue with Mono. It's a totally uncertain future for Mono. As I said elsewhere I am not slandering Mono, I wish it were otherwise but, given that there are just so many other cool technologies out there, what's the compelling case to bet your business on it with such a rain cloud over it? So it's not about using it for some little side project, its about founding your startup idea with Mono at the core of the technology stack, are you going to take the risk? Would you, personally, use it over the other options for your business when it doesn't have an independent community, only a soon-to-be-acquired Novell?

Listen to the squawking and preening going on in this blog to display value to Oracle. http://www.novell.com/prblogs/?p=3070

Do you trust Oracle with your business future, given the multiple fiascos that have come out of the SUN takeover?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

> That is, Novell looks like it's going to be acquired and there seems to be no reason for the purchaser to continue with Mono

Contrary to other "open-source" projects, Mono has a very active (albeit small) community behind it. Right now there are very active contributors that aren't working for Novell.

Also, making a parallel with another active project, JRuby, its leader quit Sun/Oracle but it is still working on JRuby ... and I've been watching Miguel's commitment and enthusiasm about Mono ever since the start, and it has only grown since then.

     It's a totally uncertain future for Mono.

Yeah, because whatever platform you're using is so much safer.

The patents grant by Microsoft also includes supersets (contrary to Java SE implementations), and the ECMA standard you have to implement is rather small, also making it suitable for mobile phones (MonoTouch falls under that community promise, even though it ships with a fraction of what is known as .NET)

It's also an open-source project that doesn't fall under the GPL trap ... yeah, I said it. The class libraries are MIT X11, the runtime is LGPL, it is appropriate for embedding in commercial deployments right now.

If commercial support is dropped, it can live on.

Get over it!

>Microsoft has sanctioned Mono, and no court in the world would let them take the CP back and say "nah, we were just kidding."

Microsoft is an entity independent of the people who currently work there. It's not about MS going to court and saying "We had our fingers crossed", it's about new management coming in and claiming previous management did something crazy. Do this promise protect against that?

It's legally binding, so yes (so far as the letter of the promise goes).

>>Microsoft has issued a thorough, unrevokable, legally binding Community Promise to not assert patent claims over .NET implementations

I remember when Microsoft claimed to open their Office document formats. I argued then that I didn't know how (legal loophole, impossible to implement, etc) -- but there was a catch. A monopoly company don't want to do that -- "follow the money".

Later, it was found out that the specification was thousands of pages long, etc.

Are there e.g. any creative loopholes in that agreement? How do you know? Has that Promise been analyzed by a good team of lawyers?

Has Mono been checked for other patent troubles? E.g. doesn't Microsoft itself pay licenses to Oracle, because .NET is too similar to the Java environment?

Edit: I do hope I'm wrong, of course. (Fixed a bit of grammar.)

     How does that value proposition hold up for a B-grade 
     C# with patchy coverage of the forms et cetera

Comparing it to other open-source projects (Ruby MRI, Rubinius, Python, Pypy, Unladen Swallow, Perl 5, Perl 6, Ocaml) ... Mono is actually pretty solid and usable right now with good performance characteristics.

The generational GC took a long time to get developed, yes, but at least it does have a beta quality generational GC that you can use right now (compared to the alternatives) + Mono 2.8 also ships with a beta-quality JITer based on LLVM.

And about B-grade Windows Forms ... because you know, Swing is so much better than just porting the UI layer to WinForms / GTK# / MonoMac (Cocoa) and providing a native experience.

Mono is free software. At this point you're more likely to be sued by Oracle over Java than Microsoft over Mono.

FUD is FUD, intelligent people make technology decisions based on facts and costs, not fear.

Just to offer some counter points... I bought MonoTouch and absolutely love it. Mono is rough around the edges but they do manage to get it right where it counts. At runtime MonoTouch is fast, stable and runs great. MT is so much nicer to develop for compared to Cocoa Touch it's not even funny (I've released two iOS apps written in ObjC and consider myself pretty decent with the platform). Novell knows this and knows this is really the only edge they have, which is why they've put so much into MT and now MonoMac.

Yes Mono's future is shaky, but as a .NET developer I can adopt to Mono pretty much overnight. So if it goes belly up I haven't lost all that much.

Would I base a business on anything Mono? No, I wouldn't, you are right there. But despite all the FUD, there is value in Mono as long as you can maintain a realistic outlook on it.

It's in Microsoft's interests for there to be a strong alternative C# implementation. This is just so they can reassure their customers against the risk of vendor lock-in (and M$ does need to reassure customers about that risk).

For example, I've taken a semi-detailed look at both Java and C#. I find C# and .Net to be very pleasant to work in. I would totally choose C#/.Net for my own startup over Java.