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Comment by sapper2 | Hacker News Reader

MS should support them with some funding.

Giving the Mono guys $50 million seems like a no-brainer investment to me. This is particularly true since MonoTouch directly helps bring apps to WP7. It would also help their cloud efforts. The future is heterogeneous, and while Mono can already handle that there's too much FUD.

> MonoTouch directly helps bring apps to WP7

Particularly if it means there could be one platform on which to write apps for both WP7 and Android.

I doubt Ballmer would go for it. He probably still thinks "Linux is a cancer" and a threat to be destroyed, whereas in fact the threat to MS is more from Apple.

If I was running MS I'd use the disquiet Oracle has created in the Java world by pushing for .NET/C# to replace Java as the standard OS-neutral run-anywhere platform.

It would also go a long way to assuage people that MS wasn't about to pull the rug out from under Mono with a patent suit. If MS was a shareholder in a company that commercializes Mono, it would be tougher (but not impossible) for them to sue.

Microsoft applied the "Community Promise" to the ECMA C# and CLI standards a couple of years ago.

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

For C# and the core language, yes. But not anything higher on the .NET stack. Novell had some patents that was able to hold Microsoft at bay. But since Novell sold off their patent portfolio, who knows?

Personally, I wouldn't touch Mono would a ten foot pole, but that's just me....

> It would also go a long way to assuage people that MS wasn't about to pull the rug out from under Mono with a patent suit. If MS was a shareholder in a company that commercializes Mono, it would be tougher (but not impossible) for them to sue.

For exactly this reason, I don't expect to see this happen.

I agree with this. While you could certainly make the argument that Mono undercuts Microsoft by expanding .NET beyond Windows, I think the amount of developer goodwill it generates towards .NET probably compensates for that.

Not to mention that Mono can be used to push developers toward Windows and the official .NET Framework, and in fact has.

Which is exactly why some of us are reluctant to cheer Mono on, no matter how dedicated and talented the Mono team might be.

Agreed - My feeling has always been that Microsoft would weakly support the "toy" effort on other platforms and then encourage/threaten people to deploy to a "real" platform when the time comes.

I don't know..

While I'd love to see some funding for these awesome guys, I don't think that Microsoft's money would be that great. Moving Mono development from a big corporation to a small startup might even help settle some of the FUD problems. Receiving money from MS probably wouldn't...

True. Although funding or enterprise adoption from somebody like IBM would say a lot. Right now it is not clear whether Mono is a viable enterprise platform for customers that value cross-platform deployments. At least that's the perception I get.

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