Re: GNOME, .Net and Mono

[Jamie Guinan <guinan bluebutton com>]

A few thoughts:

First, Miguel has indicated that Mono will use Gtk/Gnome to implement GUI
widgets,

  http://www.ximian.com/devzone/tech/mono.html#building

The C API's will *always* be there, so all that time invested in Gnome C
applications is not wasted.


Next, we've all seen Steve Ballmer's "Developers, developers..."  clip,
right?  (http://www.ntk.net/ballmer/mirrors.html)  Say what want about
Ballmer, or Microsoft and its business practices, they know the importance
of having developers in regard to expanding their platform user base, and 
they clearly intend to continue cultivating developers.

Meanwhile, Sun has invested a lot of time and money building a large base
of Java developers.  I didn't really "get" what C#/.Net was all about
until I read this comparison of C# vs Java,

  http://www.25hoursaday.com/CsharpVsJava.html

This article made it totally clear to me - Microsoft intends to eat Sun's
lunch by winning over the Java developer community.  And they will
probably succeed.  They've reduced the barrier to entry in moving from
Java to C# to practically nothing.  Just look at the similarities in the
keywords and language syntax.

So, if Microsoft succeeds and wins over the current Java developer base,
all that Mono does is lower/remove the barrier to entry for building Gnome
applications for those same developers.  How is this a bad thing?

If you could compare the current number of Gnome developers to [Java + MS
VC++/VB] developers, I bet the ratio would be microscopic.  Mono could
potentially allow a huge influx of new developers.

Some people might not *like* having all those new developers - many of
them would write crappy code, many of them would write proprietary code,
and the signal/noise ratio of mailing lists like this may well plummet.
But the more developers Gnome has, the more market it will have.  Take a
clue from Microsoft on this one.

-Jamie