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?
> 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.
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