● 02.16.10
●● What Apple Teaches Us About Mono and Moonlight
Posted in Apple, Interoperability, Mail, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Protocol at 6:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A new story of migration to Microsoft (due to Apple’s reliance on Microsoft) offers an important lesson about the purpose of Novell’s Mono and Moonlight
AS we have shown before, Microsoft’s supine friends at Apple have helped OOXML and continues doing this. Based on the news about “Office for Mac 2011″ [1, 2], Mac OS X will accommodate more promotion of monoculture the Microsoft way. Matt Asay, for example, is a Mac user who extols the virtues of Microsoft Office and openly mocks OpenOffice.org. That’s apparently what Apple enthusiasts are for. Ironically enough, Canonical has made him a COO (a decision that we criticised in [1, 2, 3, 4]). COO rhymes with coup.
As one of our readers has said repeatedly, Microsoft inserts its APIs and non-standards into the competitors’ products and once that’s ‘injected’ they can proceed to infiltrating the server/desktop side interchangeably. As a specific example, this reader gave Office for Mac OS X (or Entourage). Based on the following new example from Internode, he was right. Internode is moving from FOSS to Microsoft Exchange and here is its explanation:
So what changed?Snow Leopard was the key.[...]Apple delivered a huge corporate software upgrade in Snow Leopard, by tightly integrating Exchange client functionality into the operating system – in Apple Mail, iCal, and Contacts.
Now watch this discussion at Linux Today. “The lockin begins at internode,” says Petem. Rainer Weikusat reconstructs the arguments and starts with: “I have rarely seen such an amazing amount of BS in a single text.” Someone from Citadel writes: “Just wait until the first time Exchange blows itself up. That always happens eventually.” And one person says: “To pick this apart. All of your staff needs to have access to configure your filtering? Wow!!! Just plain WOW!!!”
“I have rarely seen such an amazing amount of BS in a single text.” –Rainer WeikusatSo anyway, what Microsoft did here is simple. It used proprietary integration with something it controls not to facilitate interoperability but to upsell Microsoft products/stacks. It is the same with Mono and Moonlight. In more or less the same ways, Mono and Moonlight are ramps to Visual Studio, Windows, and other proprietary Microsoft products.
Why are Novell and Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza promoting these? We venture to guess that for selfish gain, some people promote this inside GNU/Linux. If their new interests are rewarded by Microsoft, then they would do anything. Stephane Rodriguez told us a couple of years ago: “So far, Microsoft has got all the marketing PR they wanted from “open-source” groups that are remarkably compatible with Microsoft minds. Again, I think those guys are just Microsoft persons who take a pride not to be on their payroll. (DeIcaza told me in the past that he’s rich). [...] DeIcaza took the role of [Microsoft's] Brian Jones, the technical person. (technical person who concentrates on never answering the good questions)…”
Here is Moonlight being used in what seems like a sort of Microsoft advert. Meanwhile we learn from a reader of ours that “Someone made Ada for .NET? (A#)”. Embrace and extend much? █
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