Why Microsoft Will Never Make .NET Truly Portable

Michelle Meyers writes "Just days before Microsoft claimed to be making parts of the .NET CLR "available" to other platforms, NeoSmart Technologies had published an article bemoaning and blasting Microsoft's abuse of it's developers by pretending .NET was a true cross-platform framework when they're doing everything in their power to stop it from being just that. Of interest is NeoSmart's analysis of how Microsoft has no problem making certain portions of .NET available to Mac users — just so long as its distributed under an "open source" license that forbids any and all use of the code except for educational purposes — yet are terrified of the very thought of .NET being available to *nix users, even if that's to the benefit of .NET developers everywhere. Even more interesting is one of the comments on that article linking to legal documents in which Microsoft employees discuss the (im)possibility of creating a cross-platform code and UI framework, years before the .NET project even started!"

Re:Java

[Anonymous Coward]

Why use Java? I admit I'm more of a hardware guy then a programmer but why bother using either Java or .NET? C works just fine for most programs. It's portable, it's easier to learn, and it's less hyped with fewe buzz words?

Re:Does it matter?

[errxn]

...the Help Desk webcomic isn't exactly the best source for objective and serious assessments of Microsoft products

Neither is Slashdot, for that matter.

Re:Does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

What .net is now is completely different from the vast swarm of swirling spin and angry buzzing buzzwords that poured forth from Microsoft when that concept was spawned, half-formed from the bowels of that beast. It was going to revolutionize the world, one-up .mac on the personal services side while providing corporate services that scaled to millions of users and provide a synergistic end-to-end mashup of all business processes with qualitative and quantitative analysis of everything at once. dotnet was going to bring the ultimate in efficiency and productivity to every one of your workers, from the CEO all the way down to the guy who screws the plastic case together and puts it back on the conveyor belt. (Remember the cars on demand ad, with the robot painting the cars as people decide what color they want? .net made that possible!) There was going to be windows .net, office .net and so on, all of them designed to work with The Intarweb in new and wonderous ways that would blow the minds of every lesser being if so much as a hint of their power was whispered at them from across the room.

Now it's just a runtime for a bytecode interpreted language. Whoopity-doo.

Re:Java

[aegisalpha]

Objects blah blah blah blah

They fear the power of C, obviously.