Jim Blizzard did a little mono survey over on his blog and I posted my comments there but I wanted to also put them up here:
1) Is Mono... A) Good for developers? - Personally I think it is awesome.
2) Is Mono... A) Good for Microsoft? - I guess you can see downsides for Microsoft, but in the long run it might show that MS is finally ready to play nice.
3) Do you think Mono infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property rights for .NET? A) Not a problem. - Microsoft put out the specs and even created a sample implementation that runs on the Mac.. how would it possibly infringe.
4) What do you think about the viability of a Mono-based solution? B) Ready today (or soon) for prime time. - They have shown ASP.NET apps running successfully, good windows apps might be a little farther away.
5) Do you see Mono becoming a viable web application environment? C) Already there. - There are apps out there running, it might not hit enterprise but in a PHP kind of way it is there.
6) Do you see Mono becoming a viable desktop application environment? B) Getting there fast. - I think it could in the future, needs a little more work. Implementing Windows Forms will be a big move in the right direction.
7) Do you think Mono is a threat to the Microsoft Windows platform? A) No. - If all you guys can come up with is custom .NET apps as your value added then you are in big trouble. The Windows platform is based on much more than just platform lock-in. There are tons of *nix and Java apps, tons of Mac apps, but everyone uses Windows.
8) Will Mono provide "write once/run anywhere" ability (as in a run on Mono/Microsoft .Net without re-compiling)? A) Never. - Has anyone?
9) Do you use Mono for production applications? B) No. - No, but I am looking into it.
10) Any other comments? I think Microsoft has won alot of goodwill in the development community, and the quickest way to trash all of that would be to attack Mono. (Or to attack FireFox, which they are already doing). The goal should be to beat those applications with better software, not legal moves and cheap shots. (Like MSDN working like crap in FireFox)
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