Originally posted by DeepDayze
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1. wine indirectly helps them make money
2. going after wine would hurt their public image
3. and might attract counter-suits by major Linux players (including IBM - that's mutual assured destruction)
4. the danger of losing the lawsuit is too great to risk. Safer to spread FUD instead.
5. they have a sadistic sense of humor and like seeing OSS developers chase an impossible dream
6. core wine developers have pledged their firstborn sons to the empire, in exchange for patent protection
Seriously, wine helps Microsoft more than it hurts them. It provides a measure of compatibility but doesn't allow developers to write first-class applications for Linux. In other words, it maintains the platform lock-in. What's not to like about that?
Most of these points apply to Mono, too, with two small - but significant - differences: (a) unlike wine, Mono actually works; (b) Mono allows first-class Linux applications and has moved beyond the featureset found in .Net. (This wasn't always so. Mono <= 1.9.1 used to suck hardcore and Mono <= 2.4.2 used to suck softcore. It's only with versions 2.4.3/2.6 that Mono becomes positively awesome).
Right now, Mono is a great tool that goes beyond mere .Net compatibility. It provides features like vector instructions, trivial embedding, continuations that are not found in .Net - right now, it makes sense to write specific applications (like games) for Mono even on Windows.
I understand why some people might like to avoid Mono and, frankly, there are parts of it that I dislike. (Libraries like Moonlight, Mono.XNA will always play second fiddle to Microsoft, even though the core runtime can hold its own. However, none of those is part of the Mono core, so it's not that big a deal).
Ultimately, I consider Mono as nothing else than another useful tool in an OSS programmer's tool-belt.
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