Salutations All, My company has been experimenting with Mono for some time now, with great success. We like the ability to cross deploy to different operating systems and architectures, and in fact that was our primary purpose in evaluating Mono. Save for System.Windows.Forms, the major things all seem to be there, and our systems administrators our much happier having our ASP.NET applications hosted under Apache. Additionally, our Linux users in the company have been beta testing a GTK# version of our proprietary customer service system, and are quite happy with it.
I suppose when it comes to "supported" it really comes down to what your personal comfort level is. I don't know what support offerings Novell has for Mono, but you should always take into consideration that *having* support is all well and good, but do you ever take *advantage* of that support? I myself have never once contact Microsoft because of a deficiency or error in the framework (of which I've reported and worked around many). Bugs in frameworks are inevitable, no matter who writes it, and as programmers I feel that its our duty to report when possible, workaround as needed, or (in the case of open source software) correct the issue yourself if you can. Funny story, I once had a problem with the EMU10K soundcard driver in one the 2.2 or 2.4 kernel series, I don't remember which. Regardless, it was throwing all sorts of errors on me, and after sifting through the source for about 4 hours, I noticed that Alan Cox had done a lot of the work on the driver. So, frustrated, I said "Screw it, I'll email him", not honestly expecting to ever get a response. Surprise Surprise, 4 hours later the man who wrote the thing wrote back and said "Oh yah, sorry about that, there was a bug in this that or the other - here's a patch." Now, that's what I call support! Your mileage may vary, of course, but that's true with any corporate or open-source support offerings. Cheers, Bryan Porter -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of PFJ Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2004 3:55 AM To: mono Subject: Re: [Mono-list] Is Mono ready to compete with MS .NET in realbusiness? Hi, > Mono 1.0 was shipped awhile ago, and I'm really excited > about that... but now the natural question is: > > "Is Mono ready to compete with MS .NET in real business?" Depends on the context. For winforms, no. 1.2 will have that and it should rock. > ... and one more question is > > "Will Novell provide support, documentation, etc.?" > "If yes, by when?" monodoc already has the documentation. As C# is already a standardised language, whatever is in the ECMA standard or the MS documentation should follow. > Behind MS .NET there is a huge development team, > support, documentation, and continuity... and I > think Novell should offer the same, but till now > I don't see anything in that way. There is with Mono. The big difference is that (I would guess) the majority of those working on Mono aren't on the Novell payroll - it's the biggest difference between Open and Closed source. Take OpenOffice, there are well over 200 people actively working on it, yet only about 15 work for Sun! TTFN Paul -- "If I face my God tomorrow, I can tell Him I am innocent. I've never harmed anyone. I have cheated no one. I have deceived no one. I have hurt no one. Except myself. And that He will forgive me." - Hans Holzel _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
