At least Miguel de Icaza, founder of Gnome and Mono, thinks in a quite positive way about this deal, thank you, whilo, for the link. Well, what the hell is he talking about? He is a C# fanboy and he thinks abandoning MeeGo in favour of Windows Phone 7 is good for C#. I have always thought that there are some ideals which are more important to care about that the spread of a language, however, let us have a look at some arguments:
Although some open source advocates might see this as a set-back for Linux, Android is already the best-selling Linux OS of all times.
Oh, yes, we are just fatuous idealists, why should we care about the spread of Free Software if there is a free alternative? Wel, of course we should not care about the spread of digital restrictions management, because we can use our devices without DRM, etc. Sorry, that is ignorant, such a proprietary system like WP7, not even allowing GPL-programs, will certainly do harm.
This is fascinating turn of events for C# developers as Nokia will make WP7 more relevant in the marketplace, making C# the lingua-franca of all major mobile operating systems.
Wrong, according to his one diagrams C# had already been a lingua-france before the introduction of WP7. But there had been other linguae-francae, too, like C++ and EcmaScript, but he wants to support monopolists like Microsoft and the monopolism of a single programming language, why should there be choice? For the loss of freedom and choice he uses the euphemism “simplification”, aren’t iPhones quite simple, huh? Well, he did not mention MeeGo, which does not support Mono/.NET/C#, however, there was a Mono-port for Maemo, I am sure it would have been easily possible for MeeGo, too, why does he accept .NET – only WP7 is using .NET and Silverlight – and does not want Mono to be the “runtime-franca” for all devices? And of course he does not care about the millions of Symbian-devices, which support C++, Qt and EcmaScript/JavaScript.
We advise our users to split their user interface code from the engine, or their business logic. Developers should create a native experience for their mobile apps: one per platform.
Of course it is a good thing to split GUI and programm logic. But do you write different user-interfaces for GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS X? Is that useful? No, you can simply use Qt, QWidgets, Plasma or whatever and it will be an interface well usable with any keyboard and mouse input devices. But for different smartphone-systems you want to rewrite the whole user-interface? Having 3.5″ or 4″ multi-touch devices running Symbian, MeeGo, Android, WP7, iOS or WebOS, why should they get seperate interfaces written using different APIs etc.? That is nonsense, it would have been nice with C++ and Qt for Symbian, MeeGo, Android and iOS, or even an approach using C# may be better when using the same Mono-runtime with the same GUI-libraries (maybe Qt) for every device.
This is a grand time to be a mobile developer.
Sorry, no, as I explained, Nokia using Windows Phone 7 does not make the situation better, and it is a really bad time for Free Software. Why should there room for somebody like him in Free Software communities? I do not get it, he can start working for Microsoft if he wants to.
Sorry, but everything about the Nokia-Microsoft-deal is bad.