Hanselman vs. Boo
time to read 2 min | 335 words

Scott Hanselman has an amusing post about working with the .Net OpenID library, which is written in Boo. I suggest that you would read it, but a few of notes first:

  • I had to go through a similar process when porting Brail from Boo to C#. I have to say that the code afterward has a lot more cruft than before.
  • Scott is making a reference to my Boo.Reflector project, I will try to update it to Reflector 5.0, but I can't make any promises. Getting coherent code is not a trivial task, and there are a lot of smarts that went into the C#/VB langauges in Reflector to make it look seemless.

The most important point, though, is about Scott's comment regarding Mono's licensing:

ASIDE: Be aware that Mono is GPL'ed, but since Mono produces IL, and Mono libraries are CLS compliant, you can reference them in your Windows .NET applications happily, and they'll work fine 99.9% of the time. Adding a Mono library to my Windows .NET CLR program doesn't make it run under Mono, it's just referencing a library. Some people, like myself (yesterday) look down on this like we look down on C# programs referencing Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll, but hey, it's tested code I didn't have to write...you'll no doubt see my own personal epiphany coming later in this post...

Mono is not GPL'ed. It uses several licenses over several components, but only the compiler itself is GPL'ed. You can see the details here, but basically, the libraries (including Mono.Security) comes freely, with no strings attached (MIT X11 licenses, to whom it may concern).

 

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