Portable Dot Net

http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html

Southern Storm Software is working on a portable implementation of DotNet with Gnu/Linux as their initial target platform. The primary goal of this project is to build a stable and portable interpreter for .NET platform binaries, together with a suite of Free Software tools to build .NET applications.

As of May 2002, Portable.NET is usable. Slightly complicated programs are possible. Indeed someone has written an HTTP Server which compiles and runs inside Portable.NET . The compiler is halfway to the finish and the runtime is going through optimisation. Still needs to smoothen out a few rough edges.

True to its name Portable.NET has been ported to GNU/Linux GNU/Hurd , GNU/Darwin (Mac OS X) , Cygwin (Win 9x , Me , 2k and XP).. Currently HPUX looks promising as well ..

The question is, then, what incentive do FreeSoftware developers have to contributing? With Kaffe, we've already made significant inroads into Java, which certainly gives us more that we can do now, as opposed to what .NET promises.

Another interesting question: How is Southern Storm's work being licensed under the GnuGeneralPublicLicense is going to mesh with MicroSoft's license for the portable libraries?

PortableDotNet is now part of DotGNU (http://dotgnu.org/).

Well Mono is usable but in the typical style that pervades the open source (sic) community they have to fight and destroy andy chance of having one succeed. Once again.