This “Down on” thing seems to be coming around a lot lately. First it was Pownce, then Apple, now it’s Mr. Dave Winer. Who is Dave Winer? Well for one thing, he’s practically the guy that inventing RSS (Check out paragraph 6 on Tim O’Reilly’s “Blogging and the Wisdom of the Crowds“), giving way to several technologies many of the folks taking time out of their busy day to bash him use everyday.
I’m kind of new to the area of social media (this blog is almost 2) and I’ve really just started getting into personal branding, social networks, and life streaming on a grand scale. So I can understand if I missed something. Is there a particular reason everyone seems to gravitate towards insulting this man? I’m not trying to be an a**kisser, simply curious. I mean this man is part of the reason we have RSS feeds, podcasting, and videocasting. I know that I definitely don’t share his political views, but then again being raised in Texas I don’t share political views with most of the internet and people I follow. I have seen nothing that is overly crazy, I mean aside from a “crazy” comment or two but really who isn’t guilty of that.
The reason I bring this up? There was an article posted on the website WinExtras entitled, Dave Winer – You Are a Pompus A**. The article picks out basically a single point out of one of Dave’s multi-point articles about the TechCrunch website and TechMeme. While the author of the article brings up a valid point on the statement below, he completely overlooks the main point of Dave’s article. The statement that the WinExtras’ author decided to focus all his attention on was:
Most of the authors don’t know the first thing about technology, never took a computer science class, have never written code, and don’t admit that understanding tech is a prerequisite for writing about it.
Granted, this statement does go a little over the edge. For one thing, I have yet to take a computer science class in college. All of my skill sets in technology come from hands on experience including but not limited to coding and administration. One thing I do understand is technology. When you’ve been around it as much as I have (close to 20 years in some form or other), it’s one of the side effects. But granted I’m willing to concede to the author over at WinExtras that this statement is a little “crazy” and over the line to some degree. But it does not change the fact that the article in question completely ignores the main point of Mr. Winer’s article.
I think this is how misconceptions get thrown around the internet. A single writer doesn’t like something someone else said and so that person writes about it and the next thing you know, it’s all over the internet. But when you get to the actual context of the statement it’s almost never as bad as the internet has blown it up.
Michael Koby 
Would Open Source Java Threaten Mono?
With a recent article stating that Sun is looking to open source Java and have it ship with Linux, I thought I might take a look at how open source Java might affect the open source development world. People like to focus on the doom and gloom when these kinds of “announcements” are made, but the fact of the matter is this: open sourcing Java will have zero effect on Mono.
The reason is mainly due to the languages. They are different and different people use them for different reasons. Mono is great for Windows .Net developers looking to get into Linux development. There is very little syntax differences between working on the .Net framework versus working with Mono (there are some differences as some libraries are not completely finished). But for the most part you can take C# code from Windows and compile it flawlessly under Mono’s compiler.
Java is meant for true cross platform development. It defiitely has the goal of “write code once” and have it run on any system. This is due to the way the Java runtime is designed. Java code runs on top of a Java “virtual machine” (not like VmWare). The code can be written once and run on multiple platforms because the engine that runs Java code is the same no matter what system you are on.
Basically, the people who code on top of the Java stack do so for a reason, and the people that code .Net do so for their own reasons. Both serve a distinct purpose in the development world and one is not really “better” than the other. I say “.Net” but you can insert Mono because Mono is meant to be a .Net runtime for Linux. You see, no one that develops using Mono is going to jump ship for Java just because it’s now open source. Also, the fact you have a ton of .Net developers in the Windows world means that there will always be a need for Mono.
So no, the open sourcing of Java will not threaten Mono.