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PJ has another excellent article over at Groklaw, summarizing why Free software "wins" and why proprietary is bad. Preaching to the choir, sure, but PJ's writing style is just a breath of fresh air, very engaging. And perhaps more optimistic than I, which is why I find her writings reassuring.

Meanwhile, I'm spending Easter playing with Mono, Ximian's free .Net/C# implementation. I am wary about potential IP issues, but with Microsoft's "RAND+Royalty Free" licensing and ECMA standardization, it just feels safe. And unlike SUN's Java, which I've been using, Mono is free. There's one cognitive dissonance off my shoulders! And as a language, C# is way nicer than Java. It draws more on C/C++ than Java; It has enums, structs, operator overloading, and classes that are not filename oriented as in Java. And where Java's class libraries are over-engineered and full of deprecated legacy, the .Net libraries learned from this and is clean and logical from the get-go. Generics support are already implemented as a prototype in Mono too. I'm currently writing a little project in C#, which I will not speak of yet.