I found some EXE, DLL and BAT files, all files specifically for Windows.
First of all: Why all those binary files in the source tree? That doesn’t make much sense to me.
And I found quite some C# files. GitHub reports that 8.5% of all source code is in C#. This worries me a lot.
I am not very happy with C#. It is not the language syntax or the langague, I don’t have a problem with that. It is the “aura” that surrounds C# which scares me:
- Microsoft has a lot of scary patents accociated with it; I don’t trust them when they say they won’t use these against free software projects. Apparently there is nothing preventing them to legally threaten any free software (and other) projects which use C# somehow. If they choose to do so, it would get ugly.
- .NET Framework is a de-facto crucial part of C# and proprietary software. How does TOL solve that problem?
- I know, there’s the Mono project but I am deeply skeptical about their intentions. Mono is led by Novell, which in turn is highly influenced by Microsoft. Mono may be free software, but the Mono project is clearly not independent.
- The reference implementation is proprietary software: Visual Studio
- C# has an ISO standard associtated with it, but it is not complete. This makes Microsoft’s proprietary software accociated with C# (in one sense) privileged.
I know that the main motivation of TOL was of ROTC:E’s dependency on proprietary software and TOL’s goal is to get rid of said dependencies. But now it seems that TOL just gets rid of a single dependency (the game engine if I recall correctly), and having all those blobs and C# files in the source tree worry me.
It would be sad if TOL would indeed fall into the same trap as ROTC:E.
Any comments on this?
How important is C# in TOL and for what stuff is it used?
Is .NET or a .NET imitation required for TOL?
Are my worries justified?