Oren and Frans know what is up. Its nice to see other thoughts and reasons for the same things I am worried about. Others suggest not worrying so much.
While I don’t think things are as bad as the comic on Phil’s page suggests, I am on the side of not looking into Medusa’s face. I need The Powerpuff Girls to come and save me from Sedusa. Frans has a suggestion that could save me! It basically references the Java Research License’s Residual Rights clause which says that one cannot be tainted.
I still don’t see the big deal. I keep links to Mono’s System.Windows.Forms implementation and the rest of Mono’s .NET library implementation on hand as references. For one, there are no (or very few) P/Invokes! This makes implementing something myself far easier than much of Microsoft’s System.Windows.Forms implementation. At least easier than the small bits I’ve seen in Reflector.
As for bugs, well, since you can’t actually DO anything about the underlying Microsoft bug implementation, I’m not sure what the big deal is. Heck, Microsoft doesn’t so anything about serious bugs. Workarounds are great, but sometimes bugs can bite you in the ass and cause production downtime. When its known and unfixed bugs that do this, I get angry and wonder why I’m not running on open source to begin with.