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Miguel de Icaza & Nat Friedman On Mono
cg writes "LinuxWorld has an article based on quotes from Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman about Ximian's motives, plans and ambitions for Mono. If you read yesterday's story about "Bad Ximian", you should also read Miguel's opinion on Passport."
firstly, supporting .NET and passport on a linux platform is just helping microsoft stabilise the dekstop arena and so i find this strange coming from ximian. ximian's has been doing great things for the linux desktop helping it become a useable interface for people like my parents. this is where linux has always had its shortcomings. as a server, we all know it rocks! now basically if linux servers talk .NET and maintain the persistance of a passport - microsoft has its back-end technology all over the place and can use its far-reaching availability as an excuse to promote XP as the desktop operating system of choice. why? because when you first fire up an XP-based system, you go an register for a passport. once again, from my parent's perspective this is a simple and convenient action. considering that both my parents sit on some board of directors or another, their familiarity with microsoft as a desktop platform creeps into decision making for server platforms as well (yes i know they are not the IT directors, but it IS still a FACTOR).
secondly. i find it so amusing what microsoft is doing. about 3 years a go i read an article on microsoft's web site, which i WISH i had saved. it was basically slating the JAVA and J2EE environment and how SUN was targeting networking computing was such a step back in technology. back to the old terminal days of old. now what do they do, they bring out their own distributed platform in the shape of .NET. J2EE has been around for a number of years now. it has a large amount of commercial support. it has had time to mature into an incredibly robust and scalable platform. and now everybody sees the alternative, .NET and jumps onto the microsoft bandwagon.
in JAVA, and J2EE, sun has produced a great "plumbing" mechanism for distributed software. the problem is that they haven't developed the frills around the plumbing (somethign like .NET). i believe they expected the community to use their platform to do such a thing. have we failed them?
We lose a company that presents a corporate face to GNOME. We have not lost the developers. The Ximian hackers are so pationate about what they do (if the recent Mono articles haven't made that clear nothing will) that I think they would still hack on GNOME if they had nothing but a cardboard box on Central Ave. and a laptop.
Others have mentioned that Ximian is losing focus on its current projects like Gnumeric, their desktop distrution, and Evolution. In fact, people have shouted this with extreme prejudice. Well let's get one thing clear: Ximian owes us nothing! Ximian can direct their efforts to whatever project they damn well wish. They are OSS developers in their core, and OSS developers scratch their own itches. That's the way it works, folks.
.NET is an interesting idea, and Mono is an interesting project. Ximian is surely treading in unknown territory but the payoffs could be big in 3-5 years. It's worth a gamble. Ximian isn't dropping their current projects, but if you're worried Evolution or Gnumeric or whatever isn't going to be ready for your desktop as soon as you'd like, then sign up the mailing lists and look at contributing.
This is our community. Take action.
Jason.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
But, once again, this isn't a matter of Gnome vs KDE. Ximian are deeply involved in Gnome, it's true, but .NET and Mono are seperate from that. There is nothing stopping KDE from using the work of the Mono project (as a slightly seperate example, people have already produced working code which adds a SOAPDCOP layer to KDE, which would make remote KDE administration much easier).
Who has been claiming that Ximian are evil? They are misguided idealists, and will probably be very disenchanted in a couple of years after Microsoft has finished playing with them, but they are not evil at all.
Please try and seperate GNOME/KDE and 'for Mono'/'against Mono' in your mind. THEY ARE DIFFERENT.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Assumption 1: Mono will have good performance
I am labeling this as an "assumption", because for some strange reason Mono's expected performance is not discussed here, even though there are multitudes of people consistently bashing Java for being slow.
Since the CLR is essentially identical to a Java VM in terms of high-level design, the execution of CLI code would be performed by using much the same approaches that are used for executing Java bytecode. If you look at Ximian's CLR implementation roadmap, you will see that it follows exactly the same path that the Java implementations took, except that it stops short before the last step -- runtime optimization. (Just to note that this last step is the most difficult one, but it is exactly what allowed Java to get close to C/C++ in terms of performance. JIT helps, but it simply does not cut it -- it is not enough).
Now, it took more than 5 years of intensive work for the JVMs to reach their current level of performance. How long will it take for Ximian's CLR impelementation to become fast enough and not be branded by the people on /. as slow? Obviously they can benefit from some of the Java work, but personally I feel that it would be very unlikely if that happens within less than 3 years. (although it would be nice if it did)
Assumption 2: .NET is standardized, so we can do multi-platform development
By now we all know that C# and the CLR have been submitted for ECMA standartization. What is important to realize is that while the C# language may be standardized, most of its libraries would not be. if you look at the list of libraries that are submitted for standartization, you can count 257 entities (classes, interfaces, delegates, etc.) defined in there. On the other hand, if you count the entities provided by the libraries in .NET beta1, and exclude the server-specific stuff, the OS-specific stuff, and even WinForms, you will get a number that is very close to 2000. So in effect Microsoft is standardizing at most 13% of the libraries it provides to Windows developers (the figure would be even lower if we include WinForms and other libs that might also be of interest).
What are the implications of this fact? The standardized libraries might allow OSS developers to build more extensive libraries base on pure CLI (w/o native code) and thus create an environment for multi-platform development. The suggestion to use the .NET libraries for this purpose, however, would fly in the face of everything that we have learned about Microsoft in the past -- as long as they have a monopoly, they will play games with the API, and will turn the whole endevour into a perpetual tail chasing.
It seems to me that Ximian do recognize this fact, but I am not very clear how they plan to counter the problem. In the article Nat said "I hope it doesn't happen" in reference to Microsoft changing the API, and that an open source version would "reduce the chance that Microsoft will be able to do that". If that is their strategy, well... good luck.
Assumption 3: You need .NET (Mono) to implement or use Web services
This is one of the reasons given in the article as to why Mono is necessary, and I am sorry to say this, but it is complete bull. The Web services that MS is advocating are based almost entirely on SOAP and XML, which are completely platform-agnostic and language-agnostic -- that's what MS has been touting as an advantage all along. You can communicate to a Web service using C and a set of SOAP libraries if you want to. If Ximian wanted to have a safe development environment to implement and use Web services, there is already a very mature one in existence that provides superb SOAP and XML support -- Java.
There is only one objective reason that I see for selecting .NET over Java, and it is not mentioned in the article at all: the CLR is designed to support multiple languages, unlike the JVM. The catch here is that the JVM already supports a hell of a lot of languages other than Java and that languages have to be bastardized to be used on the CLR, but still, I guess it does hold some marginal advantage.
Finally, as you can see above, the whole supposed licensing advantage of .NET vs. Java is a complete red herring. In fact, Java holds some practical advantages in that respect: In Java concrete specifications are provided not only the main libraries, but also for many optional ones. Changes in the Java API must be approved via a fairly democratic process as part of the Java Community Process, of which OSS groups such as the Apache foundation are also members, and is open to entry by others as well. All this has allowed a lot of implementations of the various Java libraries by a lot of independent vendors. Will this happen with .NET? Anyone willing to bet money on that one?
Could it be because Ximian is causing a lot of hype over vaporware? Could it be because Ximian is trying to get other Open Source developers to assist it in wasting time in its goal of finding the holy grail? Could it be because Ximian is more talk than action? Could it be because Ximian is being detrimental to GNOME, if not KDE?
How *much* do we have to read about Mono, a project that only exists in name and hype? If Mono is so good, shut up and show us the code. Instead Mono is nothing but a publicity stunt.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
> implemented technology in
> OLE/COM/DCOM/whatever - but that doesn't mean
> that we should blindly follow in their
> footsteps.
No, but it doesn't mean we should automatically decide that everything Microsoft does it useless for us either. Unlike what some people seem to think judging by the way they argue here, is that we have some sort of power in the desktop market currently. This is bullshit, M$ still controls well over 90% of the desktop market and if we are to take them on we have to do what we always done on the server side, implement interoperability. Samba is a much used example, but lets also look Apache for instance which has support for Frontpage extensions and ASP.
Ximian wants GNOME to become a serious contender to M$ in the desktop arena, and they are smart enough to realise that sitting around the fire like a gang of old Amiga enthusiasts dreaming about the comeback of Amiga and its rise to prominence is not the way to do it.
With rubbing of the hands and insanely glaring eyes, is how.
So this is about:
.NET technologies including C#
Passport and Hailstorm
Mono is saying .NET/C# technologies are great for us hackers to copy. We can even get MS to agree and help us!
Mono is saying, we don't care about the second bit: Passport and Hailstorm. We can even do our own, super-groovy, hacker's version!
The problem that I and many others have been trying to point out to people is that MS' strategy is indeed to 'open up' the technologies and platforms - because, like in the case of Windows, it buys leverage and dominance on the layer above.
With the Windows platform, that layer above was Office and everyone developing software for their OS. With .NET, that's... Hailstorm and Passport.
As more and more CTOs and dull technical managers buy into the rapidly-spreading .NET platform (whether MS or open source), and more and more CEOs and dull government departments buy into the easy-easy Hailstorm community, it will be as impossible to do anything in your daily personal life without Passport/Hailstorm as it is now impossible to do anything in daily business life without Office.
So now do you get it??? It's your bluff that's being called, pal! And it's considerably more scary to have MS own your identity than simply owning your business desktop!!
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This is great stuff and I think it really puts Miguel's motives down in a clear manner. I think we should all thank them for even trying - I was amazed after all the anti Hailstorm and .NET stuff that's been posted, how folks reacted negatively to Ximian tryin gto start MOno because they were working with Microsoft.
Yes, they might get crushed, but again, they might just glean enough info that they can develop a working alternative without being sucked in. Lets give Ximian credit - they are OSS developers after all and I expect any 'agreement' Microsoft tried to get them sucked into would be picked apart with a fine tooth comb before it was signed to be sure they didn't back themselves into a corner.
Sure, right now Mono is only the .NET side of things - it doesn't deal with Passport. But you can bet that other folks are already working on it - Seems like a sweet deal to me. With Ximian working to develop Mono, more resources are available to work on Passport alternatives - seems like a good thing to me.
So lets not trash Ximian and Miguel for trying - at least they are - more power to them!
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