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Miguel de Icaza on Mono, Ximian/Novell, XAML
moquist writes "Netcraft has an interview with Miguel de Icaza, of Gnome and Ximian fame. Icaza expounds his thoughts on Mono (the .Net framework for open source), the current direction of Microsoft's .Net, Novell's acquisition of Ximian, Novell's Linux desktop environment, Linux for grandmas and kids, and "the greatest danger to the continuing adoption and progress of open source" (Hint: it's pronounced "XAML".)."
.. the interview summarizes neatly what Miguel has been saying for the past few weeks; it even links to the "two stacks" diagram. Hopefully distributions would start shipping with the unencumbered stack of Mono once Mono 1.0 is out.. between that and gcj/classpath Linux should see an influx of new developers.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
How the hell do you pronounce "XAML"?
He acknowledges that the Microsoft replacement for HTML is a rich user experience to come, despite the fact it certainly is dangerous to a certain extent.
Do realize that, GNU/Linux zealots : you can say something is good from a certain point of view (usability), and bad from another (interoperability). Isn't that incredible ?
Really ; isn't that incredible ?
Regards,
jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
It's a Google spamming technique, exactly like spamming your meta tags full of keywords. Google places higher relevance on keywords in a document's URL, so it's suddenly become extremely popular to give descriptive names to documents. This might not be such a bad thing, but it can certainly be overdone.
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I dont get it, MS has failed numerous times before with "exciting" new technologies and i dont really understand why they are bound to success now.
And Microsoft has succeeded numerous times with technologies too, such as DirectX and I suppose COM considering its widespread usage throughout the Windows OS. They've failed in the past, they've succeeded in the past. XAML can do either.
XAML might as well just be a failiure. Is it really a threat to linux? Not today and not tomomorrow since its just wapourware on paper as of today.
There are a couple articles on MSDN that discuss XAML and provide sample code, such as this XAML RSS reader. Longhornblogs regularly has XAML-related entries, most of which link to code, a sample executable, and screenshots. XAML is definitely not vapourware. It exists and people are using it.
I am still a realtively new coder, with only around 4 years under my belt all in Microsoft shops, and even newer to the linux world about 3 months.
/. I was excited at the possibility of using the development tools and environment that I am familiar with and be able to deploy my code to Linux. The most exciting thing to me was the possibility of running ASP.NET on Apache. In the last 2 weeks I have really began to experiment with this particular aspect and was able to copy my compiled C# ASP.NET web app from my windows box to my Fedora Core box and everything ran with no problems.
When I first heard of the Mono project here on
I welcome further the possibility to continue to use the development environment I know while being able to deploy my code across windows and linux platforms. (I am not a fan of Java and say what you wish about C#, but I find it to be a very nice language.)
I wish the mono team the best of luck.
I am so creative, look at my cry for attention in my sig.
You are overlooking the fact that Mono has two stacks. One Microsoft clone and a home grown solution. The home grown solution is cross platform and not the same direction as Microsoft.
I any case. This isn't a case of choosing between our own direction and Microsoft's direction. It is choosing between a whole mess of open source projects moving in their own way or a coordinated push to integrate disparate open source projects and technologies that currently do not integrate well.
The patent issue has been covered so many times before. When it comes to patents, it doesn't matter if you are cloning Microsoft technologies or building something entirely original - your risk is the same because no matter what you are implementing, you are probably infringing a patent anyway. The only effective defence you have is prior art.
Absolutely 100% agreed with parent. I was thinking about this earlier today. Imagine if there was standard API that desktop applications implementated that allowed other applications to get data from them.
Example: Gnome could ask evolution for it's contact information. In fact, Gnome could ask for any piece of information, group of information, or all of evolutions information. The information would be returned in an XML format. Gnome could also ask for meta data from evolution.
If desktop applicatons started implementing this standard, It would be very easy to write interoperable applications. In fact, it would be very easy to implement entire new applications based on the information existing applications have.
The lines between applications would become blurred, and we would have a very rich environment. In fact, an idea such as this just might be the killer concept the blows the door wide open for Unix/Linux.
Here's how I'd guess at the state of things:
1) Miguel recognizes the fact that Microsoft is big, doesn't play nicely, and doesn't like having other people in its sandbox.
2) Miguel presumably believes that Linux is a superior system -- that given the opportunity, users will prefer Linux.
3) Miguel presumably believes that a primary reason Microsoft retains its position is because of barriers to interoperability established by Microsoft. By promoting their own, closed file formats and protocols, Microsoft makes it difficult for customers to move to other systems.
4) Miguel improves interoperability between Windows and Linux, reducing the barriers that Microsoft has worked so hard to establish, that prevent people from using Linux as a full or partial subsitute for their own products.
Then, once barriers to transition have been eliminated, as long as OSS developers and distro providers are providing a superior alternative, users can and will switch.
May we never see th
Right after saying:
"We cannot choose one desktop over the other - Gnome or KDE - because there's users for both code bases."
He then states:
"We're making the decision it's going to be OpenOffice, the browser it's going to be Mozilla, the email client it's going to be Evolution, the IM client it's going to be Gaim. So we basically have to pick successful open source projects and put them together."
The problem is that, as far as I know, these tend to be the default applications used on top of the gnome DE. Granted I would install OpenOffice when setting up a computer with KDE, but it would make more sense to use konqueror, kmail(/Kontact) and kopete instead of the other programs. In fact given time and if koffice manage to convert over to the openoffice file format (which I believe they are doing) it might make more sense to install this for basic users, as like the other programs, it is tied in well to the KDE DE. This leads me to the assumption that Novell will eventually, at least in the short run, ship Gnome as the default as KDE will have to load 2 lots of services (it's own + those for OOo/gaim/evolution/mozilla integration) and will thus require many more resources.
In the long term I hope that this kind of activity will help to unify the two desktops background services, allowing software to be written that works with an equal level of tie-in with both DE, however I guess this will take a long time and lots of carefull negotitation before it happens.
There are 2 possiblities: 1. An open standard wins over XAML 2. XAML wins, and becomes a de-facto standard.
If #1 happens, the Miguel has wasted his time. If #2 happens, the FOSS community will NEED his work to be able to interoperate with the majority of the WWW.
So, on one hand, cloning XAML hedges our bets, but on the other, it helps XAML gain acceptance, because even the FOSS people can use it.
So, we want Miguel to continue what he's doing, but we also want him to fail!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I want to ask you a very serious question.
If you have to install a 7 meg browser (mozilla) to make your application work why not just ship an application that updates itself over the network? Better yet why not just write a java web start application. Either way you have to get some sort of a platform installed on each and every machine and keep it updated. maybe if Mozilla could get their act together and come up with a clever way to share a network installed mozilla amongst the desktops we would have a compelling solution. It's a lot easier to distribute an icon to every desktop then a full blown application and it sure would be handy to just upgrade the network copy and go home. Mozilla really needs to look into centralized management of user prefs, plug ins, bookmarks etc.
Where MS kills you is in forcing people who have windows to install IE and updating IE when they update their windows. Maybe what's needed is a XUL activex plug in so that XUL will work with IE.
I do agree with you about the database application thing though. 90% of all business applications touch a database.
evil is as evil does
Oh, you didn't know that about de Icaza? Miguel doesn't just like some of Microsoft's ideas - Miguel wishes he were working for them.
One of the things that I like to do is find the Silver Bullet of tools. So I keep searching the internet and keep installing new tools. Yet here is an interesting result, am I closer to getting my app done?
We developers always like new and neat tricks, but yet it seems we are still building the same apps at the same speed. It took the Mono team about three years to build the Mono stack. Well, you know I could probably write most of my apps in three years.
I am not trying to rail C# or Java, as my point is that maybe we should be thinking about how to code properly. Maybe the language is not THAT big of an issue....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"