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Miguel de Icaza Talks About Mono
Matthew Revell writes "Miguel de Icaza defends Mono and talks about its future relationship with the Gnome desktop, in the latest LugRadio.
The leader of the open source implementation of .NET says no one is forced to use Mono but he hopes it will make life easier for open source developers. "
Hi,
.NET. That is a valid argument; however, it must be considered that Mono is something that, in the future, is really required for the Linux/UNIX world.
I can perfectly understand that many hate Mono simply because of the fact that it was Microsoft who designed
I suppose that those bashing Mono have never actually worked with C#. Personally, I'm really an anti-MS guy, but at work I was basically "forced" to use C#, and I must admit, it absolutely rocks. It is simply a much more productive language than C or C++, especially for GUI development. When you get a specific task, you're simply much more likely to get it done and get it stable within a given time in C#. The biggest productivity gain (besides the syntax candy, like foreach loops) comes from the garbage collection. Sure, other languages like Java have that, too. But, as far as typical DESKTOP applications are concerned, Java has failed to gain popularity both with users and developers (I suppose the major reason is that Sun took way too long to finally allow Java GUI apps to integrate themselves seemlessly in the desktop by adapting a "native" look & feel; but that's another issue).
Linux apps have done a great job in the past years in getting competitive to their Windows counterparts. So, if Linux wants to stay competitive with Windows in the future as well, there must be a similarly productive language for GUI development on Linux. Standard C/C++ with GTK+ and QT can certainly compete with the horrors of MFC easily. But, in my opinion, not necessarily with the combination of C#/Windows.Forms, as far as speed of development is concerned.
Also, if we want to see more commercial applications to run on Linux, there must be a way to easily develop portable GUI apps. Imagine you're the boss of a smaller software company. You develop Windows apps, your customers all use Windows (welcome to the real world!). Maybe 3% of your customers consider switching to Linux. And now you're starting that new software project that must be finished within a certain time. What are you gonna do? Buy QT, and tell your developers to start learning it? Use GTK, with all related problems on the Windows platform, and tell your developers to start learning it? Nope, that's not what the typical boss is gonna decide. He'll let the developers use what they're used to, M$ visual studio, where they can click together the GUI. He'll tell the 3% of the customers that Linux isn't supported.
And this is exactly what may change with Mono!
And talking about the patent issue: Giving up on Mono because of potential patent issues would mean giving up on the patent issue itself. Mono could be the best "bad" example how software patents support a monopoly and limit interoperability. The fight against software patents isn't over yet. At least not in Old Europe.
bye,
Till