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. "

Comments

Re:MONO is a disaster.

[KhaZ]

... Perhaps I'm missing something.

This post, and all it's subposts, really anger me. From what I understand, .NET is an ECMA standard. This can be verified here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/ecma/. They even post a C# specification, so really anyone with the talent can implement it.

As such, how does this "legitimize microsofts attempt at monoplizing another market with yet another windows-only product exactly similar to an exsisting [sic] multi-platform product"?

1) It's not Windows-only since MONO runs on linux.
2) It doesn't legitimize any attempt. http://www.mono-project.com/about/licensing.html does not state anything about an 'evil' Microsoft licensing scheme, or invasion of Microsoft bed bugs into your code:

"The C# Compiler is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The runtime libraries are under the GNU Library GPL 2.0 (LGPL 2.0). And the class libraries are released under the terms of the MIT X11 license.".

Perhaps I fail to see the "licensing minefield created by Miguel", as the fact that it's an open standard, and that the MONO licensing itself isn't restrictive, pretty much subverts that.

On a final note: even if all my points are completely off base, and wrong: I ask you one thing: When did we turn from software developers who seek the 'best' solution to 'X' people?

"I'm a Mac person."
"I'm a Linux person."
"I'm a Windows person."
"I'm an X person."

Since when did it become about branding yourself with something, over choosing the best technology for the job? Half the sub-posts here are all about not choosing the tech because it 'feels too Microsofty'. C# was built by Anders Hejlsberg, who designed Pascal, and Delphi, both successful languages in their own right: and Borland technologies.

Oh no! Now the anti-Borland people aren't going to use C#!

When will this nonsense stop? We're all so anti-being branded, unless we do it to ourselves. Pick the RIGHT solution: not the one you've been known to cower behind.

Re:MONO is a disaster.

[Omega1045]

I really disagree with your point. If anything, Mono helps fight MS. One way that MS locks people onto Windows is with proprietary developer kits and languages like VB and Visual C++. These rely on Microsoft libraries. When a company develops some custom software with ASP, VB or VC++ they are locked into Windows (with the exception of some 3rd party stuff that lets you run some of ASP on Linux, Wine, etc).

MS Actually let .NET and C# become ISO standards unlike many of their past developer tools and languages. So when a large company develops an ASP.NET application and then decides that they don't want to have to continue support IIS or Windows, they now have a choice to migraite to Linix!

Mono provides choice for those that are currently developing for the Windows platform. So does Java. Mono is FOSS. Is Java?

I am currently working on a project that uses C# for the GUI. Our customers use Windows workstations, so we are writing software for Windows. We are actually moving away from Java which was the old language of choice at my company. You may argue the reasoning behind this, but it is the decision that was made and we are using C# instead of Java. I am hopefull that a more mature Mono (in a year or so with full System.Windows.Forms) may provide us with a way to run our client programs on Linux workstations, if requested by a customer. Mono will give us back some of the choice we lost moving away from Java.

Mono creates great competition for Java. Perhaps this will be another reason for Sun to finally make Java FOSS. Competion is a good thing.

Cross platform apps and scripting

[Rhalin]

Mono may be a reimplementation of an MS product, even looking at the source, you'll notice a folder full of *nix implementations of windows API calls. But what does it really matter if it does the job you need it to?

I started looking into it a few weeks ago when a project I was (am) working on required a scripting engine that could handle running scripts from anonymous sources, id est untrusted.

We went through a large range of languages: python, perl, angelscript, php, lua, etc etc but ended up with a few rather large problems in all of them: either lack of sandboxing and protecting a system from the effects a script could have, or lack of documentation and user friendlyness for those who may not be too familier with programming (yes, we have to consider them)

One of the dev's on the team brought up that .Net includes a set of security features that help to lock down scripts fairly tight, the problem being, our app has to be cross platform. This started us looking into Mono, which doesn't implement all the security features -yet-, but by our planned release date, they should be done, or very close.

Another thing to consider, is that Mono will run any CIL compiled code, meaning that we can support a virtually innumerable count of languages, with very little excess implementation (find a compilier and link it into the project).

So now we have: cross platform scripting (with sandboxing eventually), and the ability to present the users/programmers of the scripts with the syntax they are most comfortable with using.

Not only that, but Mono is going to save us a fortune on our development costs, because we may be able to drop Qt GUI implementation from our project roadmap, which averaged about $6000 for each developer(Qt Enterprise with QSA), I believe, and had some -major- limitations on what you could use thier scripting language for (for example, you're not allowed to use it to expose features of Qt itself to the scripter, which may be neccisary for our project)

Mono does the job, fits our specs almost perfectly, saves us money, and is built on CIL ECMA standards. What more -could- we ask?