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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. "
he hopes it will make life easier for open source developers.
I thought the problem was that Microsoft told everybody that they didn't have any patents on C# or .NET, but they are actually a licensee of somebody else who has patents on it? Miguel dodged the question on this one by simply stating that it was a reimplementation rather than licensing .NET from Microsoft.
Listening to the audio, the things on the horizon are Windows Forms and incremental improvements (tuning). People are porting applications today, usually you can just copy the binary, but ignorant Windows developers do things like screw up path separators, assume case-insensitive systems, etc.
Miguel is the lead developer for gnome, and his pet project was creating a .NET framework for linux. It has since grown to be more than a pet, gaining the backing of Novell. It is not the easiest thing to get running on your system, but by far not the hardest.
It needs to be defended for a number of reasons. Linux zealotry (why would people move from Windows if all the software is cross platform?), laguage zealots (IMHO, C# is a nice language to program in, but the java guys scream bloody hell) and people afraid of MS putting the legal smack down on Linux over API issues,just to name a few.
Personally, I think that Miguel's reliance on WINE is a mistake, but we have discussed this here, and it does have immediate benefits for the windows.forms and directX stuff. I know people who are programming frontends on both Windows and Linux, using a combination of the GTK interface and Windows.forms, and they love it.
WINE support was abandoned in favor of their own SWF implementation, and it's been that way for a while in the development releases. They're developing their own implementation because, yes, it makes things less portable and less stable.
Here is Miguel's answer to GNOME becomig depentdant on MONO: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002- February/msg00031.html
This post, and all it's subposts, really anger me. From what I understand,
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:
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.
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KickingDragon
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
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.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Gtk# on Windows uses the UXTheme API, which will
make Gtk+ look like every other app on the system.
The feel in Gtk+/Win32 is already emulating the
host OS, so you get both look and feel.
Hello,
You are wrong, Microsoft has not done anything
to prevent code from running on Mono.
There is the real problem that we do not
implement all the class libraries, specially those
that are being phased out like EnterpriseServices
and Message Queuing. But then again, those are
really marginal tools which were complex to use,
so its not really a problem.
The other bit is COM support, which we do not
support as there is really no "COM" to talk to
in Unix anyways.
Miguel.
Hello,
Yes, "Java has a hell more production sites
than Mono". This is whats wrong with this
argument: if "having more production sites" is the
metric to choose a technology over something new
then we would still be running code in assembler
and Cobol. After all, there were more production
systems written in those than in C, C++ or Java
when these languages came out.
Love,
Miguel.
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?
.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.
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
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?