De Icaza Pleads For Mono/.Net Cooperation

suka writes "In a recent interview with the online edition of an Austrian newspaper, Mono project-lead Miguel de Icaza pleads for cooperation between Mono and Microsoft's .Net: 'I think that the deal should include a technical Mono/.NET collaboration, and even go as far as Microsoft recommending Mono for all of their developers looking at migration'. The whole interview has some other interesting bits, like de Icaza's thoughts on open sourced Java and information about upcoming versions of Mono."

Comments

Re:Instead of catch up

[agent dero]

Wow, where does one even start to combat the trolling.

If you look in the Mono.* namespace they've developed a LOT of Mono on its own, including Mono.Xml, Mono.Unix, Mono.Math and a wide vareity of other tools. Not to mention now there are various open source projects out there like DBus#, Dumbarton, and of course Tao.

Mono is a definite option now for cross-platform applications (Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, etc) and extends the compatibility to .NET 1.1 and is coming up on having a .NET 2.0 compatible class library.

Don't get yourself mixed up, Mono does allow developers to use .NET code on other platforms, but it is really a powerful framework unto itself nowadays.

Re:Nevermind MS....

[agent dero]

As far as I'm concerned, mono stands for "mononucleosis". I sure as heck don't want the human version nor the computer version!

Mono means monkey in spanish. Thus the monkey on almost ALL the mono-project pages.

Re:Forget dot net / mono, use Java

[gludington]

A better question that you should have asked is why would we care about Java being GPL-ed when it's slower, less scalable, only supports a single language, controlled by a single vendor, and YEARS behind.

I am not going to get into a pointless flamewar on speed or scalability, but Java has not been the only language on the JVM for quite some time. The first result on a Google Search for jvm languages lists over 200 languages. Granted, most of those listed are toy and/or unfinished projects, but there are solid options available for most of the main languages you list, and with JRuby, Rhino, and JSR-223, this is rapidly improving, at least for dynamic languages. I will grant you .NET is far ahead of the JVM in terms of mixing languages in a single application.

When the Java language becomes forgotten (like all computer languages do) for the next best language, all your code is useless. But all my libraries are just a call away, no matter what language takes the place of what I currently use.

Since the JVM can and support other languages, the question for both JVM and .NET is "When the JVM/.NET runtime becomes forgotten, what happens to my code?" This is one reason why people are excited about the GPL of Java. With an open source virtual machine, should (Sun|Microsoft) (go bankrupt|lose interest), other people can pick up the slack. In the Java world, open source JVM efforts (e.g. Kaffe) no longer have to spend the time with clean-room reimplementations, and can focus on improvements. You could say that Mono could do the same thing -- but that seems to be what Miguel is arguing now, that without explicit Microsoft cooperation Mono has to expend too much of its resources in playing catchup.