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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."
My cousin tried Mono in college. Some bed rest and lots of fluid and she eventually got better.
the sleeper activates...
free software, open standards, open file formats, no software patents.
Good luck on that. Microsoft most certainly doesn't want its application platform running well on other operating systems. The whole point of .Net was get something there while it fucked over Sun. I'm afraid that Mono, like Samba and OpenOffice, is stuck reverse engineering Microsoft, and that will always be a game of catchup.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This is like a pimply teenager begging the homecoming queen to go out with him.
Wait. Did I just compare Bill Gates to a homecoming queen?
Best Windows Freeware
Oh just quit it, Mono has no takeup because if people wanted to use Microsoft technology they'd be buying Vista and .NET. .NET plus a clone.
If they want cross platform portability they don't rely on Microsoft for anything, rather than try
All Mono does is give them a veneer to claim cross platform portability without actually being cross platform portable.
I'm hoping someone with more knowledge can chime in here and shed some light on the issue of .NET patents.
.NET. I think this is the C# language and the CLR.
My understanding is that Mono exists because of a statement, made by Microsoft, that they won't sue for re-implementations of the ECMA-submitted components of
Mono is now starting to slip into linux distributions and that worries me. Tomboy for example is the default load of Ubuntu 7.04. I'm not a rabid MS hater, but since when does a promise from Microsoft mean anything at all?
Is there any legal protection for the Mono team and those who distribute it?
Why not develop mono on it's own, as it's own application development platform.
C# is a good language, having it represented outside of Windows is a good thing. Plenty of C# coders are hitting their streets, and linux could exploit that too.
Instead of dicking around trying to recreate MSFT's libraries (Windows Forms), why not more focus on developing their OWN truly cross platform libraries, (like, say, GTK#)
I had some success writing cross-platform apps based on GTK#, this was over a year ago, and haven't played with Mono since, I didn't want to invest too much time into something that looked like a novelty which would just be pitched.
De Icazas focus seemed to be "do exactly what microsoft does" then, and seems so now.
I'd take a thread safe GTK# over a half-assed wine-implementation of winforms.
But, that's just one little bears opinion.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If Microsoft was interested in interoperability, they could have it, anytime. They own the platform, for goodness sake, and if they wanted other their framework to work on other O.S., they would do it themselves. Microsoft strategy is not and will never be help to other platforms to run their applications, they prefer people locked in, with no choice. What is the main excuse for Mono? "To help people that are locked in .Net applications to migrate to Linux". (btw, if those people had plans to migrate to Linux, they would not choose .Net in the first place, as the technology is widely known as MS only. It is not as if it was a market standard, it is 6 years old, tops). Microsoft, on other hand, lists .Net as an advantage over "Unix". Why would they give up that advantage? On the goodness of their hearts?
.Net framework for *nix, they would do it themselves (like the PS3 people ported linux to their console). The truth is that they don't want.
I say it again: if MS wanted a fully functional port of the
Why does this guy need comfort from and a working relationship with Microsoft? And why do all of his projects follow some tech Microsoft convolutes from some REAL tech(OOP, Java, etc)? Sure seems like he's got a case of Microsoft envy or something and IMO, it can only be terminal.
Because De Icaza is not only putting Microsoft tech in Mono, he's pushed Mono applications into Gnome and he's loading the MS Trojan Horse onto many GNU/Linux distros.
So what is up with him needing acceptance from Microsoft?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Let's see, every piece of software that has anything to do with Mono is slow, buggy and they leave zombie processes everywhere. I hate them to the point where I finally ditched Gnome. I recently updated to SUSE 10.2, which has been afflicted with Mono, even though I choose KDE. I now curse SUSE.
Why would Linux users be interested in Mono again? Something about "compatibility" with MS software? You mean software that's slow and buggy and makes me curse like a sailor? No thanks.
As far as I'm concerned, mono stands for "mononucleosis". I sure as heck don't want the human version nor the computer version!
Not to mention that ALL the source code for Linux is Freely available online. If there's any "interoperability" issues, Microsoft has access to ALL the Windows code and ALL the Linux code.
They only reason there are "interoperability" issues today is because Microsoft wants there to be.
Miguel's role in the world is to make it possible for Linux developers to get locked into Microsoft technologies, In due time Microsoft can harvest them in any number of ways. If he thinks otherwise, he needs to reconsider his choices in recreational chemistry.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Agreed. De Icaza started out with admirable hopes of helping poor Mexican children through successful Free Software, putting a whole desktop project into motion. That he now is just a corporate shill investing all his time and energy in a misguided language project that even his GNOME colleagues don't take seriously just shows he has ceased to be a big player.
Yeah, 'cause it's not like you can compile other languages like Ruby to Java bytecode.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Because it saves them market share, which is still valuable. If you're going to lose someone to Linux, you can at least keep them partially on your platform. This makes it easy, or sometimes desirable, to switch back to Windows (for integration into other Windows software, etc).
.NET, you may also keep them on SQL Server and Exchange, which are very very pricey and I'm sure turns a nice profit.
Furthermore, if you keep them on
Visual Studio is also very nice to work in, and Visual Studio isn't cheap, either. As you use Mono you can reuse those same components on Windows, too (ideally).
Well, first and foremost, some people seem to prefer one over the other. God only knows why, but they do. That alone would be reason enough. Second of all, while they have many similarities, they also have many differences, and they're not particularly compatible. Having FLOSS support for both means software written in either can be free. That's a big deal too. It's basically the same reason that the Gnu Compiler Collection includes Fortran as well as C. And finally, while the Java spec was (and as far as I know, still is) under the control of one company, and is subject to change at a whim, Mono is (believe it or not) based on a public standard. It's a fuzzy standard from a dubious standards body (ECMA) that tends to be a bit of a corporate lapdog, and it only covers parts of what MS calls ".NET", but it is a standard, and FLOSS folks tend to really like public standards.
But really, the first one is the biggie. Why have Perl AND Tcl AND Python AND Ruby? Why have Gnome AND Kde AND Xfce AND GnuStep? Why have Emacs AND vi? Why have bash AND tcsh AND zsh? Why have Sendmail AND Postfix AND Exim? Why have MySQL AND PostgreSQL AND Firebird? Because people aren't all the same, and have different preferences, and, at some level, FLOSS is supposed to be, at least in part, about choice and freedom.
This gives a great opportunity to allow Visual Studio developers to port code to Linux, Mac OSX, *BSD Unix, etc by having Dotnet and Mono synch up to be 100% compatible in the code and CIL, CLR used.
It also would allow Microsoft to more easily port Visual Studio to Linux, Mac OSX, *BSD Unix, and other platforms that Microsoft claims is too hard to port Visual Studio over to. After that is done, Microsoft can port their application software to those platforms more easily rather than rewriting code for a separate Windows and Mac version of MS-Office, etc. Then it would be one code base, and recompiled for each platform using Dotnet/Mono libraries. If Mono is finally 100% compatible with Dotnet, then the CIL and CLR code will run under Mono as well as it does under Dotnet on Windows. Since Mono exists for multiple operating systems, all that is needed is to compile the code for that OS and it makes cross-compiling easy and less costly.
Think of all the money in R&D that Microsoft would save, if it partners up with Novell and Mono just on the R&R of OSX applications that Microsoft writes if the same code can be used for Windows and OSX with just being recompiled.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I've been a SUSE user for about two years now. I have exclusively SUSE on one laptop and dual boot one desktop with Win2K. My other desktops have either SUSE/XP or SUSE/2K at work. I remember the big push after Novell bought Evolution and brought all the Mono developers on board, where they said, 'hey, let's all be one big mono happy family and everyone use Gnome.' Of course, us KDE-fans screamed and pouted and stomped our feet so much, that Novell pulled back to some degree.
.NET to us as "the next big thing." Even back then I thought of it as a half hearted attempt to marginalize Java. (Not that I had any love for Java at the time.) Now, they have the market share they want, we've all got VS 2005 loaded on our machines (next to Netbeans 5.5) and those few who use Linux (including me) as a desktop may want to use C#/Mono to develop. Well, the problem is, there's no good IDE. Monodevelop isn't really up to the same level as VS 2005 or NetBeans (or Eclipse, for that matter) and is currently at a 0.13x release. Who'd want to develop an enterprise-scale application using that?
I remember back to TechEd (or was it TechNet) 2001 in Atlanta where Bill and Co. introduced
So, here's Miguel, who failed at getting us enterprise users to adopt Evolution, and he wants us to go with Mono.NET. I particularly love Miguel's naivety in saying he'd want to, "even go as far as Microsoft recommending Mono for all of their developers looking at migration." Migrating from what? Windows? Microsoft doesn't want people to migrate away from Windows. That's the furthest thing on their minds.
In any case, I'll stick to migrating to Java. Now that it is going to be truly OSS, I'll trust them just a wee bit more than our good friends in Redmond.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Seriously, now that Java will be GPL'd, why exactly do we need Mono?
.Net only exists because M$ failed to embrace and extend Java. Why does the OSS community need a knock-off of a language that only exists because M$ couldn't control Java?
Perhaps, but it's narrow minded if thats the case. If Microsoft supported Mono they could point to it for those wanting an open-sourced .NET platform without having to change any of their current proprietary works.
.NET solution.
A simple "we will not sue" would be a nice place to start for instance. I can't see how that would be a big risk. Therefore, I can only suspect that the reason it hasn't been done yet is that certain senior management is too pig headed to admit a different strategy is needed. Java is GPLed now. Microsoft is going to need an answer sooner or later. Maybe for once they won't wait until the opposition has a huge head-start. *cough* *cough* *cough*
It's called keeping your options open. A little bit of support now could pay off big time in the future when Microsoft gets fingered for not having an open source
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
had mono came out about 3 years earlier (i.e. during the early days of .net), then MS would have cooperated until they felt that they had enough market share taken from java, and then they would have gone after mono. Based on MS's long history of screwing over all their partners, I would say that it was very predictable what this outcome was going to be. What I am amazed at, is that so many expect different of MS. This is the classic case of a dog helping a scorpion across the lake and then getting stung on the other side. The simple answer, that it is in the scorpions nature. Well, it has ALWAYS been in MS's nature.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Mono is factually sponsored by MS. The Novel/MS deal was all about Mono! The patent-deal thing was a feint (with a neat side effect, mind you)! No, hear me out. Just reading his talk and arriving at page 2 made me notice it. I honestly believe it is and it's not that Miquel is seriously bullshitting about his opinions. Allthough they are notably influenced by black MS accounts - which I am now certain of. Allthough maybe without him knowing for a fact.
.Net brand or attracting attention. All the while having Mono on the leash. If the test fails, they pull the plug, go completely off trail with .Net and leave behind yet another OSS plattform along with the XUL, Ajax, Java, QT, etc. bunch to bash their heads competing for attention. If it does work out they can slowly shift to OS independant services and tools. They can even combine both with varying intensity in which ever way they require it.
Figure this:
If there is any way MS can prepare to hop the OSS bandwagon that is continously growing without losing their face it is the mono(t)rail (pun intended). In a well built mono they can without haste probe the OSS market for sophisticated free developer tools and their chances to get into OSS bases servicing and specialized proprietary offers without thinning the
Think about it. It's a very smart move and not that a stupid notion at all. They can continue to slowpoke about with their bloated NT/2k/Vista Kernels and go 'plattform independant' whenever the need arises, squishing whatever Zends, SuSEs, Novels and RedHats get in the way. And with a 'Mono excuse' they won't even raise a blip on the antitrust radar doing so.
If this works out we'll see yet another rare of strange things: MS actually trying to build quality software again. For a short period of time that is. Until they regain their stranglehold. Then it's business as usual again.
No, friends, it's absolutely clear to me: Novel bought Ximian, SuSE and then some. Then they went f*cking around aimlessly with those brands for two years. They are MSes easiest, least dangerous, most hidden, most powerfull and - oh, the irony - cheapest way into a potential MS dominated OSS market. This is what's behind all this.
My 2 dollars.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You know, this guy got mod'ed troll, but at worst I think he was off-topic.
In all reality, that is a quintessential Microsoft move.
Purchase into a market, then leverage their OS monopoly to drive adoption of SUSE, or whatever they may call it then. It's already begun, but imagine a version of Linux that also supports the ACTUAL Win32 API, or true cross-compatibility between Windows and this one linux distro.
Sure, the Microsoft-Haters in the linux community would throw fits over it and boycott it entirely, but the businesses that use Linux for web servers and db servers and such don't care about that. To them it would mean the best of both worlds. And in all honesty, they'd be correct.
Of course, it would probably be bad for the Linux community, I'm not denying that. But this is a very standard modus operandi for Redmond. It's certainly more than just a troll.
Shout to Novell: Just drop mono and switch to Java...Pleeaseeeze! (pleading like De Icarza).
And yes, I've tried switching my winforms apps to mono and it never worked out. Why? cause the cool features in .Net apps are either referenced unmanaged code or some DLL import hack. .Net only offers great cross coding between MS languages and webservices (I prefer XML-RPC anyway) from my experience and that's it.
Then again, my apps broke switching from .Net 1.1 to .Net 2.0. sheesh.
(literally: Miguel, step down from that cloud - Miguel, get real)
.NET developers are not aware of your project, and most would not want to bother with it. People that use Visual Studio care about using the latest tools and APIs from Microsoft, and when they know you don't even have .NET v2 they don't want to bother.
.NET crowd which is typically not using Java. The open sourcing of Java will not alter the balance of applications that will be ported from other platforms to Linux. If they existed, people were already using the proprietary Java from IBM or Sun or even one of the GNU based efforts."
I just don't understand your project.
Most
"On the migration piece, the open sourcing of Java will not have an effect on Mono. Because the crowd that we are targeting is the
I'm so glad Java is now being open sourced, you won't have this as an excuse anymore. Why would anybody want to develop in your environment, which has serious patent concerns? It lags behind and has no serious number of tools for anybody to use?
Your statement about MS recommending Mono is bizarre. Why would Microsoft recommend Mono? The only reason for them to even mention your project, is in the chance a customer maybe asks about running in other platforms. I could definitely see MS just mentioning Mono to get a customer, but they surely will have no incentive for anybody to use your technology.
Finally, why is this project called mono? It reminds me of the phrase:
"El hombre crea y el mono imita", which seems apt for your project (Man creates and monkeys imitate)
- sigs are for wimps.
I thing all the projects started by Icaza have been secretly backed by Microsoft (except midnight commander). This includes Gnome.
.NET. They have to do this, because they could not destroy Java. Now MS has to protect .NET, make it the universal API that every developer would use. Linux (as always) is a threat to MS. So what's MS strategy this time? The same they used against Java, just a little backwards.
.NET from Linux, they would do a backwards embrace an extend: give Linux a limited .NET implementation, so that developers would still be locked to .NET proprietary extensions in the Windows platform. This limited .NET implementation is MONO. And who started MONO? Icaza.
.NET, everywhere where developers make $$$.
MS monopoly is all about protecting the API. As Ballmer said: developers, developers, developers! They had one API everybody used, win32, and it was their crown jewel. As long as everybody keep developing for win32, MS would win.
Then came Linux. If Linux distros could provide a competing API to Win32, MS would be screwed. MS solution? fragment the Linux API. You see, one of the main values of a successful API is that it's universal. So how to destroy Linux? Destroy the universality of the API. Make not one, but TWO competing APIs! Then developers would have endless religious wars and Linux would not grow as a competing commercial platform against Win32. How to do it? Make Gnome and start a religious war against the then 'closed license' QT libraries. Forward ten years and what's the result? Nobody uses either KDE or Gnome to develop commercial software, the 'developers, developers, developers' are still somewhere else. Oracle uses Java as the API when running in Linux. And who started Gnome? Icaza.
Meanwhile Java becomes stronger against C++. Developers switch to Java.
Now what happens, MS decides to create a new API from zero, sacrificing their beloved Win32. The new API is then called
Against Java they used the embrace and extend, promoting J++, that used MS proprietary extensions to the Java language to achieve developer lock in. To protect
Right now it is Java vs
Icaza is also a strong backer of the Novel-MS deal.
All I can see Icaza doing lately is telling everybody: "why can't we be friends?", but I seriously suspect the motives behind it.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
I know a lot of people in the OSS community think of De Icaza as some sort of god. But when we look at his actual contributions, I think they've set the OSS community back by years.
Take GNOME, for instance. When GNOME was first established, KDE was already the premiere OSS desktop environment. There were some minor licensing issues, but with Trolltech's cooperation those were quite easily worked out. Regardless, a lot of effort was put into GNOME to duplicate what KDE already offered. Even today, we still see that GNOME has not yet caught up to KDE. And with the upcoming release of KDE 4, it's unlikely that GNOME will ever be able to catch up to KDE, let alone overtake it. Nearly a decade of effort has been wasted on GNOME, with so very little to show.
And then we have Mono, the subject of this Slashdot topic. Again, so much valuable time and effort has been wasted on creating a product that really is of no benefit to the OSS community. In fact, it blatantly stands against what OSS is all about. And beyond that, we already have a common runtime: the POSIX interface shared by Linux, *BSD, and even commercial UNIX systems. And even on top of that we already have many language options: C, C++, Python, Perl, Tcl and Ruby, just to name a few.
Like GNOME before it, Mono is essentially a waste. Just imagine how much further along projects like KDE, Python, Perl, and Ruby would be if effort and expertise hadn't been wastefully siphoned off to GNOME and Mono. It's quite conceivable that Linux could have been a major rival to Windows on the desktop.
And how will Mono support .NET 3.0? Many of the new features such as Windows Presentation Foundation simply aren't available on a Linux system. Has someone already wrote a XAML parser as well?
Perhaps De Icaza sees or is inspired by something that others here dont recognise. that c# and the .Net framework are a genuinely beautiful techonology. its like late bound python or ruby yet is typesafe, has wonderful meta programming possibilities - dynamic properties overiding IPropertyDescriptor, and a wonderful event model using delegates - cleaner and more contained than than Qt's signals and slots mechanism for instance. also easy integration to c/c++ using MC++, now CLI in ms world or even better automatically via swig wrappers. easily configurable automatic COM IUnknown interface exposure.
i say this as someone who at a personal level actively resists windows (10 year linuxs on personal desktop yada yada yada) and recognises ms business practices for its genuine sin and damage caused to economic welfare.
much kudos to De Icaza for seeing the value in this technology before others. linux/unix is so missing in a good object model (corba, gobjects, java beans etc) and a good abstraction layer between high and low level object design - i just hope that this might become a standard that ms could permit to be embraced by the linux community.
searchanoncoward
Nah, more languages run on the JVM then .NET and most run better on the JVM.
evil is as evil does
Once upon a time, a woman was picking up firewood. She came upon a poisonous snake frozen in the snow. She took the snake home and nursed it back to health. One day the snake bit her on the cheek. As she lay dying, she asked the snake, "Why have you done this to me?" And the snake answered, "Look, bitch, you knew I was a snake."
-Natural Born Killers
When MS says "cross-platform" they mean mobile devices (running a Windows-esque OS of course). Look at the system requirements for the compact .NET 2.0 runtime and it should be obvious enough: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa milyid=9655156b-356b-4a2c-857c-e62f50ae9a55&displa ylang=en
Microsoft actually released the 1.0 CLI sourcecode with support for BSD and OSX, and the license is not that bad, except for a small paragraph which prohibits any commercial use (breathe easy, the catch has been revealed). http://msdn.microsoft.com/MSDN-FILES/027/002/097/S hSourceCLILicense.htm
The people at MSDN aren't that bad, the marketers seem to dislike the smell of source code =). I've used both C# and Java extensively and there are numerous areas where C# shines above Java like types, generics and operators (overloading) for instance. There is a much higher level of consistency inFirst lesson: This is a comma, learn to use it. In fact, punctuation is your friend!
Also: not? I don't think the phrase "not is isn't" makes any sense, in any context.
So, the above sentence should read: "When you try to point that out, people say "No it isn't, you can use Mono."
And it's still ugly as sin. Do you actually read what you type? Alright, going to ignore punctuation for the rest of the paragraph...
What's a convent lie? Is that a lie told in a convent?
I think the word you're looking for is convenient.
Now, on to what I actually disagree with...
Or you could switch to Rotor. Microsoft does actually provide the .NET source under some Shared-Source crap, and if you've got tens of thousands of lines of code, chances are you can afford some MS-owned port to somewhere else.
Also, .NET does have strengths Java doesn't, and vice versa.
Consider: Java has a fairly long-standing and stable bunch of libraries, including cross-platform stuff, but not limited to it. There's tons of open-source frameworks, but also plenty of official and commercial frameworks. The server frameworks are apparently very good.
However, Java is not well supported in a few places -- including out-of-the-box Windows. You have to install Sun's JVM if you really want your app to work. Vista comes with .NET, if I remember right, and older versions of Windows can get it via Windows Update. It integrates better, too -- they look and feel like native Windows apps, and are .exe files, so the user doesn't even have to know they're .NET.
Then again, .NET does not work very well on the server. Trying to get .NET working under Linux/Apache is probably worse than trying to make Ruby/Rails to work under Windows -- and you'd still need a SQL server, most likely.
I've always felt that Mono is a great project, but that it's going to be held back by Microsoft's dominance over the language. I like that there's a standard, but after "OpenXML", I don't trust Microsoft's standards.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!