Miguel De Icaza On Mono, Moonlight, and Gnome

Knuckles writes "Austrian newspaper Der Standard continues its recent series of in-depth interviews with free software developers. This time they sat down with Novell's Vice President of Developer Platform, Miguel de Icaza of Gnome and Mono fame. The interview was conducted at GUADEC (GNOME Users' And Developers' European Conference). Miguel talks mainly about Mono 2.0 and .Net 3.5 compatibility, enhancing the collaboration with Microsoft over Silverlight ('Moonlight' in Mono), and the larger political situation of Mono and Moonlight. When the interviewer asks whether Moonlight is only validating Silverlight on the web, Miguel gives a quite detailed answer that includes a possibly well-deserved swipe at Mozilla ..."

Comments

I LIKE IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

If Miguel De Icaza hates it, I LIKE IT!

Re:I LIKE IT!

[odiroot]

Yeah, sounds fair. And makes me smile.

Re:I LIKE IT!

[samwichse]

Damn, this new mod system doesn't allow for goofs like overshooting from Funny to Overrated.

First page of three.

[Anonymous Coward]

Miguel de Icaza: "We could refresh the look and feel of the entire desktop with Moonlight"
Interview: Mono leader criticizes double standards when it comes to the open web and talks about future developments and the increasing openness at Microsoft

In 1997 Miguel de Icaza - together with Federico Mena Quintero - started one of the most influential Open Source projects: The GNOME desktop. As a Vice President of Developer platform at Novell he nowadays is leading the development of Mono, the free .Net-implementation he initiated in 2001. Since a few months he is also responsible for another group inside Novell: The Moonlight developers who are working on an open source version of Microsofts Silverlight - a task officially blessed by Microsoft.

During the recent GNOME Users and Developers Conference (GUADEC) Andreas Proschofsky had the chance to sit down with de Icaza and talk about future developments around Mono and Moonlight, the possibility of open sourcing .Net itself and changes in Microsofts attitude towards free software.

The following interview is also available in a german translation.

derStandard.at: When is Mono 2.0 going to be released?

Miguel de Icaza: Mono 2.0 has been three years in the making. We are actually branching for Mono 2.0 on Monday [July 14th, apo], we are going to have the regular two months Q&A period, testing of tarballs and installation and fixing the major bugs. So it should come out in September. We are going to have RC1, RC2... After the initial release there will be regular point releases - 2.2, 2.4, 2.6 - every three months or so.

derStandard.at: Time based releases?

de Icaza: Roughly. Now that we have 2.0 API covered we are going after specific features, so for example at the end of the year we are going to resume work on the Compacting GC (garbage collector) and we hope to have this enabled by Mono 2.6. So instead of the team being spread across lots of different projects, we are going to pick a specific feature - like updating Windows Forms to 3.5 - and while one half of the team obviously still will have to do maintenance work, the others are going to focus solely on that.

derStandard.at: Are you going to fully support .Net 3.5?

de Icaza: The problem with 3.5 is, that it includes 3.0 where they basically dumped a bunch of libraries that are not really part .Net, they are just built on .Net. For example, we do not have any plans to do WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), this is pretty much out of the question. It's just too large for our team to build. The thing that we can do is turn Silverlight in a sort of "WPF light", and get most of the features from running Silverlight outside the browser, which we already do.

derStandard.at: What about the rest of 3.5?

de Icaza: WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) is happening, although it is happening very slowly because it is very large. We have the basics in place but it
is not complete. Also WCF is not really high performance so we are just pointing people to use ICE from ZeroC instead (or Google Protocol Buffers), if you want
something fast - use that.

derStandard.at: The last time we talked you were in favor of enhancing the partnership with Microsoft, is that stuff progressing?

de Icaza: Yes. For instance last September Microsoft signed an agreement which results in Microsoft endorsing Moonlight - our own free implementation of Silverlight. So they are providing us with specifications, they are providing us with tech contacts, so whenever any specification is not clear, we have access to their engineers. Also one thing that is very unique: Microsoft is going to be distributing an add-on to Moonlight called the "media pack". And that add-on contains all the media codecs that Silverlight uses, so it contains the MP3 decoder, the VC1 decoder, WMV and all that stuff. We are going to provide Moonlight and they are adding the codec parts - and this is going

Second and third page of three.

[Anonymous Coward]

Miguel de Icaza: "We could refresh the look and feel of the entire desktop with Moonlight"
Interview: Mono leader criticizes double standards when it comes to the open web and talks about future developments and the increasing openness at Microsoft

derStandard.at: Hypothetically speaking: If Microsoft would really release .Net under an open source license, what would the consequences for Mono be?

de Icaza: Well you actually can already get the class libraries source code, but it is released under Microsoft's "look but don't touch"-license. So it's not really open source, you can't redistribute it and you can certainly not take the code, recompile it and run it in Mono, that's not allowed.

Now, if I were to speculate, if .NET was open sourced there really would not be a lot of reason for the core Mono libraries to exist. Maybe there would be in certain cases, where people would prefer to use one of our class libraries or other parts, but not for the whole core. Now on the other hand the Mono project has created a lot of APIs that go beyond the core .Net. So those ones will continue to exist and evolve, things like GTK#, Mono.Addins, Mono.Zeroconf, Ndesk.Options, Dbus# all of that stuff.

Much of that would depend on the licensing Microsoft would choose for such a step, but there certainly would be some cases where components of Mono would be better or remain relevant. We are now porting mono to the Wii and the PS3, so developers can use it to build games and we are working with other console manufacturers to do the same thing. It's used for embedded system, for use cases like digital radios and MP3-players. Because you can shrink Mono down to a real small runtime. So if .Net was really open source, I think there would still be value for Mono in all these areas.

In the meantime - I really don't think they are going to open source .Net.

derStandard.at: Microsoft has publicly stated that they want to become more open in the future, do you think there is some real value in that promise?

de Icaza: Yes, definitely. They have been talking about opening up and improving interoperability since February, and in March at the Mix-conference you really could see them talking a lot more about engaging with the community, open specs and process. And I was just there a couple of weeks ago for another of our regular meetings and I had the chance to not only talk to the top management but to actual engineers and developers. And what was interesting: The really got the message. I don't know if it was an internal message or if they are asking people to think in that way but in the last six months there has been a significant amount of change inside Microsoft.

derStandard.at: With the increased focus on Moonlight, did you just re-prioritize people from the Mono group inside Novell or is this a new group?

de Icaza: This is a new group inside of Novell. Basically my team grew from about 30 to 40 people over the last year and a half. Most of the hires went to Moonlight, so now with 15 people working on Moonlight, the biggest part are new hires.

derStandard.at: Coming back to the licensing of codecs from Microsoft. As far as I understand, that's only valid for applications running in the web browser, is that correct?

de Icaza: Yes, that is true. Basically Microsofts position is that they are willing to redistribute the codecs towards the goal of making Silverlight universal, but they are not willing to pay the bill for every Linux user's desktop, as they have to pay MPEG LA and such groups for the licenses.

derStandard.at: And it's going to be a separate package?

de Icaza: Yes, we'll be making it as easy as possible to install, but it is a Microsoft product and it is going to come from the Microsoft web site.

derStandard.at: Will it be possible to package that with distributions?

de Icaza: I do not think so; actually I am pretty sure that you will have to download

Re:Second and third page of three.

[Bert64]

Why exactly do they need to use MPEG?

Microsoft have their own audio/video formats which they could release without having to pay royalties to third parties, or they could use existing freely distributable formats.

Re:Second and third page of three.

[RingDev]

The WMV codecs are included in the package he was talking about. The reason to supply MPEG is simple: that's what people use.

-Rick

Re:Second and third page of three.

[Anonymous Coward]

or they could use existing freely distributable formats.

It'd be a bit telling if they made use of current free and open formats while still telling everyone how bad Open-Source is. With MPEG they can just squeeze by the issue in ways they couldn't with OGG or something.

Re:Second and third page of three.

[Anonymous Coward]

The WMA/WMV codecs are covered by patents owned by *many* other companies as well as Microsoft, and and licensing is administered by the MPEG-LA.

See the list of patent holders for VC-1, which is based on WMV9: http://www.mpegla.com/vc1/

Re:Second and third page of three.

[FishWithAHammer]

To be fair, Ogg Theora sucks. I can see why they wouldn't really want to use it. (Don't get me wrong--Ogg Vorbis is great, but Theora is pretty second-rate. Yes, I realize I just rhymed. Poet, didn't know it, etcetera.)

Re:Second and third page of three.

[TJamieson]

FWIW, last week people around here were trumpeting Theora as being much better than it was in the past. As always, YMMV, but maybe it's worth a shot.

Makes good points

[apathy maybe]

He makes good points about Mozilla, and Flash and stuff. But that doesn't mean we want to use MS trash. If it is 100% free, and patent free as well (does MS support extend to releasing all relevant patents for anyone to use, or whatever how you say it?), then sure use it if you want.

Personally, I don't know why the Mozilla folks don't run with XUL some more.

Personally though, I have Flash and Java turned off by default, I'm not about to have Silverlight (or Moonlight) enabled by default.

Re:Makes good points

[Darkness404]

The only reason I usually turn off Flash on sites other then some game sites or YouTube, is because the Linux Flash player is just so crappy. I have a decent enough /etc/hosts file that blocks 98% of the ads, but if I leave Flash on, Firefox's CPU shoots to 80% just displaying a banner ad. Thankfully, I downgraded to an older version and it doesn't do it as much.

Re:Makes good points

[mr_mischief]

Actually, although the Flash IDE is closed-source and proprietary, the SWF file format is now a published specification which others are free to implement.

Adobe did this years ago with PDF, and didn't take long to do so for SWF once they bought Macromedia. They want everyone using their formats, and to then compete based on the quality and branding of their authoring tools. It's a good business case in my eyes -- make the pie bigger by opening the spec but keep most of the pie yourself by making the best-known implementation that the most people know how to use.

To compare that with anything Microsoft has ever done, the executable format for Windows is the best example. To get more programmers targeting Windows, allowing more compiler makers into the market easily was a must. If you can only compile programs using the OS vendor's compiler, that feels very much like lock-in. By getting competing compiler and assembler products supporting their OS quickly made it easier for developers to decide to target the platform in its early days.

OOXML, albeit a contentious, oversized, and and only partially specified format, is an example of Microsoft trying to do some of the same things. They're trying to get people who believe in open, competitive file formats to use a format they have a competitive advantage in producing and editing. With Microsoft's past (and some of the gotchas in the spec itself), it's easy to see how that advantage could be kept through much chicanery.

However, the Adobe's got a pretty good record of allowing anyone to come along and make use of the Photoshop save format, the PDF publishing format (which is itself based on PostScript), and allowing JavaScript and ActionScript (both based on the ECMAScript standard, after all (which is based on earlier versions of JavaScript)) to interact cleanly. Now that SWF as a spec is published, it's difficult for honest people working with Microsoft technology to be judgmental about openness.

Re:Makes good points

[TheRaven64]

the PDF publishing format (which is itself based on PostScript)

PostScript is the best example. Adobe wrote the first standard and implementation. They published a later version of the spec before they had an implementation and were beaten to market by a competitor. I don't know what, if any, market share Adobe still has for PostScript implementations (RIPs), but they certainly get a lot of money from the desktop publishing market that releasing PostScript helped to create.

Re:Makes good points

[PitaBred]

Try again. I'm only getting maybe 10% more CPU use by opening a tab for CNN.com on Firefox here with the latest player, and that's under 64bit Kubuntu, which runs the Adobe flash player in nswrapper.

Re:Makes good points

[Anonymous Coward]

In creating .NET, Microsoft correctly recognized a problem they had: their existing cross-language development tools such as COM had a high learning curve and were clunky to use. Their offerings for developing an application were C, C++, or Visual Basic. Working with these components and making them inter-operate highlighted the desire for a powerful, "real" object oriented, garbage collecting, managed runtime. Say what you want about Microsoft's intentions, .NET is a step in the right direction for them. And if Linux developers feel the features it exposes are better to work with in some cases than Java (I happen to agree with that), there's no shame in adopting them.

Yes, potential patent issues make it so there is some risk involved. If MS is smart they'd realize that would severely hurt their image. On the other hand, do they really make legal decisions without considering their own potential problems, like running afowl of antitrust law, or being seen as more monopolistic than they are seen as today? Nevermind that being a monopoly would make them liable to lose billions of dollars, but also, they have an image problem already, and they probably don't want to make it worse.

But let's ignore that patents, or what company .NET comes from. The technology is pretty solid. It was the right thing to do to go beyond their existing technologies like COM. It's a pretty good answer to Java and addresses some of its shortcomings well. It also has more than one supported language. They say that pretty soon, it'll have inbuilt Python and Ruby too.

In creating Silverlight, MS recognized another area that could use some work: namely, flash sucks. It looks pretty doubtful that we'll see it adopted at this point, but if it does, it'll be good that Moonlight will have source code available. Yes, there are free/open projects that do Flash today, and are working on reverse-engineering, but you just know that they'll come out with more changes next week. If Moonlight is working with MS to provide real inter-operability, I think that's a good thing.

Re:Makes good points

[PastaLover]

The only reason I usually turn off Flash on sites other then some game sites or YouTube, is because the Linux Flash player is just so crappy. I have a decent enough /etc/hosts file that blocks 98% of the ads, but if I leave Flash on, Firefox's CPU shoots to 80% just displaying a banner ad. Thankfully, I downgraded to an older version and it doesn't do it as much.

Ehm, this is not the linux flash player as such, it's the flash player, period. I get the exact same problem on some sites in windows. Also downgrading flash is a seriously stupid thing to do right now, as the recent vulnerability they discovered leaves you wide open to attack. (and it has been spotted in the wild, though generally targeted at windows)

Re:Makes good points

[howlingmadhowie]

no it isn't free to implement. the project leader for gnash recently said words to the effect that if you have ever used adobe's flash plug-in, you cannot legally work on a free replacement.

Re:Makes good points

[ivansanchez]

It seems like you need the "flashblock" firefox extension. Pair it with "adblock plus" for better effects.

Re:Makes good points

[FishWithAHammer]

That wouldn't make any sense. Code taint only occurs if you've ever had access to their internals--seeing something that's part of the public interface doesn't taint you.

Unless they're talking reverse engineering, but that seems beyond the legal requirement as well.

Re:Makes good points

[FishWithAHammer]

The CLR (.NET/Mono) is a step in the right direction for everyone.

Also, currently IronPython is supported (it's a Microsoft project); not built-in to Visual Studio, but I bet that's coming with the next release. I don't like Python as a language, but I've learned to accept it because with IronPython, hosting a script engine takes all of four lines of code (plus whatever global objects you want the Python script to see). The independent languages are also pretty awesome, even if I wouldn't really want to use any of them. Just off the top of my head I can think of Scheme, PHP (Phalanger), Ada (A#), Prolog (P#), and a bunch of other (more useful) languages that have CLR compilers.

I would love to see a desktop--Windows, Linux, whatever--done in managed code, built on a common...language...runtime (did you see what I did there?). No more assaches about "oh, that library was written in C++, I can't use it in my language of choice"--all languages build off the same intermediate language, and so they can consume code of all other languages. This isn't the best example, as this functionality is actually built into the .NET Base Class Library, but here we go anyway: say you need to do a directory lookup. Instead of going to the command line and mucking with pipes, all you'd do is reference the managed code implementation of the "ls" command and its public object model would be yours to work with. Instant interoperability with almost anything.

I think it'd be a huge step forward for all of us. Shame it'd never happen.

Re:Makes good points

[bcrowell]

Actually, although the Flash IDE is closed-source and proprietary, the SWF file format is now a published specification which others are free to implement.

I don't think the situation isn't quite that rosy. Although SWF is an open format, there are lots and lots of other bits and pieces that you need, such as the library of GUI widgets, and the various audio and video codecs. Those are all proprietary. (Some, e.g., mp3, are only proprietary because someone else owns a patent. However, Adobe hasn't bothered to implement support for free codecs such as vorbis and theora.) It's true that there are third-party, open-source compilers such as haxe. However, there's nothing that's compatible at the source-code level with Adobe's tools. Therefore if you're trying to work on an existing flash project, or trying to learn flash development from books, you really have no option other than Adobe's proprietary tools. The last time I checked, their tools also came with nasty EULAs, which, e.g., forbid reverse-engineering, creation of competing products, or use on a mobile device.

Re:Makes good points

[Anonymous Coward]

already been done. There's a platform that is so common, *everything* can call modules written in it.

Its called C. Probably not your prefered language, but that doesn't mean it doesn't fulfil your requirements.

Re:Makes good points

[Anonymous Coward]

The CLR (.NET/Mono) is a step in the right direction for everyone.

Then so was the JVM a decade ago, before Microsoft ripped it off. For the record, I think that today Vala and ES4 are steps in the right direction.

I would love to see a desktop--Windows, Linux, whatever--done in managed code, built on a common...language...runtime (did you see what I did there?).

I do see what you did; you added needless bloat and crippled performance! Nobody is queuing to run JNode as their main OS any time soon.

No more assaches about "oh, that library was written in C++, I can't use it in my language of choice"--all languages build off the same intermediate language, and so they can consume code of all other languages.

See also the C ABI and while you're visiting check out JNI and P/Invoke! C is the lingua-franca of programming, no bloated runtime required! Javascript is fine as an IR for a dynamic runtime (haxe, hotruby, script#), Miguels comments about not wanting to write in js really betray the agenda don't they?

Re:Makes good points

[jmorris42]

My question is what problem is solved by Mono or Silverlight?

Mono v Java is no longer a contest, Java is Free and Mono is a patent minefield laid by a convicted monopolist.

Flash v Silverlight isn't as black and white but there are Free plugins for Flash in active development and the spec is open. Meanwhile Silverlight is a patent minefield laid by a convicted monopolist. In every way that Adobe is difficult to work with Microosft is worse.

Yet Miguel is not only in love with C# and everything Microsoft to the point of wanting every smelly bit ported over to ensire they can promose developers 100% marketshare, he is hellbent in tying GNOME development to the whims of Microsoft.

A pox on him, and his corporate owners at Novell.

Re:Makes good points

[jackspenn]

Your web experience must be so boring.

Re:Makes good points

[BhaKi]

The technology is pretty solid.

Please be careful about what exactly you mean by using the word "technology". Are you referring to .NET or the specification it implements? Although MS .NET implements the ECMA specification correctly, it also introduces a number of MS.NET-specific extensions that are not part of the ECMA spec. Most, if not all, developers who write .NET applications don't read the ECMA spec. Instead, they just visit MSDN and code for MS .NET. Ask any .NET developer in the IT market, the question - "How do you know the .NET spec? Through MSDN or through ECMA?", if you want to confirm. This is bad for two reasons. Firstly, this code will be incompatible with other implementations of the spec unless those implementations are done with MS's help, like Mono. So, MS decides which implementations "work". Secondly, MS's documentation for MS.NET doesn't separate standard things from MS.NET-specific things. Worse still, developers are encouraged to use MS.NET-specific things without being told that they are MS.NET-specific.

So .NET may be solid, but only if all world uses MS.NET.

If Moonlight is working with MS to provide real inter-operability, I think that's a good thing.

Whether it's good or not is subjective, but this sort of "interoperability" doesn't make .NET an open standard.

Re:Makes good points

[Anonymous Coward]

I just use the Firefox extension "Flashblock" which just turns flash animations into play buttons so they are only turned on when needed. Keeps the CPU overhead low :)

Re:Makes good points

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a platform that is so common, *everything* can call modules written in it. Its called C.

That's only half a solution: you can import C modules into most languages, but what about exporting modules written in those languages? Ever tried calling a Java library from C? Short of firing up a new Java virtual machine, encoding your input to the VM's stdin and decoding the VM's stdout, there's no way to do it. The CLR solves that problem because all code runs in the same VM, regardless of language. That means we don't have to write high-level libraries in C anymore; surely that's a good thing?

Re:Makes good points

[Anonymous Coward]

That's only half a solution: you can import C modules into most languages, but what about exporting modules written in those languages? Ever tried calling a Java library from C? Short of firing up a new Java virtual machine, encoding your input to the VM's stdin and decoding the VM's stdout, there's no way to do it. The CLR solves that problem because all code runs in the same VM, regardless of language. That means we don't have to write high-level libraries in C anymore; surely that's a good thing?

What complete and utter bollocks. Are you telling me I can call from native to bytecode without linking an interpreter/VM to run it? .NET is, in your own words "only half a solution".

Re:Makes good points

[blackpaw]

What complete and utter bollocks. Are you telling me I can call from native to bytecode without linking an interpreter/VM to run it? .NET is, in your own words "only half a solution".

Which shows you have no idea of what you're talking about - any .NET language can dynamically or implicitly load any exported module from another .NET language, complete with type info etc. Which is what the grandparent was talking about with a desktop written in .NET

Re:Makes good points

[Anonymous Coward]

Which shows you have no idea of what you're talking about - any .NET language can dynamically or implicitly load any exported module from another .NET language, complete with type info etc. Which is what the grandparent was talking about with a desktop written in .NET

Except that isn't what he said, in fact what he said was this...

Ever tried calling a Java library from C? Short of firing up a new Java virtual machine, encoding your input to the VM's stdin and decoding the VM's stdout, there's no way to do it. The CLR solves that problem because all code runs in the same VM, regardless of language.

First he implies he can call from native code into bytecode without linking against VM or interpreter and next sentence he talks about running entirely a VM. Last time I checked it was perfectly possible to link object code without using Microsoft's .TRAP

Re:Makes good points

[Requiem18th]

Yes, potential patent issues make it so there is some risk involved. If MS is smart they'd realize that would severely hurt their image.

Nevermind that being a monopoly would make them liable to lose billions of dollars, but also, they have an image problem already, and they probably don't want to make it worse.

  Hurt their image in front of whom really? Opinions are already set and people already have a band.

  Really, Microsoft wasn't worried about their image when they stuffed the ISO committee whit chills, used every dirty trick in the book and abused every process they could to get the MS OOXML into the ISO.

  Microsoft just simply cannot get a worse image for those who care.

  And then we have people who just don't care, like you -I presume- I mean if the past record of corruption, abuse, heavy handed tactics and its shamelessly anticompetitive stance wasn't enough to make you shy away from any offering they make WHY DO YOU THINK a patent fiasco or two will bother you?

  I bet Microsoft could be eating baby seals, you wouldn't care as long as their development platform is solid.

Re:Makes good points

[Darkness404]

What Flash release? On some such as Flash 9 release 115 I got a major CPU leak (yes, it was 80% on a banner ad) on both my box running 32-Bit Xubuntu (1.8 Ghz Celeron with 512 MB of RAM) and my laptop running 32-Bit Ubuntu (1.5 Ghz Pentium M with 512 MB of RAM).

Re:Makes good points

[biovoid]

Or you could use the open-source Flex SDK (which includes all GUI widgets) with the free Flex Compiler Shell to develop Flash content.

We've been developing Flash content without using the Flash IDE for years now. Time to check again?

Re:Makes good points

[rdean400]

Miguels comments about not wanting to write in js really betray the agenda don't they?

I think Miguel just wants to write everything in .Net. He couches his language in neutral-sounding terms, but he's a .Net zealot. Everything but .Net has problems, to listen to his arguments.

JavaScript is a capable language, and it is definitely possible to write clean code in JavaScript. However, it's also easy to write monstrously bad code, too.

Re:Makes good points

[shutdown -p now]

That wouldn't make any sense. Code taint only occurs if you've ever had access to their internals--seeing something that's part of the public interface doesn't taint you.

It's probably simpler than that - just an EULA which says in it somewhere, "By using this product you agree to abstain from working on any competing or replacement product". And, so long as it's USA, you can actually be taken to the court over it.

Re:Makes good points

[shutdown -p now]

Mono v Java is no longer a contest, Java is Free and Mono is a patent minefield laid by a convicted monopolist.

We do not know. So far, any talk on patents in Mono is just speculation - there was not a word from MS on this. For all we know, Java could just as well be laden with patents (not necessarily Sun's).

Regardless, Mono is GPL/LGPL, so it is Free under the FSF definition of Free.

Re:Makes good points

[mr_mischief]

In the USA you can be taken to court for breathing the air someone else wanted to waft over their property. It doesn't mean there's any merit to the suit.

Re:Makes good points

[mr_mischief]

Was the last time you checked the EULA when Flash was a Macromedia product, or after Adobe bought Macromedia and released a new version? I'll admit I never read the EULA as my former employer owned the license and it was a company issue.

There are many proprietary commercial Flash clones that produce SWF files. There are also many freeware (closed source but free to use) and open source packages.

Two commercial packages have general-purpose timeline/programming IDEs similar to the genuine article. One is SWiSH Max from SWiSHzone (silly capitalization is theirs, not mine). Another is Namo FreeMotion from .

Many people say that Swish Max is much easier to use than Flash, but I didn't really care for the demo. To buy it is $150 so I might iinvest in it since there are some things it can do that my software can't.

FreeMotion 2008 is practically a clone of an older Flash version -- Macromedia Flash MX 2004. It has a similar interface, supports ActionScript 1 and 2, and outputs to Flash 6 or 7 formats. It doesn't work with FLA files but it does open existing published SWF files for editing. It does almost everything Flash MX 2004 does, but it won't work well with much of the stuff produced in Flash 8 or 9. I own a copy of FreeMotion 2008 (the default version on the Namo website is still 2006, so make sure you get the right version). It was only $59.95 to purchase a fully licensed download, but I opted to extend my download rights from 30 days to 2 years for another $4.95 just in case my backups get lost.

There are programs from Eltima Software and SoThink that turn SWF files into FLA files for use by official Macromedia or Adobe Flash. I've only used the trial versions of these, both of which are somewhat crippled. I'm not sure which I prefer, since the most interesting features are the ones that don't work in the trial versions.

There are many specialized Flash creators with visual interfaces. Some focus on educational software, while some focus on banners, media players, photo galleries, or games. Some are commercial while others are OSS or freeware.

There are also a number of textual Flash tools. Some work with XML. Some use ActionScipt directly. Some are libraries for C/C++, Python, PHP, or Perl. HaXe has a standard library supporting Flash features and will compile codee to SWF.

For a partial list of OSS software that works with Flash files or is used to support development of them, take a look at the projects page of the OS Flash Project.

I personally use FreeMotion when a timeline is really handy or there's a good ActionScript 1 or 2 library that works with it which would make my life really easy. I use HaXe for any Flash work I want to approach from ground-up programming perspective. I've tinkered with MTASC but I haven't used it seriously. I've yet to dabble with Flex.

If I keep getting more requests for updates to more recent Flash stuff designed elsewhere, I might need to break down and buy CS3.3 (well, probably take an old-version discount on CS3 somewhere actually). I don't do very much Flash work right now, though, and the price on the Adobe stuff is steep. The OSS stuff is nice, and the lower-end commercial stuff works for many things.

I could probably get used to the Swish Max IDE for the price difference, though. Anyone know the limitations on ActionScript compatibility and Flash Player 9 output of version 2?

Re:Makes good points

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry dude, but I can vouch for grandparent. Sometimes the fans start spinning and CPU usage goes up when I hit flash sites on my laptop. You may simply have been lucky because the number of sites you visit regularly are few and the flash files on those site are well behaved. It's also possible that CPU usage only goes up when flash files do very specific things or because, well, the player is buggy. In any case, GP is not talking out of his ass - I've seen this first hand. On a more personal note, I don't mind flash as long as:

1. Flash animations are well behaved (not annoying).
2. My browser doesn't crash.
3. Serve an a purpose other than bling-bling.

Unfortunately, 99% of the time at least one of above conditions are false. Also, I would much prefer if Flash wasn't proprietary, which pretty much just adds insult to injury.

Re:Makes good points

[shutdown -p now]

Well, so far as I know, EULAs were proven to hold in the court as valid binding contracts in at least some of the states.

Re:Makes good points

[mr_mischief]

Certain EULAs that were not otherwise outside of valid contract law were found to be binding in certain jurisdictions (I don't recall if it was states or Federal Court Districts, probably some of each). That doesn't mean that every EULA will be considered valid even in those same jurisdictions.

A contract has to meet certain legal requirements to be binding. A few off the top of my head include legal age of consent for the parties to it, consideration for product or service, not accepted under duress or coercion, and can't force either party to break statutory law as part of the contract.

IANAL, so I can't really say what's what. Those are a few things to keep in mind if you ever need to talk to a lawyer about a contract or license, though. Your counsel should know much better than I.

Same old...

[jav1231]

Looks like Miguel still pimping a marriage with Microsoft. Dude, she likes country and he likes rock-n-roll! Seafood vs. burger and fries. He's frugal, forward looking and she spends money like a drunken sailor! More importantly he just wants some freedom and she wants to tie him down. Let it go!

Open Microsoft

[dvice_null]

"de Icaza: I hope so. It might end up that at some point Microsoft just open ups .net"

LOL

Re:Open Microsoft

[cerelib]

You did not include the entire sentence, here:

It might end up that at some point Microsoft just open ups .net, like Sun did with Java, that's always a possibility.

When you put it into the context of the history of Java, it is not all that far fetched.

Re:Open Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun has been a friend of the open source community for a long time:

NFS
OpenOffice
Solaris
Java
VirtualBox
Sun Grid Engine
etc .NET is a copy of Java, which Microsoft created because Java was cross platform. Why would they ever open .NET, when the goal of .NET was to create a non-portable clone of Java?

Re:Open Microsoft

[Just Some Guy]

When you put it into the context of the history of Java, it is not all that far fetched.

Yes it is. Sun has a track record of working closely with Free Software projects for quite a few years now. You almost expect Sun to release the code to major projects now (not "expect" as in thinking they owe it, but "expect" as in "I wouldn't be surprised if..."), as they've done with OpenOffice, ZFS, and even Solaris.

Microsoft released some fonts once, then later changed their minds.

I would be infinitely more surprised in Microsoft opening anything interesting than I would in Sun doing the same.

Re:Open Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

"de Icaza: I hope so. It might end up that at some point Microsoft just open ups .net"

LOL

We will really LOL when they release source code for anything and we try to read it.

Re:Open Microsoft

[FishWithAHammer]

etc .NET is a copy of Java, which Microsoft created because Java was cross platform. Why would they ever open .NET, when the goal of .NET was to create a non-portable clone of Java?

Factually inaccurate. Get back under your bridge.

If Microsoft wanted .NET to be Windows-only, why have this dialogue with the Mono developers at all?

(Disclaimer: I'm a Google Summer of Code developer for Mono, and I know Miguel de Icaza in passing; seems like a good, knowledgeable guy who genuinely wants the best for Linux and open-source software.)

Re:Open Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Factually inaccurate. Get back under your bridge.

Please point out where I was "factually inaccurate." .NET *was* created as a result of Microsoft getting sued by Sun for trying to corrupt the Java standard. This is a documented fact, do your research.

Thus, how does opening up .NET work for Microsoft? Simple answer: It Doesn't.

If Microsoft wanted .NET to be Windows-only, why have this dialogue with the Mono developers at all?

It's good you asked. Why? Microsoft wants market penetration for Silverlight at all costs. By "providing" faux cross platform support through Mono, Microsoft gets to look open while still maintaining a way to screw everyone in the future.

Also, I highly doubt it was Microsoft's idea to work with the Mono gits in the first place. i.e. Mono came to Microsoft interested in "helping," not the other way around.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Google Summer of Code developer for Mono, and I know Miguel de Icaza in passing; seems like a good, knowledgeable guy who genuinely wants the best for Linux and open-source software.)

That's great. Miguel is probably an OK guy, but he makes some extremely poor decisions.

Oh and if you're interested in buying my bridge, please post some contact info and I'll send you a nice brochure. Also, please mention it to Miguel, he seems like the type who would be interested as well. :)

Re:Open Microsoft

[FishWithAHammer]

Please point out where I was "factually inaccurate." .NET *was* created as a result of Microsoft getting sued by Sun for trying to corrupt the Java standard. This is a documented fact, do your research.

Yes, the project was started as such. Calling it a "copy" is inaccurate. Java aims for Java-the-language penetration above all; Jython and JRuby are tolerated, but aren't anything close to first-class citizens. The CLR's specific goal is to get a lot of mutually interoperable languages on the same platform. Java attempts to contain everything in managed code. The CLR is smarter than that and provides very powerful and very flexible ways to handle managed/native interop (in a reasonably cross-platform manner, too).

Thus, how does opening up .NET work for Microsoft? Simple answer: It Doesn't.

Microsoft only released Rotor and made an ECMA standard because they want it all on Windows. Right.

It's good you asked. Why? Microsoft wants market penetration for Silverlight at all costs. By "providing" faux cross platform support through Mono, Microsoft gets to look open while still maintaining a way to screw everyone in the future.

Paranoia is kind of funny in this sort of situation; estoppel largely prevents them from "screw[ing] everyone" in the legal arena, and from a technical point of view, there's not a lot they could do.

Also, I highly doubt it was Microsoft's idea to work with the Mono gits in the first place. i.e. Mono came to Microsoft interested in "helping," not the other way around.

IIRC, Microsoft went and talked to Novell about the Mono project as part of their agreements, but I could be wrong.

That's great. Miguel is probably an OK guy, but he makes some extremely poor decisions.

I guess we'll see. Personally, I win either way. I use Windows as my primary OS. If Mono gets good, I get the lazy man's porting of applications to other OSes. If it ends up blowing up--well, my primary OS is still fine.

Re:Open Microsoft

[johnhennessy]

Sorry, it was too tempting !

I would turn the question around a different way:
- what does Microsoft get out of helping Mono ?

(remember, software engineers probably cost MS 200-300K per year, in terms of cost, not salary).

While it looks like they are partially serious about it, I have a nasty feeling (and again, only my opinion), that we're in the "embrace" period of Microsofts three point plan. Darn, I can't remember what the next two parts are ... i had it just a second ago, but i think the next parts are definitely not good.

Finally, on directions of Mono: I'm sure that Miguel's intentions are good but (i just had to dig up some Mark Twain here):

Half the results of a good intention are evil; half the results of an evil intention are good.

That works for both Mono and Microsoft. Only time will tell.

But I guess at the end of the day, the real benefit of Open Source is *choice*. ... and we still have it.

We can decided to use Mono, or we can choose not to.

Some people have already. And I truly believe that the work that Miguel and Novell are doing will entice more people to use it as a platform to program.

But we have to be a little bit cautious when dealing with the Beast (MS). Their track record isn't all that pretty ! ;-)

Re:Open Microsoft

[FishWithAHammer]

And I truly believe that the work that Miguel and Novell are doing will entice more people to use it as a platform to program.

But we have to be a little bit cautious when dealing with the Beast (MS). Their track record isn't all that pretty ! ;-)

I agree, to an extent. But their recent actions seem to indicate a new tack as a company (witness the Apache bit, for example); if we don't give them a chance to be good citizens, they never will be.

Re:Open Microsoft

[prockcore]

Sun has a track record of working closely with Free Software projects for quite a few years now.

Only recently. Anyone who has ever used solaris on a sparc will laugh at that statement. Sun used to be every bit as anti-opensource (and anti-GNU in particular) as MS is.

It was only after Sun started losing market to Linux that they started embracing open source.

Re:Open Microsoft

[Just Some Guy]

It was only after Sun started losing market to Linux that they started embracing open source.

I have an SS5 with Solaris 7 on a shelf at home. Yeah, I know that Sun used to be a very closed shop, but they saw the light (heh! I'm funny!) quite a while back.

Re:Open Microsoft

[snoyberg]

Note: most of that list was alphabetical.

Re:Open Microsoft

[gumpish]

I guess we'll see. Personally, I win either way. I use Windows as my primary OS. If Mono gets good, I get the lazy man's porting of applications to other OSes. If it ends up blowing up--well, my primary OS is still fine.

Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that until you believe it.

Re:Open Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

But their recent actions seem to indicate a new tack as a company

They do this every few years to buy themselves time while they sharpen the knives. Fool me once...

Re:Open Microsoft

[jackspenn]

If you hate MS for being closed, am I to take it that you hate Apple more as they are even more closed than MS?

Re:Open Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess we'll see. Personally, I win either way. I use Windows as my primary OS.

You're a moron, and your opinion is irrelevant.

Re:Open Microsoft

[Just Some Guy]

If you hate MS for being closed, am I to take it that you hate Apple more as they are even more closed than MS?

Why do you assume that I hate Microsoft? For that matter, why do you assume I like Apple? Life's too short to have an emotional reaction to a corporation, of all the dumb things. You can approve or disapprove of their actions without having feelings about them.

Re:Open Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of idiot uses Windows as their primary OS?

Re:Open Microsoft

[FishWithAHammer]

The kind who doesn't want to dick around with xorg.conf for dual-head monitors, who wants to be able to play computer games without issue, and who wants to be able to run Adobe products without the "will it or won't it?" of WINE.

(And who doesn't want to pay a markup for Apple branding for the same hardware.)

Re:Open Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a complete idiot. Dual-head monitors are easy to set up in Linux, and there's no games worth playing on Windoze. Adobe products are all crap, too.

Re:Open Microsoft

[FishWithAHammer]

Your bridge must be lonely.

Re:Open Microsoft

[ClosedSource]

Hmm, the kind of idiot with a real job?

Re:Open Microsoft

[abigor]

Not their os, if that's what you're referring to. A large chunk of OS X is open, and so are various tools they've written (i.e. launchd).

Since this is a software discussion, I assume you are referring to Apple's software. If you're referring to the fact that they restrict certain bits (not the kernel or userspace or the tools, mind you) to run on their own hardware, then I guess that's too bad for you.

Re:Open Microsoft

[rdean400]

Yes, the project was started as such. Calling it a "copy" is inaccurate.

No, it isn't. .Net was started because Microsoft couldn't build on Java due to Sun v. Microsoft.

Java aims for Java-the-language penetration above all; Jython and JRuby are tolerated, but aren't anything close to first-class citizens.

You're drinking the anti-Java kool-aid a little too much. The Java Virtual Machine has always been cross-language capable. It was cool in the early days of Java for language developers to target Java bytecode with their compilers.

Jython and JRuby are more than tolerated. Their development is primarily funded by Sun, and the NetBeans IDE has garnered a lot of attention for being one of the best Ruby on Rails IDEs out there.

That being said, it is a fair criticism that the bytecode is Java-centric. Sun is working on changing that (the effort being led by one of the JRuby guys).

The CLR's specific goal is to get a lot of mutually interoperable languages on the same platform.

No, the goal was to create a VM similar to the Java VM that could host multiple languages. This is a subtle but important difference.

Java attempts to contain everything in managed code.

No, it doesn't. Java provides robust interfaces for calling out to native code. The fact that Microsoft refused to support the JNI doesn't change the fact that it exists.

The CLR is smarter than that and provides very powerful and very flexible ways to handle managed/native interop (in a reasonably cross-platform manner, too).

Actually, the CLR is dumber because it makes it too easy to go into native code. There are very few legitimate reasons to go into native code.

Microsoft only released Rotor and made an ECMA standard because they want it all on Windows. Right.

Removing your sarcasm, that's completely accurate. For one thing, Rotor is no longer supported. It's now the Shared Source Common Language Interface (SSCLI), and is licensed so as to not permit commercial use. If Microsoft wanted productive usage of .Net on other platforms, they would not have created such a limiting field of use restriction.

IIRC, Microsoft went and talked to Novell about the Mono project as part of their agreements, but I could be wrong.

The Mono project lived for a good deal before it became part of Novell. Microsoft said that it approached Linux distributions that it believed were infringing their IP. Novell was a particularly interesting target because the Mono project lives there, and necessarily infringes on several Microsoft patents.

I guess we'll see. Personally, I win either way. I use Windows as my primary OS. If Mono gets good, I get the lazy man's porting of applications to other OSes. If it ends up blowing up--well, my primary OS is still fine.

All this being said, I'm not anti-Mono. It just grates on my nerves when half-truths or "used to be" truths are bandied about as facts. Java has addressed quite a few of its shortcomings in the past few releases, and I don't think it's productive to deride Java based on things that just aren't true anymore.

Re:Open Microsoft

[rdean400]

As far as the GPL goes, that's true. They only embraced the GPL when McNeely stepped down. However, they've been a friend to open source for a LONG time. Apache Tomcat is an example of a Sun work that was open sourced quite a few years ago, as is OpenOffice.org.

Re:Open Microsoft

[10Ghz]

"If Microsoft wanted .NET to be Windows-only, why have this dialogue with the Mono developers at all?"

Well, why do we need Mono at all? If MS wants .Net to be cross-platform, why don't they port it to other systems? Why do we need a separate project (Mono) for that?

Re:Open Microsoft

[jackspenn]

The open part (BSD) is the part Apple didn't write. God you're an idiot.

i just want

[ionix5891]

i just want to say thanks to people like Miguel for all the hard work they put into various open source projects

i know here on slashdot anything to do with microsoft == evil automatically

and i can imagine some of the comments that will be posted in this thread later on, but what the hell

Re:i just want

[Anonymous Coward]

Karma whore.

;p

Re:i just want

[Darkness404]

MS has made it clear that they want to kill OSS. So Miguel decides to make an OSS alternative to Silverlight with MS's help, unfortunately, MS will add in proprietary features once this halfway kills flash, and the reference implantation won't be the OSS Moonlight, it will instead be MS's proprietary Silverlight.

Re:i just want

[Ed Avis]

Even if that happens it would be worth it just to kill Flash... I'll take a free software implementation over a binary blob any day, no matter what company originated the standard.

Re:i just want

[Anonymous Coward]

i just want to say thanks to people like Miguel for all the hard work they put into undermining various open source projects

There. Fixed that for you.

Re:i just want

[Darkness404]

But imagine Flash if even though it displayed banner ads just fine, it couldn't play YouTube and some games. That's exactly what could happen with Moonlight, sure it is OSS but it is useless.

Re:i just want

[Tubal-Cain]

...it couldn't play YouTube...

<video> tags, anyone?

Re:i just want

[dedazo]

And this "kills" FOSS because... ?

Re:i just want

[FishWithAHammer]

Oh, right, because Moonlight won't be able to? What about the codec pack Microsoft will release for non-Windows operating systems, for x86, x86_64, and PowerPC alike, specifically and solely for Moonlight?

Why is it that the trolls crawl out from under the bridge whenever Mono comes up?

Re:i just want

[jeanph01]

You know, Flash respond to a need : Having dynamic web interface with a minimum effort. I'm programming in Javascript and thanks to Jquery it is less difficult to code nice things but God do this language is complicated. I love to program in it but I would love it to be less complicated. I chose Javascript because it is integrated in the browser, there is no plug-in. It use w3c / ecma standards. So my wish is that we drop flash, air, sylverlight and moonlight and have a decent HTML5/Javascript 2 implementation on all browsers.

Re:i just want

[gbjbaanb]

there's an OSS codec pack, released by Microsoft? Really? Cool.

I guess this has the DRM stuff taken out of it already, or has MS decided it doesn't care if you pirate videos as long as you're running Linux.

BTW, the trolls come out when Mono is mentioned because MS has given them more than enough food over the last decade.

Re:i just want

[FishWithAHammer]

The codecs being open-source have no bearing on whether they're available for open-source applications to use.

The DRM remains, but hey--don't buy (or pirate) media that's under restrictive licenses and you won't care.

I don't disagree that Microsoft has given them food, but Mono is a good thing, of only because Java isn't going to cut it for a managed code environment in the future. Make something better, and we'll talk. Right now, the CLR does everything Java does and then some. Hell, it even supports Java via J#, along with a raft of other mutually interoperable languages.

Managed code userlands are the future, I think, and Mono is the best choice at the moment for it.

Re:i just want

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that "managed code" is just an MS marketing term for "compiling to bytecode instead of native code" right? Java (and older platforms) have been doing what .NET does for years.

Java supports more languages than .NET does. It has been proven to scale much better than .NET has. It has been shown to perform better on virtually every benchmark.

It sounds like you've been drinking too much of Miguel's MS koolaid.

Re:i just want

[FishWithAHammer]

Java supports more languages? [citation needed]

And of course managed code is just bytecode. But the CLR is, in my opinion, a better design and a better framework (some library weirdnesses aside).

Re:i just want

[Anonymous Coward]

But imagine Flash if even though it displayed banner ads just fine, it couldn't play YouTube and some games. Sure it is OSS but it is useless.

You mean Gnash?

*ducks*

Re:i just want

[JasterBobaMereel]

Managed code is just compiling to a virtual machine rather than a real one ...

Java does this badly (it compiles to a machine that can only practically run Java, anything else is very hard to write) .NET/CLR does this much better the virtual machine is much more generic

But a Bytecode machine is still one step away from the real machine and so is necessarily slower and less optimised (I know the bytecode compiler does it's best but ...)

When the CLR runs on anything but x86(32) and x86(64) let me know ....

Re:i just want

[gbjbaanb]

I'm not so sure that the CLR is better designed, probably it is (despite some horrendous decisions as expressed by one of the guys who wrote it - Chris Brumme, google for his blog. It, and he, is brilliant).

Of course, even if CLR is better designed, its still a managed platform with the IMHO poor design decisions like garbage collection and reflection in there. I remember when it first came out and we had to badger MS to realise that finalisers weren't as good as they said they were. Eventualy they implemented the IDispose design pattern, though that would have been much better as part of the language instead of a bodged-in standard interface.

Java supports more languages. VB for one though I don't know how good/wel/etc it is. Anyway here is a citation, and another.

Re:i just want

[oggiejnr]

And you if you click a link at the bottom of the page you end up with this which seems to be a bigger list to me.

Re:i just want

[Anonymous Coward]

MS will add in proprietary features once this halfway kills flash, and the reference implantation won't be the OSS Moonlight, it will instead be MS's proprietary Silverlight.

And then maybe Flash will be opened up like Netscape Navigator and pave the way for another Firefox. No matter what Microsoft does they haven't got a chance. Their time has passed.

Re:i just want

[gbjbaanb]

so what? Is this a 'my list of languages is bigger than yours' waving exercise? The poster wanted to know if the JVM supported other languages, I showed him it did. That's all.

Re:i just want

[Tim C]

Well the OP said that Java (which should have been the JVM, but still) supports more languages than the CLR, so yes it was a "my list of languages is bigger than yours" dick-waving contest.

Re:i just want

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't view all the links provided, see http://www.is-research.de/info/vmlanguages/index.html

Re:i just want

[Anonymous Coward]

But a Bytecode machine is still one step away from the real machine and so is necessarily slower and less optimised

Doesn't writing native code require the programmer to hand-code most of the optimizations? As where Java code can be written more simply and have Hotspot automatically perform optimizations?

If this is the case, then performance of native code is more about the author of the code as where even novice Java code is highly optimized by Hotspot.

Java does this badly (it compiles to a machine that can only practically run Java, anything else is very hard to write)

Didn't we see in a thread above that the JVM supports hundreds of languages while the CLR supports only dozens?

Re:i just want

[Anonymous Coward]

You just need microsoft's media pack, as the article mentions. So if moonlight matures it could work fine, it'll just be a real pain to install since you'll have to go to two different websites and combine the parts. Linux power users will get to use it, while Windows will get to brag about being much easier to use.

Re:i just want

[Draek]

Seconded. I may not be a huge fan of the guy, and I *certainly* don't like his attitude towards Microsoft (as they say, it's not paranoia if they're really after you), but I respect the guy for all the work he's done, both for the GNOME project and all things Mono, he's created an amazing developing enviroment for those of us who live in countries without software patents, and I thank him for it.

Plus, I've got to admit this whole "Moonlight" thingie sounds pretty nice, specially after reading the interview. Flash-killer without excessive use of Javascript = Win!

Re:i just want

[Darkness404]

Yep, I thought about saying that, but at least GNASH is improving.

Re:i just want

[FishWithAHammer]

How exactly are reflection and garbage collection bad? Reflection allows you to work with classes as objects and garbage collection solves a lot of problems that are common for most software designers.

As for languages running on the JVM--how many are supported? How many can you easily get contractual support from Sun or other JVM developers for?

In any case, just adding up the numbers on the Wikipedia pages (languages, not reimplementations of them--so I counted the three different JVM Scheme implementations once):

JVM - 21
CLI - 45 (I may have missed a couple language duplicates)

So...yeah, your citation sucks ass, sir.

Re:i just want

[rdean400]

Java isn't going to cut it for a managed code environment in the future.

You've already demonstrated an outdated understanding of Java, both the language and the runtime. This kind of statement requires substantiation.

Hell, it even supports Java via J#

If you actually believe this tripe, it explains all of your other mis-statements and beliefs about Java. If all you had to base an opinion on was Java 1.1 (many years out of date now), I can understand how you come to form your beliefs.

Re:i just want

[rdean400]

The Wikipedia citation is not nearly complete.

The better citation is http://www.is-research.de/info/vmlanguages/

Re:i just want

[Anonymous Coward]

> You just need microsoft's media pack, as the article mentions.

That in addition only Microsoft can distribute and thus obviously can stop distributing any time they want.
There are already OpenSource decoders for those formats, but they are too scared to use them, does that not say a lot, too?

Re:i just want

[segedunum]

Oh, right, because Moonlight won't be able to? What about the codec pack Microsoft will release for non-Windows operating systems, for x86, x86_64, and PowerPC alike, specifically and solely for Moonlight?

You've just described the problem the OP was pointing to. Well done. As soon as Silverlight has reached critical mass and their interests are elsewhere they will drop that like a hot potato.

Why is it that the trolls crawl out from under the bridge whenever Mono comes up?

Because Miguel, and trolls like you, do not grok what has happened, consistently, over the past twenty five years which is unbelievable. I think all such posts should be modded funny.

Re:i just want

[JasterBobaMereel]

Most optimising compilers can nowadays optimise to a particular machine far better than most programmers and at most programmers might write high level code to coerce the compiler to optimise better ... unless you are talking embedded systems or very low level code

The JVM and CLR are one step away from the machine and cannot be optimised to the machine without losing their ability to run code anywhere

JVM supports Java and (at a very quick look) 25+ others

CLI supports C# and (and a quick look) 40+ others

This is because the JVM was designed to run Java and nothing else but people are inventive and persistent (and have had some years) whereas the CLI was designed to be and is mostly fairly generic and so it is easier to write new languages for it ...

Yay Miguel

[Ed Avis]

If you read the interview it sounds hopelessly optimistic and naive to imagine that you could implement a multimedia framework compatible with Silverlight as a free software alternative to Flash, that you could have a .NET and C# implementation compatible with Microsoft's, that you could write desktop applications in C#... until you remember that Miguel and his team have an awesome track record of doing all these things.

To quote my favourite font name: \!Andale Mono!

Re:Yay Miguel

[Foofoobar]

Awesome track record? I'm sorry, I must be living in an alternate reality. So MONO is now being used interchangeably on Linux and Microsoft platforms like Java is? Like he planned all along? So MONO has gained mass adoption and mass acceptance and has been embraced by Microsoft and they are now allowing them to .NET conferences where they were continually denying them from showing?

Wow. This new reality you live in smells vaguely of that new fragrance ... DeNial. You and Migual must shop at the same store.

Re:Yay Miguel

[SaDan]

I think you needed to apply a bit of sarcasm detection when reading the post you reponded to.

Re:Yay Miguel

[Ed Avis]

No, no sarcasm intended. Mono is excellent.

Re:Yay Miguel

[Ed Avis]

I meant track record in terms of technical achievement, not marketing. Perhaps the number of third-party .NET apps that officially run on Linux is pretty small; it's hard to get numbers for these things (especially for in-house work which is much more than half of all development).

Re:Yay Miguel

[Foofoobar]

I meant track record in terms of technical achievement

Well golly gee whiz... good for him. He reinvented something else that no one is using and that the initial vendor won't help support (even with his lips tightly wrapped around their ass). What a great technical achievement. Lets all stand up and clap for him shall we. Then maybe he'll shut up and move on to something USEFUL.

Re:Yay Miguel

[molarmass192]

Yep ... bang on. Mono is about as compatible with .Net as JavaScript is with Java. It's a waste of effort in my eyes, but, they can work on whatever they want, doesn't mean I'm ever going to use it.

Re:Yay Miguel

[gbjbaanb]

I've got to say this is my issue with the 'reimplement MS tech' - what else could you have done with all those resources that a) truly innovated, b) did something open and free, c) did something better.

People do go on about this for other OSS projects - why make another CD Burner when you could contribute to an existing project. I think the consensus is that people create OSS projects for the "glory", you don't get quite the same amount of kudos for being 'just another contributer'. I'm not sure if Miguel falls into this category with the backing of Novell, but I'm sure they could have invested those resources for a much better return.

Re:Yay Miguel

[PastaLover]

They have an awesome track record of coming up short. Like the winforms support that is still coming up short! He himself stated in the interview that moonlight will be like a "light version" of silverlight. So us linux desktop users are supposed to remain first-class citizens on the web by using a second rate, braindamaged implementation of a new, unproven web technology by Microsoft of all places? Hah!

Re:Yay Miguel

[FishWithAHammer]

The number of third-party .NET apps that run on Linux is pretty good; however, it requires a little discipline on the part of the app developers to not use P/Invokes to do things.

Me, I've never written a single P/Invoke in .NET, so anything I write pops over easily.

Re:Yay Miguel

[AppleOSuX]

Troll... nowhere in the post you're replying to does Ed say that Mono is as popular as Java. Why don't you try reading before you post...Miguel and his team have had success with everything that Ed mentioned:

"implement a multimedia framework compatible with Silverlight as a free software alternative to Flash" - CHECK.

"have a .NET and C# implementation compatible with Microsoft's" - CHECK.

"write desktop applications in C#" - CHECK.

Where are Java, popularity or conferences even mentioned?

Re:Yay Miguel

[FishWithAHammer]

Yep ... bang on. Mono is about as compatible with .Net as JavaScript is with Java.

Are you trolling because you know how inaccurate this statement is, or are you just repeating what somebody else said that you liked the sound of?

Because your statement is factually inaccurate at best.

Re:Yay Miguel

[FishWithAHammer]

What better return?

Novell's business model is "interoperability." Mono will provide a significant level of interoperability between Windows and Linux.

It sure doesn't hurt that C# is a vastly more pleasant language to work with than C++ or Java or Python or any of the other "preferred" free software languages.

99% of open source isn't "innovative", so whining that Mono isn't "innovative" is silly. And Mono definitely fits both your "b" and your "c"; the Mono libraries are very extensive even apart from their implementation of the Base Class Library. Mono.Zeroconf and DBus# are the two that jump to mind immediately; there are a ton more. (And the non-UNIX-specific libraries work on Windows too, giving developers there additional tools.)

Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't a valuable tool.

Re:Yay Miguel

[Foofoobar]

"implement a multimedia framework compatible with Silverlight as a free software alternative to Flash" - CHECK.

Number of Silverlight users - zero
Number of Moonlight users - less than zero

"have a .NET and C# implementation compatible with Microsoft's" - CHECK.

Compatible? Great. Start running ALL MONO code on Windows and vice versa. Oh, you mean it doesn't quite work that way. Then it's not compatible then is it?

"write desktop applications in C#" - CHECK.

For whose desktop? Windows people don't use MONO. Windows people have never HEARD of MONO (unless they happen to have caught it). And as to compatibility, see my previous answer as to running MONO code on Windows operating systems (because nobody is running it on Linux or MacOS).

Re:Yay Miguel

[Foofoobar]

Factually Innacurate? Excellent. Go start running all those MONO programs on WINDOWS under .NET then if they are so compatible. They should all work perfectly fine. Feel free to remain indignantly silent when you discover you are wrong though.

Re:Yay Miguel

[msuarezalvarez]

the issues left are primarily issues with the X Window System model (which sucks, and don't even try to deny it)

By `sucks' I guess you mean is different from Windoww's?

Re:Yay Miguel

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a tech incubator at a university and the majority of the work we do is with department of defense contractors on applications that never go public... I must say, a TON of them use mono all over the place, and mono compatibility is a requirement on many applications now. There are tons of platform specific code for every platform, and mono being available allows them to use C# or any other .NET language regardless of the platform. Not only is mono used in areas where .net support is needed on linux, its becoming increasingly common to see it where its needed in windows!

Re:Yay Miguel

[FishWithAHammer]

The ones that don't use platform-specific APIs work just fine. Same with .NET apps running under Mono. I'm a student dev for the Mono Project and I'm in the process of writing a service for the Mono Project that runs fine under both Windows and Linux (Windows using .NET and Linux using Mono).

You sure you have any idea what you're talking about?

Re:Yay Miguel

[FishWithAHammer]

By "sucks," I mean "lacks the ability to hook various events that are often useful for WinForms developers." I'm not a member of the Mono WinForms team, but I gather that most of the hold-up has been emulating these events.

Re:Yay Miguel

[msuarezalvarez]

So you are answering yes to my question.

Re:Yay Miguel

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting to note:
The Sansa Connect uses modMono in its software.

Re:Yay Miguel

[Foofoobar]

And therein lies the rub. Platform specific API's, system calls, platform specific code all has to be removed and rewritten and even got called something entirely new in some cases. Why change the name of the function if it acts the same on both systems? Why not rewrite the API's so that they work the same on both platforms?

These are classic engineering mistakes that they made that would have MADE MONO cross platform. This was the original idea behind MONO. But it's not cross platform. If I write code for a LINUX API, the functions don't tranlate to Windows API's. They should have been generic regardless of the platform. But they aren't and so it's not compatible or cross platform.

Re:Yay Miguel

[Foofoobar]

By the way, whats the name of this service, I'd like to start testing it on Windows immediately if it runs that perfect. Just to see you put your money where your mouth is.

Re:Yay Miguel

[DCMonkey]

Actually, he said Moonlight could be like a "light version" of WPF, much like Silverlight could be if it were set up to run outside the context of a browser plugin.

Re:Yay Miguel

[FishWithAHammer]

When I consider it at a releasable state, I'll be happy to provide you a link.

Re:Yay Miguel

[FishWithAHammer]

Being different, in this case, is worse. It's not as full-featured a model, and those features have value to developers.

X is boneheaded, and while it has a few benefits (X forwarding is nice, and I'm using it for my Google Summer of Code project), I still think *nix would benefit from something more modern at the base of the GUI stack. Not that it'll ever happen, though.

Re:Yay Miguel

[FishWithAHammer]

Except that the wrappers are cross-platform; they're made to take advantage of already existing native code libraries (which Java is terrible at).

Re:Yay Miguel

[msuarezalvarez]

Being different, in this case, is worse. It's not as full-featured a model, and those features have value to developers.

Being different is worse surely if what you want is to replicate behaviour. For that, the ideal would be to be exactly the same.

Re:Yay Miguel

[Chosen Reject]

So I normally would just pass by, but this statement I disagree with.

It sure doesn't hurt that C# is a vastly more pleasant language to work with than C++ or Java or Python or any of the other "preferred" free software languages.

You might think so. I've done work in all of those languages. I much prefer C++ and python over C#. If I want speed of execution, I will take C/C++. If I want speed of development, I will take Python. I find that both of those are much more pleasant to deal with than C#. Just because you like one language over another, doesn't mean it's a "vastly more pleasant language."

Re:Yay Miguel

[PastaLover]

WinForms support is nearing completion; the issues left are primarily issues with the X Window System model (which sucks, and don't even try to deny it) and theming (I know the guy working on theming for Mono's System.Windows.Forms implementation, and he's coming along very quickly).

So...the problem is...what?

Your bridge, it misses its troll. Go back to it.

Right, so it only took them what, 2-3 years? And no .NET winforms application I've tried works on the latest stable. This was the whole point of .NET of course, so called cross platform but really hard to port to any platform because winforms support will be severely limited. I'm not saying mono doesn't have its uses, I think it's great, when they're not trying to claim they'll get feature parity with anything from microsoft.

Re:Yay Miguel

[Foofoobar]

Right... thought as much. We call that Vaporware where I come from.

Re:Yay Miguel

[jackspenn]

GNOME is great. MONO has a lot of potential (and is a welcome/needed addition to Linux in my opinion). There is no question that he is providing a key service by bridging the gap between Windows and Linux, which in today's heterogeneous networks is critical.

Re:Yay Miguel

[AppleOSuX]

"Number of Silverlight users - zero
Number of Moonlight users - less than zero"

Where'd you pull those stats from? Just because _you're_ not using it doesn't mean that nobody uses it. I'm a user of both, so I know you're wrong.

"Compatible? Great. Start running ALL MONO code on Windows and vice versa"

Level of compatibility != no compatibility. Would you stop using or developing for your favorite web browser just because it's not 100% compatible with ECMA or CSS3? Didn't the promise of of Java's "write once, run everywhere" quickly turn into "write once, debug everywhere"? Do you really think that Java 100% compatible across all the platforms?

"Windows people don't use MONO"

Again, where are you getting this? Because you're wrong. I hang out on plenty of message boards where people are using Mono to develop cross platform applications. I personally use Monodevelop on Gnome and sharpDevelop on Windows to develop help desk applications for my company.

Why don't you just admit that you can't look at this objectively because it comes from Microsoft? .Net and the CLR ain't Java, they're much better than Java. C# has a lot of great features and if you don't like C# you can compile python, ruby or whatever else you want, to use the CLR. What's not to like? Oh no, it's not perfect!!! (but what is???)

Re:Yay Miguel

[FishWithAHammer]

When you lack features that developers use, and the competing technologies have them...yeah, you're worse off.

Re:Yay Miguel

[FishWithAHammer]

Vaporware? Heh, no. What's your email address? I'll put you on the release list. Should be completed and out in approximately a month or so.

Re:Yay Miguel

[msuarezalvarez]

What features are you talking about? ``Reproducing the behaviour of the Windows windowing systemÂÂ, while potentially useful, is not exactly a sine-qua-non condition for not sucking, you know.

Re:Yay Miguel

[ClosedSource]

"So MONO is now being used interchangeably on Linux and Microsoft platforms like Java is?"

Pretty much. Both MONO and Java are primarily used on Unix variants and aren't used much on Windows.

Re:Yay Miguel

[Foofoobar]

give me the CVS/SVN repo locale. I'll checkout and build :)

Re:Yay Miguel

[KwKSilver]

If perfect compatibility with Windows' behavior is a criterion, it makes more sense to use Windows and ".NET" than Mono on Linux or any other free platform. MS would never allow it, so if y'all succeed expect MS to launch Global Thermonuclear Patent War shortly thereafter.

Re:Yay Miguel

[iamwahoo2]

I love the CLR, but there is some merit to what the grandparent was trolling. If the Mono teams spreads itself too thin and takes on too much "Microsoft copying" work, then the quality of the work will suffer. From my point of view, I do not see the huge appeal of winforms. Gtk# already provides cross platform user interface for Mono and does not come with the drawback of having to keep up with a moving target. I would honestly rather see a good quality Qt wrapper for .NET/Mono than WinForms because I have more faith and trust in Trolltech than Microsoft.

I would like to see the Mono team concentrate on the copying only the "core" functionality which will not change much and then continue to build off of existing open source software.

Re:Yay Miguel

[westyvw]

I have been watching developers use native .NET on Windows realizing how bad windows.forms sucks for them, and you want to tell me I want that on my Linux box? Knock X all you like, but your full of crap or dont get it, x is much, much more useful and powerful as is, and I dont want to see it get modified to accommodate MS windows like behavior.

Re:Yay Miguel

[shutdown -p now]

He himself stated in the interview that moonlight will be like a "light version" of silverlight.

Where in the article he says that? Because I only see him saying that, because they have access to Microsoft's internal regression tests for Silverlight, they are actually able to deliver a 100% Silverlight-compatible Moonlight now.

Re:Yay Miguel

[rdean400]

Again, your knowledge must be based on the Microsoft implementation of Java.

Java has no problems with running native code libraries.

Re:Yay Miguel

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it include a GUI? None of my .Net GUI applications display correctly in mono, actually they are so bad as to be completely unusable.
Have you ever _tried_ .Net an application written with VisualStudio GUI designer under mono?

Re:Yay Miguel

[renoX]

Which events are you talking about?

I'm curious.. You're not part of WinForms team ok, but where do they have written what are the "missing events"?

Re:Yay Miguel

[Abcd1234]

Apparently you don't come from the planet earth. Go look up the term vapourware, I don't think it means what you think it means.

I just find it's terribly dumb

[rbanffy]

I just find it's terribly dumb to let both your specification and the reference implementation to be under the control of your worst enemy.

I love Gnome and I understand Mono is a somewhat simpler (than C++) way to build programs for it, but is it really necessary?

As for Silverlight... Yuck.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

I just find it's terribly dumb to let both your specification and the reference implementation to be under the control of your worst enemy.

The point is that Microsoft is "your worst enemy", not Miguel's.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

As for Silverlight... Yuck.

"Yuck" because Silverlight comes from Microsoft, or because you understand the differences between it and Flash? Care to dissect what is so yucky?

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Not likely, I'd imagine... it just has the Microsoft name on it so he hates it.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

derStandard.at: But aren't you actually validating Silverlight by that and driving adoption?

de Icaza: That's what some people want you to believe. But I don't think that's the case. Linux on the desktop is still a very small amount of people. If you believe that getting the Linux desktop people happy is what you need to validate a technology, you have lost a sense of proportion.

I mean - how many people outside of the technology world really know about Linux at the moment. And even the Mozilla guys - the keynote we had here was done on a mac, every single Mozilla developer uses a Mac. And it's funny, they constantly attack Silverlight, they constantly attack Flash and then all of them use proprietary operating systems, they don't seem to have a problem doing it. And then they had the Guiness record thing for Firefox 3 and you went to the website and it had a flash map to show where people are downloading - so there definitely is a double standard here. And that's after all their claiming that you can do everything in AJAX - so they definitely don't "walk the walk".

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[TheRealMindChild]

Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[TeknoHog]

In another version, "keep your enemies in a small .jar on your desk."

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[mike260]

I love Gnome and I understand Mono is a somewhat simpler (than C++) way to build programs for it, but is it really necessary?

Dunno about 'necessary', but .net and C# are good stuff, and I think it's good that they're available on non-Microsoft platforms.

I just find it's terribly dumb to let both your specification and the reference implementation to be under the control of your worst enemy.

By this logic, AMD should stop making x86 CPUs. BTW, it's not nice to call people dumb, especially when the evidence is overwhelmingly against it.

As for Silverlight... Yuck.

I presume that 'yuck' is entirely an expression of your feelings towards Microsoft, and not about anything concrete.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[rbanffy]

Yeah... I am just not very sure who's keeping who.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[rbanffy]

Yuck because it's not needed (there are other ways to build rich internet applications and using a semi-proprietary solution is not the way to foster development of an open one), not particularly elegant (Flash is much worse, but that's not the point here) and also because Microsoft controls it and is free to steer it any way they please (and that, probably, won't please me).

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[renoX]

>>I love Gnome and I understand Mono is a somewhat simpler (than C++) way to build programs for it, but is it really necessary?
> Dunno about 'necessary', but .net and C# are good stuff[cut]

That's debatable, a clone of Java isn't that much interesting IMHO.

>>I just find it's terribly dumb to let both your specification and the reference implementation to be under the control of your >> worst enemy.
>By this logic, AMD should stop making x86 CPUs.

Mmmh, x86 the ISA isn't totally under the control of Intel, as shown by the x86-64 extension that AMD made and that Intel was forced to take. For the rest, do you remember that AMD has initiated a lawsuit against Intel for 'monopoly abuse'?

>BTW, it's not nice to call people dumb, especially when the evidence is overwhelmingly against it.

MDI is clearly a very good programmer, but he hasn't shown that his viewpoint about Microsoft dumb is reasonable..

>>As for Silverlight... Yuck.
>I presume that 'yuck' is entirely an expression of your feelings towards Microsoft, and not about anything concrete.

Or maybe his disgust about yet another proprietary solution, but hey you're free to take the hook.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Very well done.. The check is in the post.

Bill.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Miguel, relax and stop having conversations with yourself already!

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[mike260]

there are other ways to build rich internet applications

To clarify, you are talking about Flash here, right? If there's another comparable alternative, please correct me.

Anyway, to summarise your post:

1) Don't use Silverlight, use Flash
2) Flash is worse than Silverlight.
3) I hate Microsoft.

(1)+(2) = nonsense, leaving (3) which answers the GP's question nicely.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

remember open != elegant...and to say that another option is unneeded just closed minded. You say you like gnome...using your way of thinking gnome should have never existed because it was unneeded and there were other solutions already available. Proprietary software has its place in fueling creativity and innovation...It may not always be the best solution, but in many cases it may just be.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[zsau]

I love Gnome and I understand Mono is a somewhat simpler (than C++) way to build programs for it, but is it really necessary?

Of course not. If Python's not to your liking, check out Vala, which is a programming language influenced by C# and designed for Gtk+. Kinda like a free software "embrance, extend", only done properly and without the traditionally implied ", extinguish".

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[mike260]

That's debatable, a clone of Java isn't that much interesting IMHO.

It has a VM and curly brackets, therefore it's a Java clone?

Mmmh, x86 the ISA isn't totally under the control of Intel, as shown by the x86-64 extension that AMD made and that Intel was forced to take.

That could equally happen here, except that Mono will never get the marketshare (=leverage) to make it happen, and ironically part of the reason for that has got to be the staggeringly closed-minded bleatings of the rabid Linux fanboy crowd.

MDI is clearly a very good programmer, but he hasn't shown that his viewpoint about Microsoft dumb is reasonable..

That's a good reason to call someone 'terribly dumb'?

Sigh. I must be new here.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

I love Gnome and I understand Mono is a somewhat simpler (than C++) way to build programs for it, but is it really necessary?

Probably. Mono provides 2 things really, one is a much more rapid way to produce GUI apps for Linux. The other is it provides more runtime protection than C and C++, garbage collection, lack of buffer overflows and exploitable stack overflows. If more and more people start to use it (and it's worth a look if you haven't looked at it) it will eventually have class libraries that rival Java and provide for much much more re-use.

I've spoken against Mono in the past but I've been looking at it lately. It's pretty darn good. I understand some of the fear about Microsoft somehow "patenting" things or hurting it but those fears have been unfounded. Mono is similar to JVM in performance and it has been completely open sourced from the start. You know, I've got a pair of G5 macs that are still pretty decent machines and I can't get a new JVM for them and never will be able to. Mono? Works just fine.

C won't go away but I you're putting together a desktop application for Linux, I can't imagine that you wouldn't give Mono some serious consideration over C or C++.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[FishWithAHammer]

That's debatable, a clone of Java isn't that much interesting IMHO.

Calling the CLR a "clone" of Java misses the point of it entirely. Good job.

(For those who aren't so blind: the CLR (.NET/Mono) is specifically designed to provide a coherent object model across languages--Java does this only very reluctantly, and only with largely unsupported third-party languages--as well as have closer interaction with native code without changing the managed code, to allow the use of native code in performance-critical situations while allowing the flexibility and interoperability of managed code where performance is not so critical.

It allows you to do some pretty awesome things, too. I can make a Linux release of a CLR application I wrote for Windows just by changing the shared libraries; my code figures out whether it's on a Unix system or a Windows system and automatically loads the correct wrapper assembly for the correct operating system's native code libraries on-the-fly. Java can do so, but nowhere near as cleanly; its ClassLoader issues are the stuff of legend.)

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[FishWithAHammer]

Vala has potential. The problem is, it's not cross-platform and is very much tied to the GObject-based framework. C# is not and is cross-platform.

So...why bother with it?

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[JohnFluxx]

It reminds me the Roman empire Caesar Nero who had lots of enemies. He decided to invite all his enemies to great theatre performance. Nero's plan was to put on a production so beautiful that he would make his enemies love him.

Of course it didn't quite work out the way that he planned.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[rbanffy]

"To clarify, you are talking about Flash here, right? If there's another comparable alternative, please correct me."

I was more thinking about Ajax or the clever use of JavaScript to emulate desktop applications. Of course, it narrows the definition of "rich" (which is not well defined, anyway) as probably not to include audio or video and not much animation (mainly because animation tools for JavaScript are severely lacking and most JavaScript implementations also suck a lot).

"1) Don't use Silverlight, use Flash"

Never said that. However, I would prefer Macromedia's very narrow monopoly over an extension of Microsoft's any day. In fact, anyone with half a brain would prefer a small monopolist over a big one.

"2) Flash is worse than Silverlight."

That one I did. Flash is a kludge. Silverlight is a bit less ugly, but it's not a shining example of software architecture either.

"3) I hate Microsoft."

Not really. But they do everything within their reach to sabotage things I like (FLOSS is one example). They also have the nasty habit of breaking laws in the course of their daily business of competition-avoidance, which is definitely not nice. Not nice for anyone who participates in the IT market, including both consumers and providers. You probably enjoy higher prices and a slower pace of advancements most probably because MS, among other things, finds more important to augment search with an ugly dog than to enhance it with a smarter engine. Not to say FLOSS is the answer, but, as long as it provides the competition MS lacks (because they killed it) they at least have to work.

Do you think IE would bother to pass ACID tests if Safari didn't? Do you think IE would have tabs if Safari, Mozilla and Opera hadn't?

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[rbanffy]

"You know, I've got a pair of G5 macs that are still pretty decent machines and I can't get a new JVM for them and never will be able to"

You may want to look into the OpenJDK. IIRC, it's buildable and mostly work on PPC.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Just Some Guy]

The point is that Microsoft is "your worst enemy", not Miguel's.

It's well known that Miguel applied for a job at Microsoft. He's said so.

It occurs to me that we've all been operating under the assumption that he didn't get it.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Wdomburg]

Erm, how is Vala any less cross-platform than Gnome itself is? And being tightly integrated with GObject is kind of the point. :)

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Calling the CLR a "clone" of Java misses the point of it entirely. Good job.

I see you're attempting to rewrite history.

"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java Language."

-- Prashant Sridharan (Microsoft Visual J++ Product Manager) September 1997

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

GLib is a cross platform library and Valac is self hosting and emits ANSI C. You don't have to inherit from GObject either, so in what way is Vala not cross platform?

Of course we all know your Windows .NET assemblies will run cleanly on other platforms under Mono and PNet yeah?

Pfft!

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Chandon Seldon]

It has a VM and curly brackets, therefore it's a Java clone?

A VM, curly brackets, static typing, one-module-hierarchy library namespace, OO-is-primary paradigm. Yea... it's a Java clone.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Chandon Seldon]

IBM's still selling Power servers to enterprise clients - which must mean J2EE. What are they using for Java runtimes?

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey gui, (I guess that's a bit literal) should I keep on going with Flash or should I learn Silverlight stuff. Serious question.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[rbanffy]

"By this logic, AMD should stop making x86 CPUs. BTW, it's not nice to call people dumb, especially when the evidence is overwhelmingly against it."

You know... AMD pretty much invented the 64 bit x86 you are using now. Intel was betting on Itanic and had to run to implement AMD64 before AMD took too much of the server market. AMD64 did wonders to AMD's balance sheet.

At least for a while.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow ACID tests and Tabs will rule the world, FLOSS is the savior to the world as we don't even need a working desktop OS and Office. Seriously if ACID tests and Tabs are what brought revolution to the FLOSS community than I think you guys have a lot bigger priorities.

FLOSS members are all talk and no results, too many chiefs and not enough indians. There are honestly good people in there though that just love coding and are not about the politics.

MS has pushed the hardware boundries with the graphics/gaming community where FLOSS is absent and has no intent on being interested in it from the developers. You got OpenGL but most developers and even Carmack has displayed their lack of interest in it the last couple years. DirectX has come to the point where it is now superior and the choice of game developers.

Higher prices?
Yes because that $400 laptop on sale today at Office Depot is going to bankrupt everyone.
Just looking at Slickdeals.net today, stuff is so dirt cheap it is really sad that the opinion about hardware prices at Slashdot is constantly lied about or just in denial. Go ahead brag about your Atari and how you are running Linux on 15 year old hardware.

Real world prices as of today-
-HP Pavilion Notebook: Core 2 Duo T5550, 3GB DDR2, DVD+/-RW/CD-RW, 250GB SATA HDD, 6-cell Battery, Vista Home Prem, 14.1" WXGA LCD $550 After $180 MIR
-Compaq Presario Notebook: Pentium Dual Core T2390, 2GB DDR2, DVD+/-RW/CD-RW, 160GB SATA HDD, 6-cell Battery, Vista Home Prem, 15.4" LCD $400 After $155 MIR

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[zsau]

C# is very much tied to the .NET framework. It's also worth noting that there's no such thing as a cross-platform user interface. Every program that claims to have one is either written for one platform and looks and feels out of place on other platforms or has a separate UI implemented. GObject works on all major platforms, so if you write the backend in Vala GObject and the frontend in the platform's preferred language and toolkit, you incur no more cost that you should've in any circumstance.

You might disagree, but you won't easily convince me of your position. People shouldn't switch platforms to use the same programs; they should switch because they don't like their current ones.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[mike260]

You know... AMD pretty much invented the 64 bit x86 you are using now. Intel was betting on Itanic and had to run to implement AMD64 before AMD took too much of the server market.

So having multiple implementations of a standard can lead to competition and innovation, to the benefit of the user? Gotcha.

That does rather seem to be a argument for Mono though; are you sure that's what you meant to say?

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[coolGuyZak]

IBM uses the IBM JVM.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[rbanffy]

And I am sure Microsoft will play nice even without having the cross-licensing agreements that allows AMD to implement Intel's instruction set and that allowed Intel to implement AMD's 64-bit extensions.

After all, they have a long history of responsible corporate citizenship.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[rbanffy]

Oh boy... Replying to AC... Here we go.

The price you quote is for a computer. A commodity one. Still, the burden of being Windows-friendly is felt in just about every computer - they all use more or less the same processors, the same memory architecture, the same old IO architecture of an IBM PC 5150. And only recently 64-bit and multi-cpu computers started to become mainstream. There is competition, but only to make it cheaper and faster. There is none to make it evolve because evolving out of Windows-friendliness would be fatal.

The pace of change slowed down. No more radical designs, no more radical CPUs. Only more of the same. You may call it progress, but only because you were in your diapers when real progress was made.

Who is building the next Amiga? Who is writing the next Smalltalk?

Most probably nobody. We will all pay for that.

Re:I just find it's terribly dumb

[rdean400]

its ClassLoader issues are the stuff of legend.

...and like most legends, it's in the past. Most Java implementations are moving towards OGSi, which can reload all libraries (even multiple versions) on the fly. There's also a Java Module System under development, but it's being greeted as a largely unnecessary reinvention of the wheel.

MS Shill 2008

[Anonymous Coward]

The MS Excel XML format stores dates as a floating point[1] rather than something standard like, oh, ISO format. Miguel De Icaza thinks that's a good idea. Kind of says it all.

1. The number of years since 1900 (or 1901, depending) with the number of days since January 1 as the fractional part. Or something completely implementation specific that might have made sense in 1986.

Re:MS Shill 2008

[Anonymous Coward]

This is actually a clever idea. For example, let's say you buy a book on 3D Studio Max that comes with one of those 30 day trial software CDs. If you have one of those old Pentium I CPU's with the FPE bug, then your trial run might never expire!

My lunch is coming back up..

[Anonymous Coward]

Only people who make me want to puke more are lawyers so he's in very good company.

Free software has to be libre something senor Miguel seems to be striving to destroy.

They must love him at Redmond or as they call him there 'Plan B.'

Re:My lunch is coming back up..

[FishWithAHammer]

Er. Do you know Miguel? Do you know what he's done? Have you significantly interacted with the Mono developers and used their code?

I have. You're full of shit.

Re:My lunch is coming back up..

[Anarke_Incarnate]

Good for you. I have still seen the work he has done to fragment the OSS community. He may have contributed a lot of code, but still works against many of the concepts of F/OSS. He seems to cuddle up to MS at every opportunity and frankly, I could care less if Gnome were to die. The code is already out and it can be forked (The POINT of F/OSS). He loves to control things and recreate the MS universe.

Re:My lunch is coming back up..

[FishWithAHammer]

I have still seen the work he has done to fragment the OSS community. He may have contributed a lot of code, but still works against many of the concepts of F/OSS.

Part of freedom is not buying into the hogwash concepts of the freetards.

He seems to cuddle up to MS at every opportunity and frankly

In the grown-up world, interoperability is vital. Even Microsoft has figured this out. You apparently have not.

The code is already out and it can be forked (The POINT of F/OSS).

Right, but when the code out there misses the point, forking it won't help. You have to start anew. Hence, Mono.

He loves to control things and recreate the MS universe.

And so far, he seems to be "controlling" things very well. As for "recreat[ing] the MS universe"--what Mono proposes is a better design than what you currently see available on Linux, so there's nothing but benefit in the project. After all, nobody's forcing you to use it.

(Mono works fine with KDE and Qt, too. When not on working on Windows, that's my DE of choice.)

Re:My lunch is coming back up..

[Anarke_Incarnate]

Then we will simply have to disagree.

Unlike you, I don't simply consider myself anybody's better until I have sufficient proof. You do not. I "LIVE" in the real world. I work for a major corp, on the UNIX/Linux side.

I also don't go around calling those who contribute to the things I use "Freetards."

Btw, Miguel is still a shit.

What's Novell Doing?

[mpapet]

1. One has to give some credit to Miguel for thinking big and at least attempting to do it. The way he's doing it is perilous and I can see why some in the OSS crowd fault the guy. The odds are working against him. Strongly so.

2. He's convinced Novell this is something to spend/make money with. He's got a 40-person head count and it is totally unclear to me how Novell ***makes money**** on this to support such a large dev team. If they turned themselves into a 40-person contract dev group, I don't see customers clamoring for a dual-platform solution.

Even if his projects are widely adopted, there's no way I can see that Novell can make money at it. Which still makes Novell operating in run-off mode until the last netware(?) customer quits.

Re:What's Novell Doing?

[Whatanut]

1. Create Mono/Moonlight
2. ????????
3. Profit!!

Except in this case there is a step three. It comes about when .net/mono/whatever becomes a widely used technology. Not to say it WILL happen. Just that it may. If there is no implementation under linux then that's a potential loss of business because customers aren't going to purchase Suse or any other linux if it doesn't work with wide spread technologies. Putting the development effort into this is more of an insurance policy for them. The spin-off is that the linux community as a whole gets to share the fruits of the labor.

I know one of the things that keeps me from using a linux desktop at work (aside from corporate policies) is that the VWware ESX console is written in .Net and I can't make it work under linux. Which is a whole different rant topic.

Re:What's Novell Doing?

[gbjbaanb]

then just recompile it under Mono. Problem solved, surely. (well, it is if I believe all the rantings from the pro-Mono/.NET crowd who have posted a lot on this thread). Can't see the code? just drop it into ILDASM.

BTW I assume you meant the VI client, as the ESX console *is* Linux.

Re:What's Novell Doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

About 2. It seems pretty obvious to me that Microsoft is paying Novell indirectly for this and other projects (OOXML). They made a partnership some time ago but didn't announce the financial details.

Re:What's Novell Doing?

[pembo13]

Based on the Novel-Microsoft ads I see around the internet, I would dare say that Novel has indeed found away to make money off of this.

Hmm.

[apodyopsis]

Oh dear, I predict much MS bashing here.

I have no problem with MS trying to make money of Silverlight, OOXML or any of their proprietary standards, I simply want the option to choose not to use them. I also would like to see better informed decisions by major players on which standards to use.

My belief is that eventually people will choose truly open standards because, fundamentally, they are better (this is my personal viewpoint, feel free to differ and debate).

I would even support MS standards if they did not have a proven history of subverting standards ("embrace" and "extend").

Fortunately I think the days when they can replace any existing standard with their own by simply making it default on their own platform and using monopolistic pressure for force adoption are drawing to an end. The OOXML story has proven that one, it can only get harder for them and even MS looks to be using ODF.

Any standard that is well designed, well documented and no one entity has control over subsequent revisions get my vote.

Oh dear, that ending a bit more of a rambling rant then I intended. Sorry!

It's A Trap

[Mprx]

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/mono
As this blog post explains, while the current software patent situation exists, Mono is an unacceptable risk.

1. Microsoft's C#/CLI licensing people, at high levels, are aware of us.
2. Microsoft can choose to do damaging things in the current C#/CLI licensing ambiguity.
3. Microsoft considers the free software / Linux community to be a major competitive threat
4. Microsoft does not "compete" gently
5. A + B + C + D = ?

Re:It's A Trap

[Richard_at_work]

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/mono As this blog post explains, while the current software patent situation exists, Mono is an unacceptable risk.

What makes Mono an 'unacceptable risk' but allows Wine to become one of the most often praised open source projects on Slashdot?

Re:It's A Trap

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone write applications targeting Wine?

Re:It's A Trap

[goldsaturn]

That's a really old blog post (2004), even before a lot of the Novell Microsoft noncompetition agreements. They seem to be playing nice so far. They've got to get C# developers somehow. Where better than leeching from the *NIX community?

Re:It's A Trap

[HanClinto]

Several have used it, including Borland's Kylix.

Re:It's A Trap

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone write applications targeting Wine?

There is Google's Picassa for Linux.

Re:It's A Trap

[FishWithAHammer]

They aren't "leeching," because it's relatively trivial to write code that targets both Linux and Windows.

I'd have to try to write code that doesn't target both. I'd have to specifically do stupid things to limit me to a single platform. And even then, it wouldn't be hard to work around it.

That's the beauty of a managed-code language with reflection. :)

Re:It's A Trap

[pembo13]

You must be reading a different Slashdot. The common perception seems to be that Wine is a necessary evil for compatibility with some of the last necessary Windows only applications. I myself get along without Wine.

JavaScript

[MrMunkey]

I found this statement somewhat interesting

I personally do not want to build my applications on Javascript. I think that its a) slow b) ugly and c) spaghetti code, right?

He definitely has a point with A. and some with B. (though it's a matter of opinion), but C. is just FUD. He obviously doesn't understand JavaScript (not the DOM, JavaScript is not just the DOM). JavaScript can produce very elegant code if you know what you're doing. I'm sure you can get some pretty nasty C# spaghetti code too (though it may not be as likely). I doubt that any language will replace JavaScript any time soon. All the different browsers would have to support whatever replaces it almost simultaneously. Flash is getting close, but it seems the community is treating Silverlight as a "me too" offering from MS. /rant

His comments about Mozilla are pretty interesting. I appreciate the work on Mono that they've been doing, but it's still strange to be at the mercy of MS whenever they make a change to their setup. That alone will leave Mono/Moonlight at least one step behind and could be used as an argument for only using Windows.

Re:JavaScript

[nschubach]

I'd go out on a limb and say there is no language where you couldn't make "spaghetti code". For the record, yes, C# has goto and labels. From MSDN itself: (modded slightly cause I hate open brackets on a line by themselves.)

// statements_goto.cs // Nested search loops
using System;
public class GotoTest1 {
      public static void Main() {
            int x = 200, y = 4;
            int count = 0;
            string[,] myArray = new string[x,y]; // Initialize the array:
            for (int i = 0; i < x; i++)
                  for (int j = 0; j < y; j++)
                        myArray[i,j] = (++count).ToString(); // Read input:
            Console.Write("Enter the number to search for: "); // Input a string:
            string myNumber = Console.ReadLine(); // Search:
            for (int i = 0; i < x; i++)
                  for (int j = 0; j < y; j++)
                        if (myArray[i,j].Equals(myNumber))
                              goto Found;

            Console.WriteLine("The number {0} was not found.", myNumber);
            goto Finish;

      Found:
            Console.WriteLine("The number {0} is found.", myNumber);

      Finish:
            Console.WriteLine("End of search.");
      }
}

Re:JavaScript

[larry bagina]

Javascript has a low barrier to entry, so there's a lot of crap code (and crap coders). The same is true of VB and PHP. But you can do a lot of really elegant things in JavaScipt (not true of php or vb). Builtin regexp, first class functions, closures, extend classes at runtime... It can be procedural, it can be functional, it can be OO.

Oh, and Flash uses ActionScript which is... JavaScript. And Silerlight presumably could use JScript.Net.

Re:JavaScript

[Myen]

Umm, isn't Flash JavaScript (err, ECMAScript variant) anyway? No matter how much Flash manages to beat JS, it'd still be there; see Tamarin (Adobe working on a JS engine with Mozilla).

Re:JavaScript

[TheRaven64]

JavaScript is not slow. Most implementations of JavaScript are fairly slow because (like Ruby) they use direct AST execution, which is very slow. This is done deliberately, because startup time is more important than execution speed for most scripts on the web. The new WebKit JavaScript has a bytecode interpreter, which is quite fast (about as fast as most Smalltalk implementations).

Semantically, JavaScript is very close to Self, and implementations of Self were running at about 50% of the speed of the same algorithm implemented in C++ back in the '90s. These days we'd probably call that 'fast'.

JavaScript has a lot of advantages. It's got a fairly nice Self/Io style object model, first-class closures, and a huge number of people who know it. Supporting JavaScript's object model was one of the design goals for the Etoile Objective-C runtime library, and I hope to have it supported as a first-class development language by Etoile 0.6 (I wrote a Smalltalk JIT that uses the same object model as Objective-C for 0.4 and a lot of the code can be reused to support JavaScript).

Re:JavaScript

[molarmass192]

Flash is JavaScript-like, it's not JavaScript per se. There are a quadrillion extensions in there that aren't in JavaScript.

Re:JavaScript

[Anonymous Coward]

JavaScript can produce very elegant code if you know what you're doing.

That's awful kind of you, but really I don't know what gave you the idea that I know what I'm doing...

Re:JavaScript

[mounthood]

He obviously doesn't understand JavaScript (not the DOM, JavaScript is not just the DOM). JavaScript can produce very elegant code if you know what you're doing.

Namespaces and globals stand out as really bad downsides to Javascript vs. C# (or Java, etc..)

Re:JavaScript

[Shados]

Flash by using Flex can use other languages, even the CLR in Flex 3.0, if I did my research right (I'm no Flex dev, I just looked on their web site =P)

Re:JavaScript

[shutdown -p now]

JavaScript has a lot of advantages. It's got a fairly nice Self/Io style object model, first-class closures, and a huge number of people who know it.

Actually, you've got a huge number of people who think that know it - that is, who can write alert('Hello, world!') - but who would just stare at you blankly if you keep saying scary words such as "closures" or "prototypes".

That is, in fact, the true curse of JS - it is a very powerful language which is also very popular, but the vast majority of its users have no idea how to use its full power, and just use it as VB with curly braces (which is made possible by loose typing and dynamic conversions) - and the end result is indeed, more often than not, messy code. Which is a real pity.

Re:JavaScript

[multi io]

He obviously doesn't understand JavaScript (not the DOM, JavaScript is not just the DOM).

It should be obvious by now that Miguel has a mental blockade when it comes to grokking non-Microsoft technologies.

Re:JavaScript

[Abcd1234]

Amusingly enough, the *exact* same thing has been said about C++. To wit:

"That is, in fact, the true curse of C++ - it is a very powerful language which is also very popular, but the vast majority of its users have no idea how to use its full power, and just use it as C with classes - and the end result is indeed, more often than not, messy code. Which is a real pity."

'course, that doesn't change the truth of your statement, but it's interesting that Javascript isn't alone in that particular predicament (for the record, C++ has many *other* problems, but this is definitely one of them).

Re:JavaScript

[shutdown -p now]

Spot on - and yes, I have been saying that about C++, too. It is slightly better there because the C++ standard library, at least, forces a more modern approach - but all too often I've seen people ignoring it entirely, up to the point of rolling out their own String class, and sticking to the "tried and true" printf instead.

It's part of the reason why Java and C# were so successful - they didn't bring to the table anything new that couldn't be done in C++ (with a few minor exceptions), but they did force the programmer to use object-oriented techniques rather than writing Cish code (by removing the ability to write the latter in a straightforward manner - yes, you still have static methods, but at least, when writing one, a developer has to explicitly specify that it's static - and hopefully reflect on that decision).

Out of context.

[HanClinto]

Lord knows there's certainly stuff to criticize about de Icaza, but this isn't really one of them.

"I hope so" refers to Mono becoming the officially sanctioned .Net standard for Linux -- not that de Icaza hopes Microsoft would open up .Net. If you actually read the very next question in the article (I must be new here...), you'd have seen where de Icaza said:

In the meantime - I really don't think they are going to open source .Net.

-- they are talking about the possibility of Microsoft pulling a Sun/Java thing, and if the open-source effort would have been wasted as a result. The answer is "no, but I don't think they would open-source it anyways".

Text version for those with Javascript turned off

[Anonymous Coward]

http://derstandard.at/Text/?id=1216918402134

Much ado about nothing?

[walterbyrd]

Seems to me that practically nobody uses Mono, or plans to do so.

Re:Much ado about nothing?

[cloakable]

Apart from Migue De Icaza. He'd probably love it if Gnome were to be rewritten in Mono.

Re:Much ado about nothing?

[Shados]

No one uses Mono in the fanboy-heavy businesses, such as web development, and the people that go toward Mono tend to be .NET Ninjas (since you have to know it well to deal with the quirks and stuff), so you won't see them on discussion forums all that much.

At the last place I worked (a .NET shop), it was pretty scary how many of our competitors were using Mono for their back end, to the point we considered switching too (didn't from lack of ressources). .NET stuff sells well to gullible CEOs, and .NET stuff that can be scaled up horizontally for the cost of a cluster of commodity hardware sells REALLY well.

Or so they say, I never used Mono myself, but said competitors were growing faster than us, customer-base wise, so meh.

Re:Much ado about nothing?

[RightSaidFred99]

How many people used Java for business critical stuff when it was still maturing back in the 1.1-1.2 days? How many people immediately trusted Linux back in the mid-90's? If they can make Mono rock solid it will take off because .NET is crazy sweet. Java = nice. .NET = very nice.

Re:Much ado about nothing?

[gbjbaanb]

Does this mean that Mono, if done properly/fully, will supplant MS on the server, and begin to supplant it on the desktop? If it is that easy to move your code across, and the famework is there, and the GUI technologies (shame Mono doesn't intend to support WPF anytime soon as that seems to be the current fad) are there... then why would anyone want to spend $$$ on a MS OS, when they can scale up horizontally with commodity hardware and as many free OSs on it as you like. I see Linux servers growing all the time, when companies like Oracle sell you their DB, they give you a free OS to run it, all "optimized" and "supported" and so a very attractive proposition for PHBs. Perhaps one day all applications will be sold like this - as a VM image running a free OS where they can setup the installation for you.

It all worries me - partly the .NET lock-in I see with MS, where I am sure they think Mono won't succeed beyond the basics and they drop practically all support for all non-MS systems (just seems that way at the moment). That would mean they're happy with this .NET strategy to keep developers on Windows.

If Mono does start to succeed, what happens then? Will Ballmer say 'oh well, good for them?' or will the big management at MS do something? I do see these as interesting times.

Re:Much ado about nothing?

[miguel]

Apart from Migue De Icaza. He'd probably love it if Gnome were to be rewritten in Mono.

I am actually not a fan of rewriting software that works. Rewriting is not a decision that must be taken lightly, you introduce regressions, you might drop features, a lot of knowledge embedded in the small details is lost and so on.

But there are certain cases where rewriting is worth doing. I would like to see a few applications rewritten. I do not really want to "rewrite" the panel, but instead come up with new interaction metaphors for the main application launcher. Gnome-Do for example (already written in Mono) is a great tool, but it is a tool for power-users, not a tool for most people.

I would like to see new research, and new ideas for new panels rewritten, and I do not particularly care about what language or platform is used, as long as it produces some nice new ideas, and new metaphors. Gimme is such an attempt by Alex Graveley, written in Python.

I believe that the engine in Moonlight is worth reusing for many new kinds of applications, and it opens the doors for some new creative UIs. And you get to choose if you want to use it or not. If it offends your sensibilities that its written with Mono and C#, then do not use it. It really is that simple, nobody is forcing anyone to use the software I work on. If your religion prohibits prevents you from using software based on Mono, that is fine, nobody is asking you to change your religion.

Miguel.

Re:Much ado about nothing?

[cloakable]

It's not religion, it's a paranoia about taking a bite out of something with a big juicy hook in the middle of it.

Re:Much ado about nothing?

[walterbyrd]

This difference is (I think) Microsoft can pull the rug out from under mono any Microsoft decides to do so.

Since MS does that sort of thing all the time, I would be a little nervous about counting mono.

I could be completely wrong about that.

Mono vs Wine

[js_sebastian]

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/mono

As this blog post explains, while the current software patent situation exists, Mono is an unacceptable risk.

What makes Mono an 'unacceptable risk' but allows Wine to become one of the most often praised open source projects on Slashdot?

Wine can be used to run those few windows apps for which you do not have no linux replacement, under linux. Mono is a development environment which could be used for just about anything... what if gnome, or some important gnome apps, got ported to Mono, and the day after Microsoft comes up with the bill?.. or with usage restrictions of some kind... Please read the link in the parent post, before replying... Here it is again:

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/mono

Re:Mono vs Wine

[IBBoard]

Because Wine lets people play games, while Mono is a programming framework. Anything software related from Microsoft has to be instantly hated ;)

Re:Mono vs Wine

[squiggleslash]

People develop for Mono and many want it to become a standard part of GNU/Linux distributions. Wine is generally used as a last resort to run non-native applications, and has always been considered optional (well, except by Lindows/Linspire - does anyone use that any more?)

You develop for Mono because applications can run under it as fully integrated with the environment they run upon. You don't develop for Wine because your applications will look utterly stupid and feel completely unintegrated on every platform except Windows.

If Wine is a roaring success, and Microsoft brings the hammer down on it, the only people who suffer are commercial entities who refuse to develop GNU/Linux-native applications, and the occasional user who cannot find a free alternative to their favoured proprietary app.

If Mono is a roaring success, large swathes of the open source spectrum will become reliant upon it. If Microsoft brings the hammer down, it will no longer be possible to run the majority of free and open source applications on a free and open source operating system.

Re:Mono vs Wine

[TheRaven64]

Because no one (sensible) is advocating using WINE for new cross-platform development. WINE is a legacy support tool. People are advocating developing new applications with Mono. If people started advocating using WINE as a toolkit for new development on *NIX then there would almost certainly be similar complaints. If there are patent issues with WINE and Microsoft kills it, then people lose legacy app support. If there are patent issues with Mono and Microsoft kills it then people lose new apps. If people write new apps targeting WINE then they expose themselves to the same potential risk (less so, because most of WINE implements APIs that are almost certainly not covered by patents), and so no one is suggesting adopting WINE as a framework for new developing new parts of GNOME.

The entire point of the article is that Mono should not be integrated into GNOME. Exactly the same argument could be made for not integrating WINE into GNOME, but since no one is advocating doing this, no one feels the need to post things arguing against it.

Re:Mono vs Wine

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent points, and I have one more to add:

Win32 already dominates the industry, so allowing win32 apps to run on Linux helps make Linux more useful and makes it easier to for Windows users to switch to Linux.

In contrast, .Net is still young and hasn't taken over. Porting it to Linux doesn't significantly make Linux more useful, nor does it significantly help anyone migrate from Windows to Linux. Instead it helps .Net spread and become more successful, and makes .Net more attractive relative to Java or native Linux development.

This is also why Samba is a good thing. Wine and Samba both erode the monopoly advantage of *existing* dominant protocols and APIs, whereas Mono helps a nascent API grow into a dominant one.

Re:Mono vs Wine

[tirnacopu]

except by Lindows/Linspire - does anyone use that any more?

At least 1,5 million users only in the US, there must also be a few of us in the rest of the world, thank you for noticing.

Re:Mono vs Wine

[Anonymous Coward]

People can develop for mono to get OSS software running on a MS platform.

Once people get used to running OSS, they won't care what they run it on. So, the KDEs/GNOMEs of the world will be used.

That's one of the only reasons I can see mono ever being conceived, otherwise it's a waste of time.

Good work Miguel - hope you succeed and don't succumb to other shit.

Re:Mono vs Wine

[shutdown -p now]

Because no one (sensible) is advocating using WINE for new cross-platform development.

You'd be surprised. It's not exactly a popular idea in the Linux land (including guys who made Wine in the first place), but some Windows shops do actually advocate that approach for writing "portable" applications. There was even a widget toolkit somewhere, originally Win32-only, which claimed to be "Win32/Unix portable" solely because it could be compiled with WineLib.

Re:Mono vs Wine

[weicco]

Mono is a development environment which could be used for just about anything

And so is n+1 other frameworks, libraries and programming languages. I don't see how Mono is different from those. Couldn't MS come up with patents against almost any one of those? Or I could be missing some big picture here, which wouldn't be the first time :)

Do you honestly believe that the open source

[Hohlraum]

or gnome community will ever get behind microsoft sponsored technologies?

Whether anyone wants to admit it one of the major driving forces behind the creation of gnome was simply because QT wasn't completely free.

I really don't see it ever happening. There are way too many good technologies out there to adopt that don't have the baggage.

Re:Do you honestly believe that the open source

[nawcom]

News update: Qt (Not QT, but Qt) is now completely GPLed (v3). People type in QT like it's a damn acronym or something; makes me ponder why they never get it straight.

Re:Do you honestly believe that the open source

[metamatic]

The GNOME team already got behind Microsoft technologies. Mono ships as part of the GNOME desktop, it's required for running Tomboy and F-Spot.

Re:get over it

[IBBoard]

I use .Net and in some situations I prefer it over Java. I use Linux as well. I severely doubt I'll be using Silverlight any time soon, though, as I try to avoid using Flash where possible.

The only reasons .Net exists are because Microsoft needed an up-to-date language for developers who use Visual Studio, because Java was old and someone needed to give it a clean start, because Java takes a slightly different approach to C++ in some places (so C# can get migrating C++ developers) and because they wanted a real "write lots of languages to a single base and port anywhere" language.

!flamebait

[mlwmohawk]

Sorry, it isn't flame bait. To some it may be, but this is my honest opinion.

Microsoft's actions on OOXML, alone, show that it can not be trusted to play fair. I see no rational reason why the open source movement should validate *any* of their technology without a clear and unambiguous free and open license and a durable specification that does not become a never ending game of catch up.

Microsoft is the enemy of innovation and open source/free software.

Mono and Wine

[Kaseijin]

What makes Mono an 'unacceptable risk' but allows Wine to become one of the most often praised open source projects on Slashdot?

Not even the Wine developers advocate using it to write new programs.

re-implement Gnome in Moonlight?

[multi io]

Wow, now he wants to re-implement the Gnome Panel, file manager and Evolution in Moonlight. Has he finished implementing them in Mono already? This is kinda funny -- every time Microsoft comes up with some new technology, Miguel scrambles to write a clone of it, then goes on to re-implement Gnome in that. Reimplementing stuff is so much fun anyway! If MS wants to halt all actual progress in Gnome, all have to do is churn out new hype technologies every 12 months or so.

err

[Vexorian]

Miguel de Icaza: "We could refresh the look and feel of the entire desktop with Moonlight"

Translation: We'll try to make the whole desktop dependent on a MS standard.

Interview: Mono leader criticizes double standards when it comes to the open web and talks about future developments and the increasing openness at Microsoft

The increasing openness of these guys?

The problem with 3.5 is, that it includes 3.0 where they basically dumped a bunch of libraries that are not really part .Net

You meant MS changed the whole definition of what is part of .net to include stuff not covered by OSP or that are not portable? Shocker.

Also one thing that is very unique: Microsoft is going to be distributing an add-on to Moonlight called the "media pack" And that add-on contains all the media codecs that Silverlight uses, so it contains the MP3 decoder, the VC1 decoder, WMV and all that stuff. We are going to provide Moonlight and they are adding the codec parts - and this is going to be totally legal, it's something that they are actually encouraging - that's pretty sweet

Moonlight is going to require a proprietary addon in order to actually interoperate with silverlight, pretty sweet.

For every distribution, also x86, x86_64 and PowerPC. In fact we are going to provide binaries for BSDs, for Solaris - both on SPARC and Intel.

Same old, you'll have to download them from MS and only MS, and SLED will be the only distro one able to ship them. Oh, it looks like Icaza actually confirms so in page 2.

I hope so. It might end up that at some point Microsoft just open ups .NET

hahahahahha

you get C#, you get a DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime), you get a fantastic graphics engine with a fantastic animation framework, you get video, you get audio, multi-language compatibility and so on and so forth. And I get a JITted language also, and a static language with dynamic features that beats Javascript out of the water.

As a hacker you get Microsoft, Microsoft, compatibility to Microsoft languages, and Microsoft. And beating javascript with Microsoft.

As websites start using Silverlight we don't want Linux to be in a position where you can't access those websites. Also we thought Silverlight will be important enough and have enough market share just because it is Microsoft doing it

Specially after the free, false advert of 'silverlight works in Linux' thanks to moonlight.

I mean - how many people outside of the technology world really know about Linux at the moment.

Typical MS fanboyism from Icaza

And even the Mozilla guys - the keynote we had here was done on a mac, every single Mozilla developer uses a Mac.

Diverting attention are we?

And it's funny, they constantly attack Silverlight, they constantly attack Flash and then all of them use proprietary operating systems, they don't seem to have a problem doing it. And then they had the Guiness record thing for Firefox 3 and you went to the website and it had a flash map to show where people are downloading - so there definitely is a double standard here.

Icaza here's the deal: AT least FLASH is NOT FREAKING MICROSOFT! Don't you get it? call it a double standard if you want, just missing all the previous record of Microsoft's anticompetitive actions and the clear intent to take over the world with .net and how Mono makes Linux threated by it... It is getting ridiculous.

And that's after all their claiming that you can do everything in AJAX - so they definitely don't "walk the walk".

Mozilla is evil therefore we'll help poisoning the web with Silverlight, fuck open standards.

Re:err

[PenGun]

This is relevant to what exactly? He made a bunch of points and you said nothing.

  We have the monster reeling and you want to us emulate it's stupidity by bandaging it's self inflicted wounds. Please.

Re:err

[AnonChef]

-1 Pointless Rant

Re:err

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not Miguel.

Re:err

[shutdown -p now]

Ah, Slashdot, where a troll is a Troll, except when it's about Microsoft, and then all trolls, no matter how blunt and obvious, are +5 Insightful all of a sudden...

That worked so well for OS/2...

[argent]

The business side explanation is that we want to make sure that Linux remains a first class citizen on the web. As websites start using Silverlight we don't want Linux to be in a position where you can't access those websites. Also we thought Silverlight will be important enough and have enough market share just because it is Microsoft doing it.

Replacing the open-systems UNIX API with the Microsoft controlled .NET API is awfully reminiscent of how IBM made OS/2 such a popular desktop.

Open Source Leads by Microsoft Example

[mgiuca]

Did we not just have an article in which Microsoft claimed OSS were copying all their ideas and not innovating? We all scoffed and had a good ol' laugh at Microsoft, how silly they are to see OSS in that light!

And now it seems the future of the web is to try implementing their standards. Miguel even admits that it isn't open enough for him to implement all of it. Talk about innovation, or lack thereof.

2004 called...

[metamatic]

Nice theory, but in practice the GNOME desktop includes Mono, so apparently the devs changed their minds.

This reminds me of a movie quote...

[Spy der Mann]

"Bill, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Icazablanca. Coming soon to your local theater.

brand recognition

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey. Brand recognition cuts both ways.

If you make things that suck badly enough for a long enough period of time, your company gets known as a maker of sucky products.

Gnome and Mono flame

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] Miguel de Icaza of Gnome and Mono flame.

Freudian misread.

Let's be frank: his unconditional love of M$ is really inflammatory.

This man needs a wakeupcall.

[miffo.swe]

What makes Miquel think that he and mono is so special to Microsoft? If you look at Microsofts history everyone who have tried to cooperate has ended up with a knife in their back. The ones who compete with them have been left a smoldering piece of rubbel. The potential risks with mono is enormous since the one who control it is activly out to destroy linux despite its humble marketshare. Imagine if Linux wore to take a lot bigger marketshare? Does anyone think they would not panic and press the SCO-style litigation button?

What good can come out of integrating the most Linux applications with Microsofts patented techs? From Microsofts point of view i can understand i can understand it but for OSS? MS must just love the thought of OSS applications working better on Windows than on Linux and the ability to completely thrashing Gnome any time they feel like it.

If we need a better development enviroment then we should build a better one instead of riding two carts behind Microsoft. If we need dotnet compability thats one thing but building native Linux applications in java or dotnet is just insane.

From what i have seen of dotnet and mono they are (i didnt thought it possible) slower than even java. Why we should build applications on purpouse thats goddog slow is beyond me. Why should we put enormous efforts into making the kernel and hardware faster just to sacrifice it to badly deigned software? I want my system to have lots of power left to do new stuff, not the exact same stuff but slower.

Re:This man needs a wakeupcall.

[HermMunster]

Humble marketshare is relative. When Win 3.x came out marketshare was very small. It took years to grow it.

Linux worldwide is probably about 50 million installs. That's probably more than Microsoft had with Win 3.x a couple years into it's life cycle.

50 Million worldwide users compared to what a monopolist stole is still significant. If I had 50 million in my target audience I'd be proud.

A small percent of 90% is still a huge number when one understands what that 90% represents.

Re:Idiot

[FishWithAHammer]

Sure there are, trollboy. Like "his employer realizes that interoperability is the future, and that Mono's a good way to get it."

No Support For Microsoft

[HermMunster]

I thought we'd all learned that supporting Microsoft technologies allows Microsoft to use those technologies against the competition and against the user. Look at what we have today with Windows Vista. It has 47 different programs that collect information about you and report that back to Microsoft. This is not a good thing. It is a violation of your privacy. It is a terrible precedent.

Microsoft uses their techology to trap you into their operating system and thus traps you into buying their future products. Look at Word and the formats used. Those are meant to trap you into their products. Even their ISO efforts demonstrate their less than honest intentions in regards to standards. For example they are using their format to manipulate the ISO into adopting other formats for video, etc that were already denied ISO standardization.

Particularly this has to do with Moonlight. I personally remove silverlight from everyone's computer that comes into my store. I have also found that Microsoft is now installing their web search facilities onto people's computers without their knowledge of what it is and why it is being installed. Microsoft is using their monopoly to create a new monopoly in another market.

They are using silverlight to do the same thing. Not only that, if you remove silverlight, then tell silverlight not to ever be installed again, apply a few other critical patches and the silverlight prohibition reference is delete and you are prompted again to install it.

We do not, absolutely do not, want to pursue any Microsoft technology. It is in the best interests of the future of computing and the internet to not adopt Microsoft's technologies.

Re:get over it

[miguel]

The only reasons .Net exists are because Microsoft needed an up-to-date language for developers who use Visual Studio, because Java was old and someone needed to give it a clean start, because Java takes a slightly different approach to C++ in some places (so C# can get migrating C++ developers) and because they wanted a real "write lots of languages to a single base and port anywhere" language.

Actually, the reason .NET exists is because Microsoft was prohibited after the Sun/MS lawsuit in 1997 from making changes that they needed to Java.

The changes that Microsoft did to Java included J/Direct and delegates.

Although Java does have a mechanism for calling into native APIs using JNI, it is cumbersome to use. JNI is a technology that requires developers to write a chunk of code in C++ and a chunk in Java to bind the C++ code. Microsoft's alternative, J/Direct allows all the code to be written in the native language. It now exists in .NET as P/Invoke, and it makes calling native APIs easy, and does not require any native code to go with it (this is the reason that using the SWT library for Java requires you to ship architecture-specific glue code).

Some Java developers did notice that the lack of something like J/Direct was a pain, and eventually came up with a system built on top of JNI that does what J/Direct used to do, the Java Native Access APIs.

The other bit were delegates. Delegates are merely the object oriented version of function pointers, but in addition to capturing the address of a function, they also capture the instance that is associated with the object. At the time Sun published a paper describing why they did not like delegates (http://java.sun.com/docs/white/delegates.html). It is an interesting read considering that pretty much everything on their case against delegates turned out to be wrong. Java would me a much better language and a simpler language to develop for had they allowed delegates to go into it.

The 1997 Java lawsuit prevented them from using it, but that does not mean that Java did not add a lot of value and was not a great idea to begin with. So Microsoft had to write their own, from scratch. In the process they would add the features that they needed (and in Mono, we use those extensively) and with the hindsight of knowing what was good and bad about Java, they could build a better Java, and that is what they did.

Miguel.

Re:Idiot

[mlwmohawk]

We need "interoperability" only in as much as benefits our cause. Microsoft is hostile to open source and Linux.

mono and moonbat are not a "must haves" yet, and supporting them is a mistake that undercuts the competitive environment. We should be driving open and usable standards, not the convicted monopolist.

oh puhleeze! - TAG WHOCARES

[toby]

Miguel is irrelevant. Microsoft is irrelevant. Mono is irrelevant. Moon/Silverlight is irrelevant. Stop publishing the FUD.

Yeah... like another linux distro?

[leftie]

-Yeah, Miguel and Co. wasted all that time working on Mono that they could have used on something truly innovative, open and free, like wasting his time making the 773rd different distro of the exact same Linux operating system every other distro is making, but this one has a BROWN colored desktop theme, right?

Me thinks he barketh up the wrong tree.

-In the real world, very few people are going to stop using M$ because Linux isn't capable of working with them. People will stop using Linux if it can't be made to work with M$, though.

Re:Yeah... like another linux distro?

[gbjbaanb]

true, though imagine if they made an Exchange clone, would that have helped Linux (server) takeup a lot more than yet another programming platform?

Just one example.

Where's the sellout tag? (no message)

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome is fine but his views are in sharp contrast to freedoms. I did not RTFA, I saw red immediately upon noticing his name.

Re:Idiot

[FishWithAHammer]

We need "interoperability" only in as much as benefits our cause.

Then your cause will continue to flounder and suck. Isn't that so awesome?!

Microsoft is hostile to open source and Linux.

There's a fairly significant cultural shift going on at Microsoft. They've got a considerable amount of code under permissive open source licenses (you do recall that the Ms-PL and Ms-RL are OSI-approved licenses, right?), and, more importantly, they're getting behind open standards. Personally, I don't give a shit whether they go open source so long as they adhere to standards; their current direction as a company is indicating considerably more support for open standards, and they should be applauded for such.

Unfortunately, it seems like the zealots, as per their M.O., are unable to recognize progress. Just more paranoia and vitriol. It's interesting.

mono and moonbat are not a "must haves" yet, and supporting them is a mistake that undercuts the competitive environment.

Really! It undercuts the competitive environment by being another choice? Interesting...sounds like insecurity.

We should be driving open and usable standards, not the convicted monopolist.

Hi there, open standard!

o rly

[pxc]

I'll give you an (offensive, sorry) analogy.

Anyway, to translate your summary
1) Don't date Jill, date Jane
2) Jill is hotter than Jane
3) I hate and do not trust Jill
What if I'm advising you against dating Jill not because she's worse as a girl, but because she's a lying whore who'll ONLY HURT YOU IN THE END!? *sob*

PS: Microsoft, you bitch, you broke my heart.

No more than Linux is a SCO trap

[leftie]

SCO is about to get a new sugar daddy to fund a whole new round of Linux lawsuits. Corporatist extremists are going to keep on suing Linux one way or another over and over until they land one of their lawsuits in the courtroom of a right wing extremist like Scalia until one of them owns Linux, or right wing extremists like Scalia stop getting appointed to the Federal courts.

So Mono is no more of a "trap" than Linux is. Neither is in the clear.

Re:No more than Linux is a SCO trap

[Anonymous Coward]

is your nick a reference to your politics or to the hand you use to jack yourself when you're ranting on /.? you are so amazingly full of shit and you don't even realise it.

everyone else does, though

Mono as life saver(or at least a computer saver)

[Temposs]

I just got hired on to do some contracting work for a company using some .NET implementations.

As an Ubuntu user for the last 2+ years, Mono means I don't have to buy/install Windows on my machine, and can deliver C# code that works on the .NET platform.

For practical purposes, at least, Mono can be quite handy.

Miguel de Icaza has found his niche and delivers well within it. GNOME should probably keep use of Mono pretty limited to non-essential parts of its desktop, though, for the commonly mentioned patent liability. It would be particularly bad if something like GNOME Panel was reimplemented with Mono/Moonlight(as Miguel suggests), and then Microsoft played its ace rendering it useless.

Re:Idiot

[mlwmohawk]

Really! It undercuts the competitive environment by being another choice? Interesting...sounds like insecurity.

The introduction of false choice is not competitive. Giving Microsoft's HUGE amount of cash and influence any support is a waste of our time and bad for the market. If there is the illusion of support for a Microsoft proprietary standard it will be exploited by Microsoft against us.

History has shown that everyone that works with Microsoft eventually gets screwed.

Java, lack of delgates, JNI

[Latent Heat]

Java has a pretty slick dynamic dispatch of GUI events in the form of java.beans.EventHandler. Is this everything delegates do, maybe not. But it allows you to hook a named method of any active object instance into a menu, mouse action, or other GUI event. Maybe Sun doesn't promote its use beyond IDEs that handle Java Beans and Sun still wants you to use anonymous inner classes, but this facility is pretty powerful, I use it in my GUI programming, and it works just fine.

Whether P/Invoke is slicker than JNI is maybe in the eye of the beholder. If all you want to do is call a method in a Windows dll, P/Invoke is pretty streamlined. If you want to interact with a COM object under .NET, I guess it isn't too bad; if you want a .NET app to act as a COM object, there is some kind of registration/assembly boojum that I haven't figured out.

JNI may be kind of clunky on the C++ side, and it requires "cooperation" on the C++ side I don't see needed with P/Invoke. Also on the minus side, it only allows calls to C function on the C++ side, only allowing invocation of C++ object methods through some kind of handle and casting through static C function prototypes.

On the plus side, I have found JNI to be lucidly documented. If you respect the object locking conventions, I found JNI is perfectly bi-directional -- Java calls into C++, which can call back into Java, or the other way around. I don't know of any way for C++ to call back into .NET unless you register the .NET object as COM, and as I said, the process for COM registration of a .NET object makes JNI look simple and streamlined.

I also find JNI to be thoroughly platform agnostic. They have those naming conventions for the .so and .dll files under OS-X, Linux, Windows -- for a Java app calling down to C++ (for my work for a numeric package written in C++), you have to compile a separate C++ module for each target platform, but you give your users your .jar file and bundle of the different C++ modules, and the correct C++ target is called on whatever platform they are using.

The other thing that has me on Java these days is that I was pretty much hard-wired with my scientific visualization graphcs into Win32 on account of the WinG features developed in the early 90's to get DOS game programs to switch to Windows. I am pretty dependent on the capabilities of ScrollWindowEx() and CreateDIBSection() in order to have a scrollable frame buffer widget where I can set gray level or color of each and every pixel efficiently. Every other platform than Win32, and that includes all of the 'Nix stuff layered on top of X comes up short, as does Microsoft's Windows Forms of all things.

Guess what. Java supports what I want with their BufferedImage() class and if WinForms has anything near equivalent (I guess they do, but they spank your hand that you are doing something not-secure to lock the bytes of the frame buffer). BufferedImage() scrolls had been clunky on Unix owing to the limitations on X, but Sun has a workaround where you can use OpenGL automagically though a commandline switch to get the same WinG hardware accelerated goodness for frame buffer scrolls.

I am solidly a Win32 kind of person, especially with regard to graphics, and Java is a better front end to Win32 along with a way to port Win32 features to other platforms than .NET, wxWidgets, GTK, etc, etc.

Re:Java, lack of delgates, JNI

[shutdown -p now]

Java has a pretty slick dynamic dispatch of GUI events in the form of java.beans.EventHandler. Is this everything delegates do, maybe not. But it allows you to hook a named method of any active object instance into a menu, mouse action, or other GUI event. Maybe Sun doesn't promote its use beyond IDEs that handle Java Beans and Sun still wants you to use anonymous inner classes, but this facility is pretty powerful, I use it in my GUI programming, and it works just fine.

In the end, .NET delegates are really just syntactic sugar for Java listener interfaces - anyone who'd seen what a C# delegate declaration compiles to IL would know that. The only difference is that runtime inserts the glue code automatically.

Whether P/Invoke is slicker than JNI is maybe in the eye of the beholder. If all you want to do is call a method in a Windows dll, P/Invoke is pretty streamlined. If you want to interact with a COM object under .NET, I guess it isn't too bad; if you want a .NET app to act as a COM object, there is some kind of registration/assembly boojum that I haven't figured out.

Registration is a COM issue, not a .NET issue (you'd have to do it for a native COM component as well).

Anyway. On one hand, Java has a 3rd-party solution in form of J/Invoke, which is pretty slick. On the other, C# still beats it at interop because it has structs, unions (StructLayout.Explicit), unsigned integer types, and pointers - which is enough to express any, no matter how complicated, C or C++ API directly. This is rarely truly needed, but when it is, the ability to do it is invaluable.

I don't know of any way for C++ to call back into .NET unless you register the .NET object as COM, and as I said, the process for COM registration of a .NET object makes JNI look simple and streamlined.

There is a little-known trick there. You don't actually need to register COM objects to call them - .NET COM marshalling works for any .NET object if you pass it through P/Invoke to C++ code. You can manually declare a C++ COM-style interface (i.e., with AddRef/Release/QueryInterface in the first three vtable slots), write a function that takes a pointer to that, call it via P/Invoke passing it a .NET object, and it would just work. It even works in Mono on any supported platform, even though Linux doesn't have any Win32 COM infrastructure (including registration). In the same manner, you can return objects from C++ that are directly callable from .NET.

Every other platform than Win32, and that includes all of the 'Nix stuff layered on top of X comes up short, as does Microsoft's Windows Forms of all things.

It's a well-known fact that any serious development using WinForms requires calling WinAPI via P/Invoke for something eventually, so no surprise there. A pity, but at least they make it easy to do so by exposing handles of all controls (on the other hand, it effectively kills portability right there). WPF is much better in that regard, though.

am solidly a Win32 kind of person, especially with regard to graphics, and Java is a better front end to Win32

If only Java applications would look native on Win32... they made great progress with 1.5 and 1.6, but their font smoothing still sucks, and all file open/save dialogs are non-native (so you don't get customized favorites pane, and proper context menu with items from all Explorer plugins that are installed on the system).

Microsoft's fonts were never Free Software.

[jbn-o]

More to your point: Microsoft's "Core Fonts" were never Free Software. The license for those fonts always prevented making derivative works (very handy when your language and usage isn't taken into consideration) which kills its chance of being Free Software. There are other restrictions which prohibit them from being considered Free Software as well. Those fonts are merely distributable non-commercially and verbatim (including the cumbersome packaging in which they were initially made available). So, as you said, Microsoft quite literally released some fonts.

Why JNI bidirectionality is so powerful

[Latent Heat]

A big reason I am sold on Java, as I have indicated, is that it is a platform-independent way to get the capabilities of Win32 GDI.

Suppose I have a high-performance native-compiled C++ program that needs to display some graphics. I write a Java front end having a Java Swing widget incorporating BufferedImage or other Java2D facilities. I write an application-specific but abstract interface to the Java widget. I call into my C++ module using JNI, and that module has a C++ object wrapper for the JNI call back to the Java widget. Voila, I have a high-performance numeric C++ program that is able to produce graphical representations and animations in a platform independent way.

Again, there may be a Mono equivalent to this, but since WinForms doesn't have anything like BufferedImage, and neither do wxWidgets and a whole lot of other things, this is why I am going the Java route to high-performance platform-independent computing.

Re:Why JNI bidirectionality is so powerful

[miguel]

Hello,

The equivalent in .NET and Mono is called P/Invoke and in Microsoft modified Java it was called J/Direct.

The scenario that you describe: Java calling native code, and native code calling back is also supported by P/Invoke.

With P/Invoke the way you call into a native method is simple, for example if you wanted to call glDrawBuffer, you would do:

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

class Sample {
        [DllImport ("GL")]
        extern static void glDrawBuffer (int mode);

        static void Main ()
        {
              glDrawBuffer (10);
        }
}

That is the entire binding: you do not need to have any C++ glue compiled, compile the above and run, and it will call your glDrawBuffer method.

If you are happy with Java, by all means, continue using Java. I was merely explaining why Microsoft had to create .NET (they were bared from using it by a judge).

Miguel.

Nice guy

[jav1231]

Miguel is probably a nice guy I just always had a bad feeling about coddling Microsoft. There's a reason the oxpecker doesn't sit on the back of the lion to feed.

Neither Mono nor Moonlight is open

[BhaKi]

The very fact that M$'s help is necessary their development indicates that neither Mono nor Moonlight are open. If something is really open, an implementor must not have anything to do with another implementation.

Interoperability???

[BhaKi]

If M$ dictates the list of OSs which can have this "interoperability", who would want to be their slaves? Perhaps only people like you would.

Mono isn't irrelevant

[christoofar]

As long as Portable.NET is around, Microsoft can't kill OSS by sucking people into Mono and then killing it with licensing changes. Portable.NET is a stack that's just as good as Mono.

Wake up from "open standards"

[BhaKi]

For something to be an open standard, the following things are necessary:

1. The specification of the standard should be publicly available. There should not be any restrictions or agreements that have to be signed to get it.

2. The authority to specify updates, revisions and newer versions of the standard should be equally available to all implementors.

3. Implementors must not be needed to do anything with another implementor.

Mono and Moonlight clearly violate 2 and 3.

Re:Wake up from "open standards"

[FishWithAHammer]

Setting aside the fact that your definition of "open standard" is nothing like any I can find out there:

2. The authority to specify updates, revisions and newer versions of the standard should be equally available to all implementors.

It is equally available. Suggest a revision, up-down vote of the ECMA folks in charge.

3. Implementors must not be needed to do anything with another implementor.

They're not. It's just easier to pick the brains of other implementors.

The OSI definition is far better, and ECMA 335 fits that bill.

Re:Wake up from "open standards"

[BhaKi]

Setting aside the fact that your definition of "open standard" is nothing like any I can find out there:

2. The authority to specify updates, revisions and newer versions of the standard should be equally available to all implementors.

It is equally available. Suggest a revision, up-down vote of the ECMA folks in charge.

3. Implementors must not be needed to do anything with another implementor.

They're not. It's just easier to pick the brains of other implementors.

The OSI definition is far better, and ECMA 335 fits that bill.

My apologies for not being precise enough. I was not referring to the ECMA 335 specification. I was referring to MS.NET which is a superset of ECMA 335 with many MS-specific extensions.

The openness (or the lack of it) of MS.NET is more relevant than that of ECMA 335, because MS.NET is the de facto standard. What I mean is that most, if not all, developers who write .NET applications don't read the ECMA spec. Instead, they just visit MSDN and code for MS.NET. Ask any .NET developer in the IT market, the question - "How do you know the .NET spec? Through MSDN or through ECMA?", if you want to confirm.

FYI, Microsoft itself doesn't mention anywhere on its websites that "MS.NET is an implementation of ECMA 335 with the addition of MS-specific extensions". Instead it uses ambiguous words like "framework", "technology", etc.

That's great but not enough

[BhaKi]

The real problem is that most people won't code for the ECMA spec or the Portable.NET spec. Instead, they code for MS.NET.

Re:get over it

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the reason .NET exists is because Microsoft was prohibited after the Sun/MS lawsuit in 1997 from making changes that they needed to Java.

That's one way of putting it but we all read the emails leaked in Comes V. Microsoft. We know the game and we know the outcome, Microsoft only succeeded in delaying the inevitable.

It's plainly transparent what's going on, it's the same thing that happened when Netscape and Sun promised cross platform web apps in the '90s. The stooge act is well and truly played out, in case you haven't noticed; web browsers are ubiquitous. Despite the best efforts of your idols over in Redmond, we now have a universal runtime environment and true cross platform deployment. The monkey will scream and there's nothing Microsoft can do about it!

What about Vala?

[emblemparade]

I'm really amazed that in this entire discussion, Vala isn't mentioned. I find Vala to be an ingenious project with the potential to please the whole GNOME community at once, especially users.

De Icaza originally created Mono because he wanted a nice high-level language to create GNOME applications quickly. Well, Mono did not quite deliver the goods. The applications are somewhat easier to develop (though I wonder if C# is really that much better than Python, which is also widely used in GNOME), but the applications require the large Mono runtime, which displeases users who want to get as much out of their computer as possible, and there's of course the problem that the whole project is precarious because of its relationship to Microsoft.

Vala does exactly what De Icaza originally wanted, without any of the costs. Developers get a high-level language, about equal to and in some cases more powerful than C#. Users get super-fast natively built applications, without any need for a virtual machine. And nobody has to worry about Microsoft, ever.

I realize that much of the excitement over Mono has nothing to do with GNOME in particular -- things like Silverlight support in non-Windows platforms, etc. I wish, though, that the discussion can go back to the problem Mono was trying to solve, and also make a fair comparison to what Vala is trying to achieve now.

While Vala won't help us get Silverlight running on OS X, it definitely is a project which could appeal to developers on various platforms. Vala compiles into standard C using the portable glib and GObject libraries, and makes it very easy to wrap and call standard C libraries, the most ubiquitous ABI, making it fully interoperable with practically anything you need. Some projects written in Java, for example, might be better of rewritten in Vala.

I encourage all of you to follow the progress of Vala, and help increase its visibility.

Built-in race condition

[Tony]

WHile I agree with a lot of your message, there is one bit with which I disagree:

It sure doesn't hurt that C# is a vastly more pleasant language to work with than C++ or Java or Python or any of the other "preferred" free software languages.

Well, considering C++ sucks, and Python uses stupid whitespace-for-scoping (but otherwise isn't a bad language), and the Java libraries look like something that exploded at a dictionary factory, you're not comparing C# to the best of the best. But even then, I find C# to be just like MS-Windows -- not bad-looking, but there are some stupid design decisions that fuck it all up.

Have they fixed the race condition in which you can invoke a delegate, and have someone remove themselves from the delegate at the same time, and you get an exception? I mean, how stupid was it to design a core language feature with a built-in race condition? Then you have to create accessor functions to mutex your delegate. (That's a phrase that sounds dirty, but isn't.)

C# has many little things like that. It came close to being a decent re-mix of Java, but missed wide of the mark on stupid stuff like that.

Other than that: I definitely agree that having an independent implementation of the CLI and CLR is important.

Re:Built-in race condition

[coolGuyZak]

there's quite a bit that went into that design decision, I bet. Here's a few resins why it would be a bad idea to build locking into a delegate:

• deadlocks. Thread A invokes a delegate, locking it. Thread b invokes a different delegate, locking it as well. Thread a attempts to invoke b, the thread encounters the implicit lock & sleeps. Thread b attempts to invoke a in the meantime. Oops.
• overhead: locking is expensive. Do you want to deal with the overhead of a lock each time you invoke the delegate? Keep in mind that events, a central facet of .net development, are all implemented as delegates.
• I don't even want to consider the ramifications of invoking an asynchronous function on an autolocking delegate...

Some snarking on GNOME, KDE, everyone

[jmorris42]

> it's required for running Tomboy and F-Spot.

Yup, I know that because PackageKit removed those when I told it to get Mono the hell off my Fedora install. Those are just little desktop toys that the system runs just fine without. And the day that isn't so is when I move to Xfce.... assuming I don't make the jump sooner. I have ran it for days at at time now and really like it. But it doesn't offer any big reason to migrate everyone at work so for now I'm sticking to the same brand of dogfood I'm feeding everyone else.

No, KDE isn't on my radar. There aren't any problems I have with GNOME that KDE solves. Both are copycats. GNOME seems to favor cloning Microsoft's internals and putting a Mac like UI for Dummies on it, KDE takes whatever TrollTech throws over the wall[1], heaps love on it and then clones Microsoft's braindamaged UI with those (admittedly nice) tools.

The Xfce effort seems to at least be trying to explore what a modern desktop for UNIX looks like. And of course GNUStep will someday be insanely great! Probably just in time to ship as the default on GNU Hurd.

[1] Yes Qt is now GPL, but just how many non Trolltech employees have commit access? In a race for an outsider to get a changeset committed between a Java devel and a Qt devel, which one wins? If any.

Re:Some snarking on GNOME, KDE, everyone

[metamatic]

KDE 4 doesn't clone the Windows UI.

Unfortunately.

Re:Some snarking on GNOME, KDE, everyone

[shutdown -p now]

The Xfce effort seems to at least be trying to explore what a modern desktop for UNIX looks like. And of course GNUStep will someday be insanely great! Probably just in time to ship as the default on GNU Hurd.

And in the meantime, we have Ratpoison ;)

FUD?

[benwaggoner]

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Being excitedly positive about something may be many things, but it's not Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

Re:get over it

[AnonChef]

+1 Interesting

Re:Idiot

[FishWithAHammer]

The introduction of false choice is not competitive. Giving Microsoft's HUGE amount of cash and influence any support is a waste of our time and bad for the market.

No, it's a waste of your time and bad for you. For me, it's quite attractive, because I do not have an unreasonable fear of working on Windows (it's my primary OS).

If there is the illusion of support for a Microsoft proprietary standard it will be exploited by Microsoft against us.

Exploited against you, not me; I develop primarily for Microsoft's market.

History has shown that everyone that works with Microsoft eventually gets screwed.

If you don't give them the chance to become a good citizen, they never will. This is somewhat naive--but I lose nothing if they return to form.

What was the point of Mono again?

[Ant P.]

After rewriting half of GNOME in C#, what do they have to show for it? Zero compatibility with windows .Net apps, a dependency tree the size of the Amazon and the ever-looming patent threat.

And over in the blue corner, we have KDE. Not only has it actually shown an improvement in the past three years, they've quietly got it running _on_ windows. They weren't even trying to!

Yes, I'm probably starting a KDE vs. GNOME flamewar, but if you've read this far down you're likely too bored to care anyway.

Interopeability

[KwKSilver]

Novell's business model is "interoperability." Mono will provide a significant level of interoperability between Windows and Linux.

If "interoperability" is Novell's business model, what does it do if MS chooses not to renew the patent deal they signed a couple of years ago which had a five year term?. Tick... tick... tick... Up the creek without a paddle? tick...

Rule #1 to let free software survive

[Anonymous Coward]

You never ever do anything with Microsoft. If Miguel still talks to them after all attempts from Microsoft to destroy the Open Source panorama, he's a fricking idiot, or more likely he's in bed with them.

Re:Idiot

[mlwmohawk]

Exploited against you, not me; I develop primarily for Microsoft's market.

Well, unless you have been in the situation where microsoft decides to compete against you AFTER you've create the market, you are either young or lucky. More than once, I have been on the receiving end of microsoft's monopoly machine either giving away a clone of the product or incorporation of the features of the product in Windows.

If you don't give them the chance to become a good citizen, they never will. This is somewhat naive--but I lose nothing if they return to form.

Speaking from my experience with Microsoft, they are not good corporate citizens and never will be.

optimism

[NoTiG]

I think I look at this more optimistically than other people. Sure Microsoft offering a media package so moonlight can play proprietary codecs... is not a bad thing. Because not only will it then be able to play them but it will also be able to play open codecs. Which IMO is more free than flash which won't just play any codec. The only ways then microsoft could hurt moonlight is by not offering codecs once silverlight became mainstream... but then moonlight could simply use open codecs. couldn't it just be that microsoft , like adobe... is just trying to create this to sell the tools around it? By building the best tools?

mononono

[tqft]

As seen on groklaw
http://www.groklaw.net/comment.php?mode=display&sid=20080709044510241&title=Mono-no-no&type=article&order=&hideanonymous=0&pid=710941

http://tim.thechases.com/mononono/

"Description
Introduces an intentional conflict with Mono packages

By creating an intentional conflict with mono packages, this package can be installed to prevent Mono from being installed (or at least force you to address the conflict)

"

Moonlight/Silverlight? I prefer SVG + video tag

[Anonymous Coward]

And for the few not yet knowing how widely SVG is used, see this overview of SVG examples.

Re:get over it

[IBBoard]

Given the amount of OSes that Mono is available on, would that be two universal runtime environments with true cross-platform deployment - Mono/.Net and Java?

TBH I always get the impression that .Net is more platform independant. SWT and Eclipse need OS specific libraries and you can't export an Eclipse app to run on any OS. .Net has been (in my experience) build once, run anywhere (unless you purposefully do something OS specific like P/Invoke).

Troll, fanboy, advocate, whatever

[weicco]

Yes. It is always fun to read criticism of non-.NET/C#/Silverlight/etc developers. I've read thousands of times how MS ties my hand and how I'm totally incompetent as a programmer because I write .NET apps. Or that I am Microsoft's tool or something, even when I don't work for MS.

Well guess what? I earn good amount of money, compared to some, from being a Microsoft's tool and that pays my and my wife's bills! I don't care a fricking inch about all these political, almost religional, battles that some are trying to rise (and are succeeding in it) between MS and Open Source community, Novell vs Linux people, Novell vs Sun, BSD vs GPL people, etc., etc. Or to be honest, I do care about it but I dislike it, if you know what I mean.

So could everyone just mind their own business or at least stop calling honest developers with names? I've written some stuff which I've released under BSD-like license and I'll continue to do so but shouldn't it be pretty understandable that if people keep bashing me directly or indirectly, I don't get the pleasure from it and that ... well makes me sad.

And don't get me wrong. What I'm not trying to say is that you shouldn't critize something or someone. Constructive critizism is important for everyone. Mudslinging (or fudslinging nowadays?) just isn't.

Re:Troll, fanboy, advocate, whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Well guess what? I earn good amount of money, compared to some, from being a Microsoft's tool and that pays my and my wife's bills! I don't care a fricking inch about all these political, almost religional, battles that some are trying to rise (and are succeeding in it) between MS and Open Source community, Novell vs Linux people, Novell vs Sun, BSD vs GPL people, etc., etc. Or to be honest, I do care about it but I dislike it, if you know what I mean.

It's one thing that you've chosen to take a sociopathic approach to life, but please keep in mind that there are a lot of good people out there with ethics and morals. It's unlikely that you're even capable of understanding what those things are but many people do care about a bigger picture than just "how can I make money".

It's ok, nobody really expects you to act like an ethical human being. Don't be surprised when you're not treated like part of humanity when you specifically choose to exclude yourself from that family with your contempt for anything but how you can make a buck at their expense.

Re:Troll, fanboy, advocate, whatever

[fejjie]

Mind telling me what you do for a living? Likely you make money by screwing people over, no matter what job you have, even if you work for a non-profit organization.

Hell, I bet you're a used-car salesman.

Get off your make-believe moral high-horse and recognize that you are no better than the poster you replied to.

Re:Troll, fanboy, advocate, whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Mind telling me what you do for a living?

I'm a systems administrator for a privately owned company.

Get off your make-believe moral high-horse and recognize that you are no better than the poster you replied to.

My company isn't known for their criminal activities. We don't, in fact, engage in any. So yes, I am absolutely and by any metric you'd care to use. a better person than the OP who willingly and with malice aforethought chose to work for a criminal organization when he has plenty of other options open to him.

I find it hard to believe that you're actually trying to argue otherwise.
Just because you don't feel that choosing not to work for criminals is morally superior to choosing to work for criminals doesn't mean you're not dead fucking wrong.

Let me guess, you think people who join the mafia are morally equivalent with people who engage in non criminal activities? You will be quite hard pressed to demonstrate how that isn't exactly equivalent to what you said. Perhaps you should actually think it through?

ActiveX: once more, with love

[theolein]

The reason Microsoft implemented Silverlight is the same reason Microsoft implmented the Zune, the same reason they implemented PocketPC, the same reason they implemented DirectX, the same reason they implemented Internet Explorer and the same reaosn they implemented the fucking nightmare known as ActiveX: Somebody else did something cool and Microsoft saw an oportunity to steal the other tech's user base by trying very hard to one up them.

I don't know Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer personally and I have zero knowledge therefore why they do this specific thing over and over and over again. I don't know if they are scared that some bright new technology might be their downfall, but I really suspect that isn't the case. I think that Microsoft, in all honesty, couldn't innovate themselves due to their enormous market position and the sheer inertia and inter-office political fighting that seems to cripple every large Microsoft project by bring inter-team comunication to a standstill, and they they simply find it easier to use their weight to steal and cripple others' attempts to do so.

So you think .Net is so great? You think that we should all be doing all our webwork in Silverlight and preferably XAML and WPF, because it's so much better than the craphouse which is HTML/CSS/Javascript and Flash? I think so too. I think it's better than Java. I also thought that Internet Explorer was lightyears ahead of Netscape back in the day.

The problem is that Microsoft, because they don't actually innovate, very much like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is anything but democratic, simply couldn't actually give a fuck about you, and won't do a single thing if they can get away with it. Look at IE. They left it to stagnate for 6 whole years, so long that a fledgling competitor could go from crash-fest alpha to fast and stable, innovative serious threat. Then MS shat themselves and then finally started working on a new IE again, but still trying to hobble it just enough in the hope that it would once again kill open standards.

You want the world to run .Net??? You want the world to run Silverlight? You should realise that if this were the case you will have to seriously forget about any updates for years at a time.

You would sit with the same crashy, bug-ridden POS for years, cursing MS under your breath.

The ONLY reason Microsoft has survived so long is because of the huge head start they got in the early years of the PC. A smaller company as inept and totally unimaginative as Microsoft is would have gone out of business years ago.

Re:get over it

[rdean400]

Java is available on far more operating platforms, and unless you purposefully do something OS specific, is genuinely build once, run anywhere.

Re:get over it

[IBBoard]

Lets see, Sun's list includes Linux, Solaris and Windows as official downloads. Mono has Linux (albeit distro-specific versions on the site), Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X. Mono also has an unofficial *BSD port, while Java has unofficial ports for Mac OS X (or at least "not listed by Sun but listed by Mac, and a bit behind") and BSD. I'd say that's pretty even.

As for build-once, run-anywhere, yes it is but you end up with either an ugly old and clunky GUI (AWT/Swing) or you end up with OS dependencies (SWT). System.Windows.Forms isn't fantastic on other OSes, but at least it doesn't stand out in a terrible way, just in a neutral way.

Re:get over it

[rdean400]

Sun's list barely scratches the surface.

Java is available on a myriad array of desktop, server, and mobile operating systems, such as Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, Mac OS X, AIX, UnixWare, Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD (build from source), OS/2, z/OS, IBM i, OpenVMS, Tru64, Reliant Unix, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm OS, QNX, Haiku, and so on. These are compliant Java implementations that pass the relevent TCK.

Good Lord, Get a Grip!

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez. In all honesty, while I dislike Microsoft, they're a company. You can't honestly lump the hundreds of thousands of workers into a single entity and label it off as some evil, moronic, sub-standard corporation.

At the very least, they're making an offer. They're going to port it to other OS'es, and who are you to say whether they'll be bad?

As a Linux and Solaris user, I welcome this occurence. I don't really care if it's not 100% free and open. And why should I really care about a restriction on my freedom if it works well?

So, you're mad that MS doesn't "support standards in the FOSS sense", yet you howl and roar at GPL'ed technologies such as Mono and Moonlight? The only double standard is your viewpoints in the article.

You're most likely one of those raving fanatics from "Boycott Novell".

I'm posting anonymously because I have better things to do with my time than read garbage from Linux Youths on Slashdot. Go back to your brainwashed little Ubuntu community, and rethink your life.

Also, you're more than welcome to read my blog if you want me to continue to strike down your shallow, meaningless views.

http://fuckertwashington.blogspot.com

How do your interoperate with a bully?

[jotaeleemeese]

Who has threatened you with bogus patent violations?

By copying technology everybody knows is theirs?

Honestly, where is your sense of logic?