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

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

[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: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: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: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: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.