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

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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[Tubal-Cain]

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

<video> tags, anyone?

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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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 = ?

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

[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.

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".

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

[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).

!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.

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: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.

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: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: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: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.

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: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.

oh puhleeze! - TAG WHOCARES

[toby]

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

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: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

[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: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.