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

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!

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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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.