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

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

[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.

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

[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 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.

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

[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

[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.

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: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: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.

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

[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: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)

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!