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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 ..."
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!
"de Icaza: I hope so. It might end up that at some point Microsoft just open ups .net"
LOL
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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.
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?
... DeNial. You and Migual must shop at the same store.
Wow. This new reality you live in smells vaguely of that new fragrance
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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!