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The Mono Mystery That Wasn't

Posted by Soulskill on from the context-is-everything dept.

jammag writes "It was shocking news, or so it seemed: Miguel de Icaza, the Mono creator, was switching his opinion about his life's work — he now seemed to agree with the free software partisans who oppose his Mono work and his Microsoft connections. The story flamed across the Internet and even got picked up on Slashdot. But Bruce Byfield reports that 'De Icaza has not changed his opinions.' De Icaza calls the rumors 'a storm in a teacup.' Tracing the misinformation trail, Byfield concludes that 'the FOSS community excels at communication. However, in this instance, that ability was used irresponsibly.'"

2 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good News by fejjie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As someone who actually knows Miguel de Icaza and someone who was there when Mono began, I can tell you with absolute certainty that he started Mono because he truly believes that it's a good platform. As do I and all of the other Mono developers (none of whom get a "fat paycheck" from Microsoft or anyone else). The Mono team is underfunded at Novell, so I and likely other developers have taken a pay CUT in order to work on what we believe in.

    We are not paid to parrot any opinions from Microsoft or Novell. Our opinions are our own and we stand by them.

  2. He HAS Admitted Defeat by segedunum · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Whatever way you cut it, this is an admission of defeat and it has been exactly what everyone has complained about regarding .Net and the nonsense surrounding Mono for years. De Icaza has sought to paint over it at every single turn until now. Maybe the penny seems to have finally dropped:

    "The most important part is that Microsoft has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot because of the constant thread of patent infringement that they have cast on the ecosystem. Unlike the Java world that is blossoming with dozens of vibrant Java virtual machine implementations, the .NET world has suffered by this meme spread by Ballmer that they would come after people that do not license patents from them.

    Sun on the other hand said from day one: we will not sue you over patent infringement if you implement your own Java. Google does something similar with their APIs and Google's Wave: they are giving everyone access to their stuff.

    As the only implementor of the ECMA standards outside of Microsoft, I sure would have hoped that they had given rights to everyone to implement. They would still be the #1 stack, but it would have encouraged an ecosystem that would have innovated extensively around their platform.

    Instead, people went and innovated on Java or other platforms that might not have been as advanced as .NET, but at least they were not under Microsoft threat."

    It's very clear. The part in bold I find most damning. This indicates that he knew all along that you couldn't create an open source implementation of even the CLR without permission from Microsoft. There is a lot in here, but people like Bruce Byfield obviously havent read it properly. He's tried top backtrack and cover up a bit by saying that it's all nothing, but it most certainly is something.