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The Mono Mystery That Wasn't
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.'"
Inflammatory headline supersedes mundane content? Say it ain't so!
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Didnt you hear? Stallman converted to scientology and Linus is accepting patches from NAMBLA!! Oh and the EFF finally released its spec for its homegrown DRM scheme.
Good news everyone. Icaza is still a whore.
If you make your living exchanging your talents for money, so are you. So what is your point?
Stop being so inflammatory. If you have a logical argument to make, make it and we will decide whether the argument is valid based on its merit. Otherwise you just blend into the rest of the noise of modern 'rhetoric' (with apologies to true rhetoric).
I can see the editor thinking "we already know this is fake news, but let's publish: we are missing a good Mono flamewar since forever!"
We have announced that our upcoming Mono release (2.8) will default to 4.0:
http://www.mono-project.com/Roadmap
For the first time in Mono's history our C# compiler and its supporting engine and core libraries were done before Microsoft released the product, we were usually one to two years behind. This time we are some five months ahead of time:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Dec-09.html
There are still a handful of loose ends here and there, but luckily, nothing major.
Miguel doesn't care, because that "99% of us" turns out to be less than 1% of the real "us."
I never understood whats so immoral or degrading about being a whore. Certainly there are segments of the "sex worker" community that are unsavory and engage in despicable activity (sexual slavery, mental/physical abuse, unfair exploitation) however, there are also those who work freelance and or enjoy their jobs.
I don't mean to ruin whores for you, I mean, maybe you need to see it as degrading and immoral to get off, your kink is ok I guess. Though, I no more understand that kink than asphyxiation, so it does seem a bit strange to me.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
"Miguel at the time argued that the free software world had failed to produce any real competitor to Java or .NET style frameworks despite their absolute dominance of mainstream programming."
Why would they need to? While initially some of the Java trademark and licensing mechanism were semi-unfriendly to open source, the situation was a LOT better than it has ever been with .NET, and is much better now.
Instead of trying to create a competitor, the OSS community worked with Java - A lot of Java's success can likely be attributed to the participation of the OSS community. (Heck, even Miguel's blog article effectively says this with his citations of various OSS "research" projects into JIT that became mainstream.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
I'd thought that after all this time he was finally wising up and accepting what everyone else you agree with was saying.
There, fixed that for ya.
I know, amazing! Some people might *actually* disagree with you, oh wise and omniscient one!
...I'm amazed at how obtuse (and in some cases, downright insulting) the majority of the comments on this story are. I think it's highly likely that if .NET didn't come from Microsoft, nobody would be getting quite so emotional about the whole thing.
For the record, I'm categorically not Microsoft's greatest fan, but you cannot deny that .NET/C# is a damn good platform. Having a portable version of said good platform is therefore a Good Thing. It doesn't matter if Microsoft decide to fuck Mono over; it's still a good platform and therefore still a Good Thing. If you disagree and you don't like it, then fine; don't use it and stop whining.
Run fast, support multiple languages, provide 99.9999% secure code environments, support more than one thread executing at a time, etc, etc.
But... Java and Python are two drastically different technologies. Python is great at what it does but it's a scripting language not a virtual platform like Java. .NET is more comparable to Java since .NET was basically cloned feature for feature from Java with some additional features added.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
You thought wrong.
First parties posting is one of the strengths of the dot.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
The slash however is a slippery slope.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Java's virtual machine (specially Sun/OpenJDK) is much more advanced than Python's (CPython).
Python takes a bytecode and then executes the one or more native instructions it takes to fulfill the purpose of the bytecode instruction. And that's basically all it does.
Java takes the bytecode instruction and compiles into a native format and uses thats for future executions. In addition, it does many other types of optimizations to increase the execution speed. You can run Java in a purely interpreted mode like Python does, pass the -Xint argument on the command line to the java instance. You'll notice it's 10000x slower than the optimized execution paths.
Java's class library is primarily Java code, whereas Python wraps native libraries for much of this work. Both methods have their pros and cons, but it means Python can be prone to more issues regarding different system libraries, etc. Since Java provides it's own virtual platform with most of the code in Java, you don't have these issues as often.
Java also allows for true threading, whereas Python threads are limited by the global interpreter lock preventing you from getting real performance gains from asynchronous execution. You have to resort to multiple python processes to take advantage of multicore processors for example.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Visual Studio 2010, a core flagship MS product, is written in WPF.
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
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.