Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 11th Mar 2008 23:28 UTC, submitted by irbis
"Does GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza's backflip over the Novell-Microsoft deal a few days ago mean that he has finally been convinced that he is on a one-way path to nowhere? Has he realised that his own project, Mono, is actually putting GNOME on a development track that can leave it open to patent claims one day? And has he realised that creating Moonlight, a clone of Microsoft's Silverlight, (with which the company hopes to trump Adobe's Flash) is not going to advance the cause of free software one iota?"
Permalink for comment 304765
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2005-07-06
First off, let me say that it's an honor to be arguing with you, Miguel.
I have tremendous respect for your hack-foo ninja skills. However, I cannot agree with many of your "facts".
Parrot is, by its very nature, a language-agnostic, register-based virtual machine. Dozens of languages currently target it. Vala is a meta-compiler to GObject. Its compilation infrastructure is currently being abstracted to allow for arbitrary syntax.
As I've said before, this isn't an FOSS concern. It's a business concern. And if that's a primary goal of Mono, I'm fine with that. It's a damn good reason to start the project if the goal is to lure businesses to Linux with minimal shock, but it doesn't really have much value for those of us already on the FOSS side.
The Parrot project has so damn much documentation, the Amazon would be leveled to put it to paper. And just as you've built an ecosystem around Mono (something you should be proud of), the resources you've invested could have done the same for any other project you chose. Mono's Linux ecosystem didn't exist before you moved in.
Broadly, all these arguments play into the hands of Java, though. It has the added benefit of being an open, collaborative project (and better speed and memory utilization). Please don't portray your decision to shadow .NET as a foregone conclusion.
And this is where everybody else (including your own project: http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing) raises the spectre of patents. I'm not in the mood to get on this merry-go-round again, but for those who already write software in the Linux realm (and aren't customers of yours), the threat of losing access to these interfaces is as appealing an engineering solution as building a castle on sand.
Such as? Every GTK# project I've used/seen uses the same wrapped libraries as a Vala one, yet a Vala-generated application runs native, without any interpretation overhead.
I don't mean to sound like a salesman. Honestly, the investment of resources could have gone to *anything* to make the Linux development ecosystem even more developer-friendly than it already is, instead of reinventing the wheel and tying its development to an unstable partner. Your three-pronged test is just as easily satisfied by Java, Python, Ruby, or Perl as it is by Parrot. I just chose it as an example of a open source project in its infancy at the time you chose to go off and build Mono from scratch.
Respectfully,
Mono Del Diablo (ironic, huh? the name predates your project)