Submitted by “Novell today announced the beta program for Mono 1.2, which now includes support for Microsoft Windows.Forms to more easily port .NET client-side applications to Linux. Other enhancements in this beta release include additional platform and hardware support, virtual machine upgrades, and enhanced Java support, as well as significant performance, memory consumption and stability improvements.” And on a related note, Novell also released the code to the server side of iFolder.
This will be intresting.
I remember hearing about some legal issues regarding windows.forms, I hope they have those cleared up!
I’m liking Novell more and more everytime they release something – they seem to be a real driving force for the Linux desktop’s future.
Please, substantiate: there are and there never were legal issues with Windows.Forms
XAML could be a problem with some patents, but Windows.Forms has nothing to do with it.
XAML could be a problem with some patents, but Windows.Forms has nothing to do with it.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that if mono’s implementation of Windows.Forms ever does any real damage to Microsoft there will definitely be a legal battle. You may think they don’t have a leg to stand on, and neither do I but that doesn’t mean they won’t do it. Look at SCO. Their claims were ludicrous but here we are three years later without an answer, and a lot of money spent. Microsoft is dirty enough to bleed Novell dry with legal wranglings if they need to.
Windows.Forms isn’t part of the ECMA standard, which has got people worried. Technically, you can’t copyright an API, which is why the FSF can duplicate the Java SDK with Classpath, however with the current pitiful state of the US patent office, it’s quite likely Microsoft have registered some defensive patents. As they haven’t offered to standardise Windows.Forms, they may – again, given the appalling state of the US patent system – be able to bring a case to trial.
Of course, it’s not certain that they would win it (though lesser cases such as Eolas have been won) but even the case itself would do enormous damage.
It’s great to see a big player really embracing free software like Novell has been, since acquiring SUSE and Ximian. I can only hope for more of the same in the future from them, and hopefully from others as well.
!!!
— “It’s great to see a big player really embracing free software like Novell has been, since acquiring SUSE and Ximian. I can only hope for more of the same in the future from them, and hopefully from others as well”
—
Well I agree with you! Its really good. But what else could have they done? I mean the Novell business model and technology was going down and actually doomed.. so!
But they are doing the right thing, more ore less. I hope they will continue like that, or better, and they do not rotten too much even if they have a huge sucess with their policy and business…
Mono is just onother of the good things they are bringing or helping to. It is really and interesting concept and technology.
So, up to the moment thumbs up to Mono, Ximian, SuSe and Novell!
!!!
Can we only hope that they will release eDirectory as open source? It would be a nice competition to Fedora Directory Server. OpenLDAP is great – but I still find it too difficult to setup.
The iFolder demos that I have seen look really impressive. Now that it is fully open source it would be great to see that type of functionality completely integrated into the desktop.
Any idea what the license for this project is? Also, how well will it interoperate with other technologies out there? For example, do I have to maintain yet another repository for authentication credentials? Or would an existing Fedora Directory Server instance suffice?
I believe the mono runtime and compiler is GPL, while all of the mono class libraries are LGPL.
However, they are also open to licensing commercially to a 3rd party if desired – as stated in their FAQ. I assume they do this by asking all code contributors to agree to give the copyright over to Novell at the time that the contribution is submitted.
As for your interoperability questions – I’m sorry I’m unable to help.
This is awesome news. I was once one of the biggest opponents to mono/.NET but after using it I really like it. Some great applications have already been built with mono like f-spot, beagle, ifolder, and banshee. Whether or not Microsoft pursues legal action because of Windows.Forms is irrelevant now. Mono doesn’t need it to be succesful although it would help. THe most important thing is that now it is easy to make free crossplatform software.
The release of iFolder server is also great news. Novell keeps opening up amazing proprietary technology. Netmail (Hula), YaST, and now iFolder server. Novell is learning pretty quickly how to gain favor amongst OSS advocates. Let’s just hope we can return the favor and not only keep Novell going but allow them to flourish.
ok I have a copy of a novell sanction slideshow presentation that outlines the roadmap for mono and on it it clearly say that by now mono should be at 2.0. My question naturally is what happened? What happened to .net 2.0 support and c# 2.0+ support? Other than that I am really phyched about mono 1.2 but you gotta admit that it’s progressing a lot slower than .net is.
Oh and just so there are no dumb comments the specs for c# 3.0 have already been released so no MS is not holding Mono’s progress back.
Novell, and the rest of the mono community have deliver what we have today at an amazing pace when put in perspective. There are 23 permanent Novell mono developers and about 230+ regular contributors to the mono project. We support 5 distinct operating systems and over 7 CPU architectures, that does not include all the distributions on Linux and Windows variants alone! Compared that with Microsoft and .NET. They literally have thousands of people that work on .NET between development, product and program management, QA, marketing, etc.
http://www.mono-project.com/Supported_Platforms
There is a lot of .NET 2.0 functionality in mono already. For example, a very capable implementation of generics was available in mono quite a few months before .NET Framework 2.0 was finally released to the general public.
C# 3.0 spec is handled by ECMA, so members of the Mono team like Miguel de Icaza are responsible for contributing directly overseeing its progress just as the other members like HP, Intel, Microsoft, etc. This means that C# 3.0 is not holding mono up, mono is actually one of the reasons C# has progressed to 3.0
Keep up the good work, monos.
cheers,
dalibor topic
Isn’t Microsoft .NET also on FreeBSD?
Microsoft has something called project ROTOR. If I remember correctly, it runs on FreeBSD and on Mac OS X.
However, project rotor is a very small subset of the .NET Framework and it is severly restrictive on its share source license.
I believe that you mostly can use it in Academia and not commercially. I am no longer a Microsoft employee, so I would not be the best person to give answers about MS intent on that project.
iFolder is like rsync + a pretty gui on crack. I used iFolder before with the crappy simias server and it was ok, but this is incredible. Novell used to give away the iFolder client away for free and sell the “enterprise server” for people who needed a better solution than p2p iFolder.
iFolder has potential to be another one of those mono killer apps like beagle.
There are many things that mono includes in their Global Assembly Cache (GAC) that Microsoft .NET does not.
Too often folks leave out or forget that mono not only includes System.Windows.Forms but it also includes Gtk and Gnome sharp. Mono includes System.Data.SqlClient but is also has Mono.Data.SybaseClient as well as Npgsql. Mono includes System.Directory but it also includes Novell.Directory.Ldap.
I could continue but, my point is that mono has a lot of things going for it that tracend what Microsoft .Net has in its core offering.
Did I mention it is Open Source?