This week Friday Gert Driesen and Philip Van Hoof were to do a presentation about Mono at Microsoft Belgium. Soon later, Microsoft’s Belgium legal team cancelled the presentation. The reason was that for doing such a presentation, Microsoft Belgium needed approval of their legal team in the USA first.
Microsoft (Belgium) Cancels Mono Presentation in Belgium
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Considering the controversy surrounding the legality of the Mono project, this is an interesting event.
Too bad they did not carry through the presentation. hat would have been the equalient of a green light for the Mono project.
Yeah, but is it really a surprise considering that controversy? Has anyone seen any applications in widespread use based on Mono? for that matter .NET??
“Has anyone seen any applications in widespread use based on Mono? for that matter .NET??”
Depends what you call widespread applications.
– More and more parts of the microsoft web pages are being converted, stuff like msdn is pretty widely used and works just fine.
– Sharpdevelop is one of the better open source projects and is rather popular.
– .Text is a widely used blogging engine
– flexwiki is a widely used wiki engine
– btnet is a great though maybe not widely known bugtracker
– …
there’s plenty
Software using .NET? Sure, a lot of the newer stuff coming out of Microsoft uses it 😉
I use Muine, Imendio Blam!, MonoDevelop and SportsTracker, all written in CTK#. On the Windows front the only two .NET apps that I use occassionally are RSS Bandit and SharpDevelop. But then again, on Windows, I have a very specific set of only 10-12 apps that I use, I almost never install new stuff in it.
What about Muine (music player) Blam (RSS Reader) f-spot (photo managment, a little unstable but showing great promise), MonoDevelop, Tomboy (great notes/personal wiki app) ?
And in the future there is iFolder, Beagle and Dashboard.
Just yesterday I installed a little Book/Movie catalog app: mCatalog ( http://mcatalog.sf.net ) guess what it’s written in ? 🙂
Considering the controversy surrounding the legality of the Mono project, this is an interesting event.
There is no controversy at all. Miguel de Icaza recently gave a presentation in Spain where he explained that very point. Shall a patent problem arise the patented components would be pulled off the tree, and we’d still have a very nice free software and cross platform development environment. It won’t be that big a loss if we can’t code for SWF in mono as long as we have Gtk#. Same goes for other components of the system. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that this was cancelled. As Web Services mature on mono, it’s one less Windows 2003 license they sell every time a customer finds out that Linux/BSD + apache/mod_mono can do the job.
No offence but all the apps mentioned by the people above are neither widespead nor particularly interesting. I mean an audioplayer, an rss reader, etc. all are a dime a dozen in any language. The exception ofcourse is Sharpdevelop (quality software to be sure), but you don’t see people measuring Java’s popularity by Netbeans downloads.
Still .Net/Mono is still young, maybe the next generation of apps will show us what it is really capable of.
Just finished installing mcatalog. I also have muine, f-spot and monodevelop running on this system.
Reading a little of the background, including the guy’s personal webpage I feel it should also be mentioned that these guys (at least one) work for Cronos, a Belgian IT outsourcing company and not Microsoft itself.
Probably someone at Ms got the jitters when this guy, who seems to be a linux/OSS enthousiast, started posting about it an a Ximian mailing list of all places.
Microsoft has sponsored Mono talks in the past. I attended a session at a university in Zürich where Miguel de Icaza gave a presentation about Mono to students and faculty of the computer department. The event was sponsored by Microsoft, MS employees were there and handed out VS.NET stuff at the end, MS donated a few XBoxs and had a contest to give them away, and it was advertised on some MS web pages.
No doubt similar events have taken place at other times where MS interacted with the Mono project in limited ways.
Has anybody actually used mono btw? I’m half wanting to try it out to see if it’ll actually run some .net apps allright.
Come on! Mono hasn’t been out a year. Of course there’s no major apps. Monodevelop is one of the more impressive IDE’s on linux and it’s very nice (thanks to it being a port). Beagle is bound to be huge, very possibly on the scale of Evo. What’s impressive here is that the apps that are written using Mono are quite mature in a very short amount of time, which, if you recall, was basically the whole point of Mono in the first place
For those of you who don’t like the thought of .net then don’t worry, much development will still be done on [insert your favorite language here]. However, like it or not, mono will be a platfrom for a lot of upcoming apps. Here’s another interesting one here: http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy/
I do. Are you convinced now?
Yup, a lot of us have. It’s also very popular with the Gnome developers. Writing apps is a breeze with gtk#
Favorite Mono app ATM…
Tomboy! http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy/
Beagle/Dashboard is pretty great too except if you leave it running for a long time, it’ll eat all your memory.
“Beagle/Dashboard is pretty great too except if you leave it running for a long time, it’ll eat all your memory.”
This is my general feeling with these high level languages. We don’t need to manage the memory, but memory leaking is an issue with large apps. Though sometimes we do need to manage some resources, still.
I do some test Mono stuff on FreeBSD. It runs fast and startup is fast, but it uses a lot of RAM even by very small Mono app like Blam. I believe, those should be get better in Mono 1.2.
Hmm, I didn’t expect this would be osnews-worthy news. Actually the be honest it’s not. It was not really going to be a huge event anyway (max 20 people). So I fear lots of people are going to blow things up in their minds about this.
I would like to add to this (since one dude was already reading my webpage and started mentioning my employer) that this presentation had nothing to do with, indeed, my employer.
I see Tomboy is using the comic character Kuifje, written by Hergé, a late belgian comic writer. Isn’t this copyrighted and shouldn’t he have permission to publish this image?
Belgium is not part of the USA. Why should belgian lawyers care about the opinion of their american colleagues ? SCO, for instance, was ordered by a german judge to stop talking nonsense about linux. That didn’t prevent the parent company from spewing FUD in the States.
Why is Microsoft paying guys who can’t take a decision based on their own country legal system ? I think the real reason may be found in the topics of the presentation. The speaker intended to deal with the “not so rosy” relationship between Microsoft and the Open Source community.
However, why would MS want to demonstrate non MS technology?
So now that this was plugged then Redhat (which just moved to Munich from somewhere in GB) or SuSE should pick up the ball and finish the demonstration – still on MS Windows. They don’t have to ask any MS legal team first. If MS has a problem with that they’ll probably let it be known. And that’s part of the purpose.
@Claus: The presentation was only ment for Microsoft-Belgium employees. There was no intention whatsoever to demonstrate Mono to, for example, their customers. It was a very small event where two technical camps share information and idea’s. Not even sales-dudes where expected to come. There where no businesses involved at all. Not even my own employer nor Gerts employer.
I repeat that this isn’t (os)news-worthy. It was ment to be a very small event. Lets move on to impotant topics, I am getting way to much attention here! 🙂
Name a dozen of widespread or killer java destkop applications (No aplets are not applications).
… that MS doesn’t want their software contaminated with “ideas” from OS…
I would like to add to this (since one dude was already reading my webpage and started mentioning my employer) that this presentation had nothing to do with, indeed, my employer.
Sorry about jumping to conclusions there. I don’t know how stuff is organised at MS, but at the big blue guys a bit down the road in Diegem something like this would probably be presented a business partner or something.
Too bad the presentation fell through, maybe you can rework (some of) it into an article for OSNews ?
Nasdaq.com is also another .Net application. Parts of the .Net framework (namely remoting, among others) are written in C#. Roughly half of VS.NET 2005 will be in managed code. A lot of the new stuff in Longhorn is written in managed code. The reason we haven’t seen many “killer” desktop apps in either Java or .Net is the reliance on a seperate runtime, of which neither are guaranteed to be on the user’s desktop. That being said, one of the best .Net desktop apps I’ve used recently is Omea Reader by JetBrains (of ReSharper and IntelliJ fame). They are planning a Mono port soon.
Hmmm, well I haven’t used a lot of Java apps, but here are some good ones I’ve tried (and some I have just heard of but haven’t used):
Azareus (the best bittorrent client out there)
Eclipse IDE (just learning to use it now, seems pretty decent)
Netbeans IDE (recommended by a lot of people)
Jedit (runs pretty decently for a Java app)
Limewire (never used it, but some people like it)
jGrasp (another editor some people like)
Jboss (some J2EE thing, don’t know much about it)
(and anything that uses J2EE for serving web stuff)
Seven apps in seven years, are you desperate or what?
Heh, I’m still of the opinion that there is nothing wrong with c, c++, perl, scheme, lisp and the plethora of tools (RAD tools included) that existed long before java and c# where a glimmer in some academic’s twinkly little computer science eye.
It’s not about the language, but about the runtime and the ability to re-use libraries implemented in one language and then use it in another language as is.
Don’t confuse C# with Mono or .NET
We have gotten by just fine without java and the clr for an extremely long time, writing a library in c, and then using swig or boost to generate bindings in 95% of the languages out there is a pretty tried and true combo. clr seems like a computer scientists wet dream rather then something I as a developer need or even want.
There is no controversy at all. Miguel de Icaza recently gave a presentation in Spain where he explained that very point. Shall a patent problem arise the patented components would be pulled off the tree, and we’d still have a very nice free software and cross platform development environment.
Depending on WHAT exactly they would have to pull off the tree, it could render mono more or less useless for most real-world stuff.
This is maybe not a controversy, but it’s definitely an issue…
We have gotten by just fine without java and the clr for an extremely long time, writing a library in c, and then using swig or boost to generate bindings in 95% of the languages out there is a pretty tried and true combo. clr seems like a computer scientists wet dream rather then something I as a developer need or even want.
Around 1987 the Clipper and PE2 (simple but relative good text editor) combo was a very good development environment, but now it is not competitive with the modern development tools. If you not have too mutch time but you must create a big and reilable and platform independent application the CLR can be a very good idea. And IMHO in long term the CLR+JIT combo will more powerful then native C/C++ in all platform, because it can generate optimalized code for your processor. Not only i386, i586, i686 but for every modells of AMD, Intel or any other processors.
And we were getting by fine back in the 80s writing assembly. If you want to bit-twiddle with C or whatever then go ahead. The rest of us realize the benefits of a CLR.
It doesn’t matter what tool you use to do your bindings. It’s never 100% automated, it’s always going to be a pain, always behind the library, etc…
It doesn’t matter what tool you use to do your bindings. It’s never 100% automated, it’s always going to be a pain, always behind the library, etc…
I don´t want it. But IMHO nobody write internet bowser, database management system, office applications, business software,etc in assembly. If you try it you will lose. Naturally it is not impossible, but if competitors (commercial companies or open souurce developers) use higher level languages and developer tools they can create more useable and realible applications with less resource use.
LC: you are wrong about that. NetBeans,eclipse, monodevelop, sharpdevelop and even an entire office suite EIOffice are writen in java/c#. If you know what you are doing you can write code that is fast enough for a large application.
You’re missing the point. People wrote a lot of assembly code for PCs back in the 1980s because they had to….limited memory, not the best compilers, the nature of the operating environements, etc…
So then we started writing C code in the 1990s, C++ a little later, etc…
Now the problem with what the anonymous guy from Sandia, New Mexico is saying is what I consider the deployment problem. And what I mean by the deployment problem is that say I want to write an app in a nice high-level language like Python and distribute it say on windows. Well, one option is to force the user to install python on his system, a better solution is to package everything up using py2exe so that the runtime and all associated libraries are in the installer and work like a traditional windows program.
An even better solution IMHO, given a generic enough runtime is to be able to use libraries already developed in any language that is already compiled down to the runtime bytecode. Kindof like how any language that can compile down to MSIL can automagically use gtk# bindings without any kind of bindings tools mess.
When people around here ask who’s using .NET/Mono it’s really a moot point because Longhorn has the CLR deep in its bowels and by defacto, the vast majority of computer users in the world will be using CLR apps.
For me the news is as much that Microsoft might be interested in a presentation about mono.
Yes, it is true. And IMHO this is one of biggest problem of linux. The binary packages not always run on every distro because the Gtk, Qt, Motif, Fox, wxWidgets, etc libraries or other stuffs are missing or not older/newer then your. You can create big and slow static binaries or binary packages (but you can’t create binary pkgs for EVERY linux distro). Or you can give the source to the user but it is not too good for commercial applications and the most of end-user never will compile applications from source.
Well, I haven’t used many .NET/Mono apps, but, by coincidence, I *just* finished installing Norton (owned by Symantec now) Ghost 9, which is a .NET app, and is a fairly popular application.
So I guess we’ll be seeing a gradual stream of some popular commercial apps with their newer version developed in .NET.
For me the news is as much that Microsoft might be interested in a presentation about mono.
It is not a big surprise. Mono helps kill java to microsoft, because the CLR, C#, etc is available on other platforms then windows. But IMHO the .NET will kill java anyhow, it is only question of time. It is sad because Java is not a bad thing but IMHO C#/.NET is more advanced and the M$ have enough money to develop it. And whilst setup program of java applications must copy the JVM to the user´s computer if it doesn´t exists, the .NET will be available on every windows (and the most of components will be loaded into memory -> the .NET applications will start faster on windows. At least on desktop side.
In reply to:
For me the news is as much that Microsoft might be interested in a presentation about mono.
Yes they (some/most of their technical employees) are indeed interested in the technology and status of the Mono project. But that didn’t really supprise me.
Yes, we’ve agreed on this issue on other threads and it’s something the fanboys are incapable of understanding for various reasons.
Redhat is an OS, Debian is an OS, Gentoo is an OS….Linux is a kernel. Until people start realizing that the software universe is not their distros repository things will never change.
Thats wonderful. So you have your most critical applications implemented using an array of API’s in .Net and MS comes along and sues you, forcing you to move your platform potentially including hardware to X86/Windows.
You see everyone migrating away from LZW wholesale. Submarine patents don’t allow you to just do what Miguel advocates.
LC: you are wrong about that. NetBeans,eclipse, monodevelop, sharpdevelop and even an entire office suite EIOffice are writen in java/c#. If you know what you are doing you can write code that is fast enough for a large application.
Yes. There are only two kinds of applications: stuff that developers use (Netbeans, Eclipse, Mono and SharpDevelop) because they are forced to. And on the other hand stuff by lunatics like the aformentioned Office suite, that all three people use (mostly its developers and some weirdos the get if off by running office suites in Java).
>Considering the controversy surrounding the legality of the
>Mono project, this is an interesting event.
>Too bad they did not carry through the presentation. hat
>would have been the equalient of a green light for the Mono
>project
Its easy….
Step 1) Use Mono to give .NET the facade of portability. Kill off Java
Step 2) Later, use patents to kill off Mono and to kill of the thousands (MS hopes) of Linux desktop apps written to Mono
End result, both Java and Linux crippled and the world is stuck in MS’s shackles for another generation.
I can’t believe seemingly smart people in the OSS world can’t see this coming.
always fun reading opinions about software from people who obviously never even tried it.
… were the MS guys. While it would have been good for both camps to discuss and share as he stated was the intent: “It was a very small event where two technical camps share information and idea’s.”, the MS guys backed out of the arrangement and I’m sure will not be sharing their ideas any time soon.
When you think about it, its like the Surveys that MS did asking the FOSS community why they chose Linux around the same time they revamped the Services For UNIX offering and launched their “Get the Facts”. In that request for help on those topics discussed, a wealth of valuable information I’m sure was gathered from those who responded to it.
That coupled with your own content I can’t wait till you do share your finds with the rest of us. Whether in the form of an article as suggested by someone earlier or paper/report how ever you see fit.
But IMHO .NET will kill java anyway. Microsoft can buy the best developers, architects for create more advanced .NET versions. And IMHO the SUN and the IBM resources for this purpose are far more limited.
And IMHO not the .NET patents in mono the only one way what microsoft can use to sue linux.
14.10.2004
LinuxWorld: Microsoft wirbt für Interoperabilitaet
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/52156
… german
But IMHO .NET will kill java anyway. Microsoft can buy the best developers, architects for create more advanced .NET versions. And IMHO the SUN and the IBM resources for this purpose are far more limited.
And IMHO not the .NET patents in mono the only one way what microsoft can use to sue linux.
How exactly are IBM’s resources limited. IBM is very profitable, and has a boatload of money. IBM could, but it doesn’t have a monopoly to leverage. That is the reason they would rather work with Java because they do not have to incur the development costs that Sun has to, or at least they could share them.
Plus this is a survival matter for Microsoft. Not for IBM. IBM can use whichever solution comes out on top. Mcrosoft have to be the top or die.
And for the people worrying about MS, I am sure you would have heard from them by now. Mono is now in release, and they know it. If they wanted it shut down, I am sure they would have stated their intent by now. It would be enough to set back Novelll et al quite easily.
Short after this message, Microsofts legal team cancelled the presentation. The reason was that for doing such a presentation, Microsoft Belgium needs approval of their legal team in the USA first.
Strange, isn’t it? Its surrounded by all kind of questions. It sucks when someone does something, saying it is according to the law, without any details as for [in this case] how, why.
I just read Philip’s message here. Its obvious Eugenia is subscribed to or monitors the Mono mailinglist while she thought she had some kind of news with this while she doesn’t. This wasn’t some kind of public speech so MS did not intend to use this to spread FUD.
A.D.A.M Interactive Anatomy 4.0 is written in C# for the dot net platform.
http://www.adam.com/aia/
>And for the people worrying about MS, I am sure you would
>have heard from them by now. Mono is now in release, and they
> know it. If they wanted it shut down, I am sure they would
>have stated their intent by now. It would be enough to set
>back Novelll et al quite easily.
MS can do far more damage by keeping the submarine under the water and allow Mono to become an important feature of the Linux desktop (hell the Linux server as well).
Once the tech is intenched and it is painful to remove, you bring out the submarine patents and cause your biggest (only) competitor quite a large amount of pain.
Plus you can sell the “OSS does not respect IP” straw man to CIOs.
>But IMHO .NET will kill java anyway.
Not if anyone cares about portability.
How important is portability you ask? Well if you have to choose between accomplishing a task with tech which will:
1) Lock you into the MS platform
2) Hedge your bets so you can port to this “Linux” thing if you have to at some point in the future
Which are you going to do?
>>MS can do far more damage by keeping the submarine under the water and allow Mono to become an important feature of the Linux desktop (hell the Linux server as well).
——-
http://www.mono-project.com/about/licensing.html
Question 131: Could patents be used to completely disable Mono (either submarine patents filed now, or changes made by Microsoft specifically to create patent problems)?
First some background information.
The .NET Framework is divided in two parts: the ECMA/ISO covered technologies and the other technologies developed on top of it like ADO.NET, ASP.NET and Windows.Forms.
Mono implements the ECMA/ISO covered parts, as well as being a project that aims to implement the higher level blocks like ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms.
The Mono project has gone beyond both of those components and has developed and integrated third party class libraries, the most important being: Debugging APIs, integration with the Gnome platform (Accessibility, Pango rendering, Gdk/Gtk, Glade, GnomeUI), Mozilla, OpenGL, extensive database support (Microsoft only supports a couple of providers out of the box, while Mono has support for 11 different providers), our POSIX integration libraries and finally the embedded API (used to add scripting to applications and host the CLI, or for example as an embedded runtime in Apache).
The core of the .NET Framework, and what has been patented by Microsoft falls under the ECMA/ISO submission. Jim Miller at Microsoft has made a statement on the patents covering ISO/ECMA, (he is one of the inventors listed in the patent): here.
Basically a grant is given to anyone who want to implement those components for free and for any purpose.
The controversial elements are the ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms subsets. Those are convenient for people who need full compatibility with the Windows platform, but are not required for the open source Mono platform, nor integration with today’s Mono’s rich support of Linux.
The Mono strategy for dealing with these technologies is as follows: (1) work around the patent by using a different implementation technique that retains the API, but changes the mechanism; if that is not possible, we would (2) remove the pieces of code that were covered by those patents, and also (3) find prior art that would render the patent useless.
Not providing a patented capability would weaken the interoperability, but it would still provide the free software / open source software community with good development tools, which is the primary reason for developing Mono.
The patents do not apply in countries where software patents are not allowed.
For Linux server and desktop development, we only need the ECMA components, and things that we have developed (like Gtk#) or Apache integration.
>http://www.mono-project.com/about/licensing.html
>
>Question 131: Could patents be used to completely disable
>Mono(either submarine patents filed now, or changes made by
>Microsoft specifically to create patent problems)?
Wow you have a FAQ entry.
Does this FAQ entry represent a legally binding patent grant from MS?
Do you have the opinion of an IP lawyer that this FAQ entry represent a legally binding patent grant from MS?
Has the attorney for the FSF commented that this FAQ entry represent a legally binding patent grant from MS?
Buddy, I’m not going to jump through hoops to try and validate Mono’s legal status.
Every technology has the that.potential for patent infringement, ranging from practical to ridiculous. Simple as that.
What would you suggest that has the capacity of replacing Mono? If you say Java, you seriously have no clue on what .NET/Mono is.
now how did “that.” get in there
OK, perhaps the anonymous poster would like to direct their mail to the FSF, which currently houses (under GNU) their own .Net implementation in .GNU. Or Debian, who has Mono in unstable. (And which works quite nicely, I might add)
But for fun, we’ll say that they do want to use the patents on some upper-level, Windows-only APIs. That’s OK. That’s all in a seperate part of the Mono source tree from the EMCA-based classes. And unless they’ve magically patented Java as well, the EMCA-level .Net stuff is not going to be submersable. C# is Java with P/Invoke. Compiling to a common language that can share code has been done before, because that’s what GCC does to your C code. (Portably? No. But did MS’s .Net compiler suite do that before Mono? Nope.) Other than that, what else does Mono do?
>Buddy, I’m not going to jump through hoops to try and
>validate Mono’s legal status.
Well there you have it. If the Mono fans aren’t going to do the due diligence to validate the legality of the platform, then I think the OSS world should leave it on the shelf.
>Every technology has the that.potential for patent
>infringement, ranging from practical to ridiculous. Simple
>as that.
Possibly, but thats like saying “you could get hit by a car tomorrow, so here take this 6-shooter with 5 bullets in the chamber and play Russian Roullete”
>What would you suggest that has the capacity of replacing
>Mono? If you say Java, you seriously have no clue on what
>.NET/Mono is.
What exactly do you think .NET/Mono is?
Why does Mono need replacing? Its a minimally deployed 1.0 preview and you act like its something important.
What software am I going to write with it that I can’t build the equivalent with Java/GCJ/Java Gnome and/or SWT? Or with C and GTK and Gnome?
People put way too much emphasis on over-hyped tools rather than on the quality of the engineer doing the development.
>>Well there you have it. If the Mono fans aren’t going to do the due diligence to validate the legality of the platform, then I think the OSS world should leave it on the shelf.
IANAL, are you?
>>Possibly, but thats like saying “you could get hit by a car tomorrow, so here take this 6-shooter with 5 bullets in the chamber and play Russian Roullete”
Right because I forgot, Sun is a poster child of OSS. They have no crippling patents on Java.
Oh wait, they do!!! http://www.sun.com/legal/patents/
>>What software am I going to write with it that I can’t build the equivalent with Java/GCJ/Java Gnome and/or SWT? Or with C and GTK and Gnome?
Its not about the software you write, its about the flexibility/fuctionality of the framework that you use.
Can I use c, python, etc classes in Java? I can in Mono/.NET
Well, there shouldn’t be anything illegal about Mono. Afterall, Microsoft submitted .NET as a standard specifically because they wanted third parties to be able to implement .NET in other operating systems. After all, rememember. .NET is supposed to be Microsoft’s answer to Java. For it to be that, it has to be portable.
I think the problem is not because of issues with the legality of Mono, but issues with the fact that Microsoft did not want to promote a product that comepetes with their own .NET implementation. Mono runs on Windows after all, and is more cross-platform out of the box because it uses GTK+ instead of WindowsForms for its GUI.