Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 11th Aug 2006 23:25 UTC
Sam of Port25 sits down with Miguel de Icaza, VP Development Platform at Novell and co-founder of Ximian. In this interview Sam and Miguel talk about the history behind Mono, the current state of the project and Miguel's thoughts on Mono as it relates to .NET.
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2005-07-09
While I don't know now much he knows about the ECMA specs, I do know that the ECMA specs a little more than the definition of POSIX, and the C#/CLR language. POSIX is good enough for console work, but it is not good enough for GUI or web development so there is truth in the statement that "reverse engineer parts of what Microsoft has done to get anywhere" (i.e. Winforms or ASP.NET).
That being said, it is a bit misleading since you can get somewhere with the ECMA specs if you use Mono's GNOME bindings.
The commment "Yes, they patent *implementation*. Any one else is free to make their own implementation." is misleading, OTOH. MP3 has patents on it and because of those patents, you can't produce a free MP3 player or writer no matter how you try to implement it. Thomson Consumer Electronics has been very lax about enforcing it's patent on free software (mostly because sites that hold MP3 encoders like the PLF are based in countries that do not acknowledge software patents), but MP3s are still at risk and Mono is also at risk (in countries that acknowledge software patents).
Personally, I have mixed feelings about Mono. Mono is a necessary evil since like it or not, a C# and CLR implementation are necessary to prevent C# and CLR from completely locking in the MS code base. It is now theoretically possible to go to your boss (who is a Microsoft fanatic) and say that it's in the company's best interest to support multiple implementations of the CLR like Mono. OTOH, I'd feel that it does carry it's risks if it gets too embedded in the Linux world because of the risks it presents. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if Mono took the GStreamer approach and divided Mono into three parts: Mono-base (consisting of pure ECMA C#/CLR), Mono-good (consisting of GNOME#, Cocoa#, etc), and Mono-ugly (consisting of ASP.NET, Winforms, etc). Mono would still be risky (since unless you live in the EU, RAND doesn't necessarily imply compatibility with open source), but this scheme would at least allow people to chose the risk level they are comfortable with.
Edited 2006-08-13 15:13