Miguel De Icaza On Mono, Moonlight, and Gnome 328
Knuckles writes "Austrian newspaper Der Standard continues its recent series of in-depth interviews with free software developers. This time they sat down with Novell's Vice President of Developer Platform, Miguel de Icaza of Gnome and Mono fame. The interview was conducted at GUADEC (GNOME Users' And Developers' European Conference).
Miguel talks mainly about Mono 2.0 and .Net 3.5 compatibility, enhancing the collaboration with Microsoft over Silverlight ('Moonlight' in Mono), and the larger political situation of Mono and Moonlight. When the interviewer asks whether Moonlight is only validating Silverlight on the web, Miguel gives a quite detailed answer that includes a possibly well-deserved swipe at Mozilla ..."
Yay Miguel (Score:3, Interesting)
To quote my favourite font name: \!Andale Mono!
MS Shill 2008 (Score:3, Interesting)
The MS Excel XML format stores dates as a floating point[1] rather than something standard like, oh, ISO format. Miguel De Icaza thinks that's a good idea. Kind of says it all.
Re:Makes good points (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:i just want (Score:3, Interesting)
Even if that happens it would be worth it just to kill Flash... I'll take a free software implementation over a binary blob any day, no matter what company originated the standard.
Re:Makes good points (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, although the Flash IDE is closed-source and proprietary, the SWF file format is now a published specification which others are free to implement [adobe.com].
Adobe did this years ago with PDF, and didn't take long to do so for SWF once they bought Macromedia. They want everyone using their formats, and to then compete based on the quality and branding of their authoring tools. It's a good business case in my eyes -- make the pie bigger by opening the spec but keep most of the pie yourself by making the best-known implementation that the most people know how to use.
To compare that with anything Microsoft has ever done, the executable format for Windows is the best example. To get more programmers targeting Windows, allowing more compiler makers into the market easily was a must. If you can only compile programs using the OS vendor's compiler, that feels very much like lock-in. By getting competing compiler and assembler products supporting their OS quickly made it easier for developers to decide to target the platform in its early days.
OOXML, albeit a contentious, oversized, and and only partially specified format, is an example of Microsoft trying to do some of the same things. They're trying to get people who believe in open, competitive file formats to use a format they have a competitive advantage in producing and editing. With Microsoft's past (and some of the gotchas in the spec itself), it's easy to see how that advantage could be kept through much chicanery.
However, the Adobe's got a pretty good record of allowing anyone to come along and make use of the Photoshop save format, the PDF publishing format (which is itself based on PostScript), and allowing JavaScript and ActionScript (both based on the ECMAScript standard, after all (which is based on earlier versions of JavaScript)) to interact cleanly. Now that SWF as a spec is published, it's difficult for honest people working with Microsoft technology to be judgmental about openness.
Re:I just find it's terribly dumb (Score:1, Interesting)
derStandard.at: But aren't you actually validating Silverlight by that and driving adoption?
de Icaza: That's what some people want you to believe. But I don't think that's the case. Linux on the desktop is still a very small amount of people. If you believe that getting the Linux desktop people happy is what you need to validate a technology, you have lost a sense of proportion.
I mean - how many people outside of the technology world really know about Linux at the moment. And even the Mozilla guys - the keynote we had here was done on a mac, every single Mozilla developer uses a Mac. And it's funny, they constantly attack Silverlight, they constantly attack Flash and then all of them use proprietary operating systems, they don't seem to have a problem doing it. And then they had the Guiness record thing for Firefox 3 and you went to the website and it had a flash map to show where people are downloading - so there definitely is a double standard here. And that's after all their claiming that you can do everything in AJAX - so they definitely don't "walk the walk".
Re:It's A Trap (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/mono [gnome.org] As this blog post explains, while the current software patent situation exists, Mono is an unacceptable risk.
What makes Mono an 'unacceptable risk' but allows Wine to become one of the most often praised open source projects on Slashdot?
Re:i just want (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yay Miguel (Score:1, Interesting)
I think you needed to apply a bit of sarcasm detection when reading the post you reponded to.
Re:Makes good points (Score:5, Interesting)
the PDF publishing format (which is itself based on PostScript)
PostScript is the best example. Adobe wrote the first standard and implementation. They published a later version of the spec before they had an implementation and were beaten to market by a competitor. I don't know what, if any, market share Adobe still has for PostScript implementations (RIPs), but they certainly get a lot of money from the desktop publishing market that releasing PostScript helped to create.
Re:Makes good points (Score:5, Interesting)
Try again. I'm only getting maybe 10% more CPU use by opening a tab for CNN.com on Firefox here with the latest player, and that's under 64bit Kubuntu, which runs the Adobe flash player in nswrapper.
Re:I just find it's terribly dumb (Score:1, Interesting)
Probably. Mono provides 2 things really, one is a much more rapid way to produce GUI apps for Linux. The other is it provides more runtime protection than C and C++, garbage collection, lack of buffer overflows and exploitable stack overflows. If more and more people start to use it (and it's worth a look if you haven't looked at it) it will eventually have class libraries that rival Java and provide for much much more re-use.
I've spoken against Mono in the past but I've been looking at it lately. It's pretty darn good. I understand some of the fear about Microsoft somehow "patenting" things or hurting it but those fears have been unfounded. Mono is similar to JVM in performance and it has been completely open sourced from the start. You know, I've got a pair of G5 macs that are still pretty decent machines and I can't get a new JVM for them and never will be able to. Mono? Works just fine.
C won't go away but I you're putting together a desktop application for Linux, I can't imagine that you wouldn't give Mono some serious consideration over C or C++.
Re:i just want (Score:2, Interesting)
The codecs being open-source have no bearing on whether they're available for open-source applications to use.
The DRM remains, but hey--don't buy (or pirate) media that's under restrictive licenses and you won't care.
I don't disagree that Microsoft has given them food, but Mono is a good thing, of only because Java isn't going to cut it for a managed code environment in the future. Make something better, and we'll talk. Right now, the CLR does everything Java does and then some. Hell, it even supports Java via J#, along with a raft of other mutually interoperable languages.
Managed code userlands are the future, I think, and Mono is the best choice at the moment for it.
Re:I just find it's terribly dumb (Score:4, Interesting)
The point is that Microsoft is "your worst enemy", not Miguel's.
It's well known that Miguel applied for a job at Microsoft. He's said so.
It occurs to me that we've all been operating under the assumption that he didn't get it.