De Icaza Pleads For Mono/.Net Cooperation

suka writes "In a recent interview with the online edition of an Austrian newspaper, Mono project-lead Miguel de Icaza pleads for cooperation between Mono and Microsoft's .Net: 'I think that the deal should include a technical Mono/.NET collaboration, and even go as far as Microsoft recommending Mono for all of their developers looking at migration'. The whole interview has some other interesting bits, like de Icaza's thoughts on open sourced Java and information about upcoming versions of Mono."

Miguel de Icaza's web log

[Anonymous Coward]

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Mar-26.html [tirania.org]

"The crowd at OSNews got upset because I said advocate more collaboration between Mono and Microosft. It is hardly news, I advocated the same thing in August during an interview that I did with Sam Ramji from Microsoft, before I knew of any MS/Novell collaboration."

Re:Instead of catch up

[agent dero]

Wow, where does one even start to combat the trolling.

If you look in the Mono.* namespace they've developed a LOT of Mono on its own, including Mono.Xml, Mono.Unix, Mono.Math and a wide vareity of other tools. Not to mention now there are various open source projects out there like DBus# [ndesk.org], Dumbarton [imeem.com], and of course Tao [mono-project.com].

Mono is a definite option now for cross-platform applications (Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, etc) and extends the compatibility to .NET 1.1 and is coming up on having a .NET 2.0 compatible class library.

Don't get yourself mixed up, Mono does allow developers to use .NET code on other platforms, but it is really a powerful framework unto itself nowadays.

Re:Mono is a Trojan Horse, expect no help

[AJWM]

So what is up with him needing acceptance from Microsoft?

From Wikipedia:

In summer of 1997, he was interviewed by Microsoft for a job in the Internet Explorer Unix team (to work on a SPARC port), but lacked a university degree to obtain a work H-1B visa.

Perhaps he's still trying to live down that rejection. (I seem to recall that he tried more than once to get a job at Microsoft, but I can't readily find a reference.) Mind you, I think anyone who would even apply for that kind of job was probably brain damaged to start with.

Re:Good Luck

[Anonymous Coward]

Mono will never be a safe language for developers

Mono isn't a language, safe or otherwise.

Re:Nevermind MS....

[agent dero]

As far as I'm concerned, mono stands for "mononucleosis". I sure as heck don't want the human version nor the computer version!

Mono means monkey in spanish. Thus the monkey on almost ALL the mono-project [mono-project.com] pages.

Re:Good Luck

[protected_static]

Mono is multi-platform .NET is not.

Well, by definition .NET is Windows-only. The underlying Common Language Interpreter doesn't have to be. IIRC, Microsoft released a couple of non-Windows versions of the CLI when .NET was first released, including one that ran on some flavor of BSD.

Re:Patents, again...

[Bruce Perens]

While MS pledged some patents to be royalty-free as part of the ECMA standardization of C#, those were only the patents that applied directly to the C# language. Mono code is covered by claims in other Microsoft patents as well, and patents of additional third parties.

So, if you use a paid-up copy of Novell, Microsoft says it won't sue you for using Mono. For 5 years, I hear, and then maybe they'll do it anyway.

I can't begin to understand why Miguel would have wanted to devote so many years of his life to a project that MS would invariably claim rights over. Is he just waking up to this now?

Bruce

Crap

[recharged95]

I like SuSE a lot, and Novell does have the clout to push back against MS (though it is making deals with them), but Mono is just killing the interop effort.

Shout to Novell: Just drop mono and switch to Java...Pleeaseeeze! (pleading like De Icarza).

And yes, I've tried switching my winforms apps to mono and it never worked out. Why? cause the cool features in .Net apps are either referenced unmanaged code or some DLL import hack. .Net only offers great cross coding between MS languages and webservices (I prefer XML-RPC anyway) from my experience and that's it.

Then again, my apps broke switching from .Net 1.1 to .Net 2.0. sheesh.

Re:Why Mono and DotNet should synch

[Anonymous Coward]

"Think of all the money in R&D that Microsoft would save"

I would save them nothing, for the obvious reason that they're no doing it.

As for the rest, thanks for pointing out the obvious reasons why developers may like a cross-platform language. I know them. That's why I'm using Java. Any reason I should switch to C#? Is a GUI toolkit running through Wine supposed to look more native or fell less bloated on Linux or MacOSX?

The only developers this would help are those currently writing Windows-only apps. Considering that the one reason Microsoft came up with C# was precisely to prevent those from writing cross platform Java apps, it's easy to see why it's not gonna happen.

And for the record, even if they did, I'd stay well clear anyway. Not taking the risk of ending up with a mass of code that can't use features I need because the latest Linux .NET is suffering "technical difficulties" and possibly won't run on the latest Windows .NET.

Re:Good Luck

[Anonymous Coward]

A convent lie that lets .NET compete with Java right up to the point where you have tens of thousands of lines of code and you want to migrate to a different platform.

People are lying but it doesn't matter. Real companies aren't blinded by such blatant lies. They want OS that deliver performances (Linux, Solaris, ...) and they now want real portability.

Google runs GMail and Adwords using Linux / Java. eBay runs on Java (on Solaris!?). Many banks run Java on Un*x OSes.

.NET is just a bad, bad, lock-in joke.

I agree with Miguel de Icaza when he says in TFA (yup, site wasn't /.ed) that Mono isn't trying to appeal to Java programmers but to .NET programmers. However, .NET programmers wanting platform independance / open-sourceness have two choices: Mono or Java. So, yup, Java is quite a competitor to Mono.

BTW is there any serious Website running on Mono? I can cite many Fortune 500 website backed by Java (especially the ones needing lots of scalability/performances), what about Mono?
 

Re:The point of Mono?

[killjoe]

Nah, more languages run on the JVM then .NET and most run better on the JVM.

Re:De Icaza is a disgrace to OSS.

[Anonymous Coward]

You remember quite wrong.

KDE was started in 1996. GNOME was started in August of 1997. Qt was licensed under the QPL in November of 1998, along with the plans to release Qt under a variant of the BSD license were Trolltech to go under or otherwise abandon Qt. Regardless, Trolltech released the UNIX version of Qt under the GPL in September of 2000.

For most pragmatic developers and users, the deal of November 1998 was more than sufficient. Thus GNOME was essentially rendered useless to everyone but a small handful of zealots. But even most of them were satisfied by the eventual GPL'ing in 2000. Keep in mind that that was over six years ago. Since that time there has been absolutely no reason for GNOME to exist.

Re:Forget dot net / mono, use Java

[gludington]

A better question that you should have asked is why would we care about Java being GPL-ed when it's slower, less scalable, only supports a single language, controlled by a single vendor, and YEARS behind.

I am not going to get into a pointless flamewar on speed or scalability, but Java has not been the only language on the JVM for quite some time. The first result on a Google Search for jvm languages [google.com] lists over 200 languages. Granted, most of those listed are toy and/or unfinished projects, but there are solid options available for most of the main languages you list, and with JRuby, Rhino, and JSR-223, this is rapidly improving, at least for dynamic languages. I will grant you .NET is far ahead of the JVM in terms of mixing languages in a single application.

When the Java language becomes forgotten (like all computer languages do) for the next best language, all your code is useless. But all my libraries are just a call away, no matter what language takes the place of what I currently use.

Since the JVM can and support other languages, the question for both JVM and .NET is "When the JVM/.NET runtime becomes forgotten, what happens to my code?" This is one reason why people are excited about the GPL of Java. With an open source virtual machine, should (Sun|Microsoft) (go bankrupt|lose interest), other people can pick up the slack. In the Java world, open source JVM efforts (e.g. Kaffe) no longer have to spend the time with clean-room reimplementations, and can focus on improvements. You could say that Mono could do the same thing -- but that seems to be what Miguel is arguing now, that without explicit Microsoft cooperation Mono has to expend too much of its resources in playing catchup.

Mod parent -1 proofread

[SanityInAnarchy]

When you try to point that out people say not it isn't you can use Mono.

First lesson: This is a comma, learn to use it. In fact, punctuation is your friend!

Also: not? I don't think the phrase "not is isn't" makes any sense, in any context.

So, the above sentence should read: "When you try to point that out, people say "No it isn't, you can use Mono."

And it's still ugly as sin. Do you actually read what you type? Alright, going to ignore punctuation for the rest of the paragraph...

A convent lie that lets .NET compete with Java

What's a convent lie? Is that a lie told in a convent?

I think the word you're looking for is convenient.

Now, on to what I actually disagree with...

You know Mono really has fallen behind .NET. You can port your applications if you want but it would just be cheaper to stick with Windows.

Or you could switch to Rotor. Microsoft does actually provide the .NET source under some Shared-Source crap, and if you've got tens of thousands of lines of code, chances are you can afford some MS-owned port to somewhere else.

Also, .NET does have strengths Java doesn't, and vice versa.

Consider: Java has a fairly long-standing and stable bunch of libraries, including cross-platform stuff, but not limited to it. There's tons of open-source frameworks, but also plenty of official and commercial frameworks. The server frameworks are apparently very good.

However, Java is not well supported in a few places -- including out-of-the-box Windows. You have to install Sun's JVM if you really want your app to work. Vista comes with .NET, if I remember right, and older versions of Windows can get it via Windows Update. It integrates better, too -- they look and feel like native Windows apps, and are .exe files, so the user doesn't even have to know they're .NET.

Then again, .NET does not work very well on the server. Trying to get .NET working under Linux/Apache is probably worse than trying to make Ruby/Rails to work under Windows -- and you'd still need a SQL server, most likely.

I've always felt that Mono is a great project, but that it's going to be held back by Microsoft's dominance over the language. I like that there's a standard, but after "OpenXML", I don't trust Microsoft's standards.