On Monday 19 July 2010 12:00 AM, openbala wrote:
It is no news that RMS has termed Miguel de Icaza - the person behind Mono (who was also behind GNOME) as a "traitor to the free software community" for being part of the Mono project.
I have no interest in political part of this issue, for the reasons outlined below. But, I would admit that at several instances Miguel's statements disappointed me. I won't use such strong language to describe him for sure, but having seen him and Nat (Friedman) present a brilliant presentation on Mono all the way back in 2003 Foss.in (in its earlier avatar, of course). I was quite disappointed the way it all turned out.
I'm a fan of .Net platform. I personally feel Mono runtime is an awesome experiment to bring C# into non-Microsoft platforms. C# as such is a wonderful language and would love to see a complete .Net 4.0 runtime implemented in Mono (currently Mono is fully compatible with .Net 2.0 and some specifications of .Net 3.0). The interesting side effect with mono runtime is that with little effort it was possible to bring *other* .Net languages to Linux such as F# and Visual Basic. With Miguel in the forefront Mono runtime is bound for some big things.
I'd have to disagree, really. As far as I can remember, the real reason why Miguel and Nat started working on Mono (as stated in their presentation) was that they were worried that there wasn't truly useful RAD-style development environment for Linux (both for desktop and webapps) at that point of time. Meanwhile, MS was supposedly going to take over the world with its new-fangled .Net thingy. The idea was to implement .Net CLR in Linux, and create a whole toolset around it (which led to MonoDevelop, I believe).
In other words, the whole of Mono project came about because people feared MS was going to take over the technology world (I suppose it seemed real enough in early part of the century). But the patent issues would always stalk it, and not everybody bought into the Mono vision that we have to re-implement MS standards, with a good amount of skepticism that we're ultimately serving MS' agenda after all.
With Moonlight (Silverlight in Mono) and Monotouch (.Net platform for iPhone and iOS 4!) the Mono suite gets really exciting.
As somebody already pointed out before, why do we have to bother with extending a single company's strangle-hold over any part of technology stack? Be it MS or Adobe, open technologies now have enough weight and momentum to drive their own standards (Flash vs HTML5/Canvas). With a lot of enlightened companies like Google (ok, in their own self-interest of course) truly embracing the open technology platforms, why bother with backward-looking, proprietary software sanctioned by a single company? Coming to Monotouch, is it even legal to make apps with it, given the dreaded Section 3.3.1 of Apple Developer License agreement? Which kind of rounds out my argument in favor of not supporting/re-implementing proprietary platforms - companies like Apple can turn around and screw you in the end, no matter their love of all things open.
P.S: Lets talk in technology!
Sorry I didn't talk purely technology - by asking to comment on Miguel's actions/motivations, you also made it a subjective/political issue - but these issues indeed go beyond the technical merits/non-merits of the platforms or intentions or actions of a single person - however influential they are. We believe in open source for a reason, and trusting technology companies not to look out for their own interests in the end, over and above whatever their professed love for developers and their interests in these days (after so many scary stories) is being extremely naive.
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