Embracing the .Beast

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de Icaza sees the CLR as a means of integrating and simplifying the development of GNOME and related applications, and to make it easier to port applications from Windows to Linux. In short, he sees Mono as a productivity tool for programmers, and as a voyage of discovery for adventurous developers, without much relevance to Microsoft's project for world domination. Mono allows you to program in Visual Basic on Linux and run your applications on Windows, or develop in C# on Windows and run your applications on Linux.

The problem is that not many within the user or developer communities share de Icaza's enthusiasm for Microsoft technologies. "Visual Basic for Linux" has not been a long term aim of Linux developers, and not many want to accept the notion that C# is the future for the Linux user space. Moreover, Mono is in a constant cycle of playing catch up with .Net, and will never be able to guarantee up-to-date compatibility, even where that is desirable, but it does provide a route for migration between Windows and Linux.

During the last few years Linux has captured large swathes of the UNIX market, because there have been few issues of portability. UNIX skills have been transferable to a Linux environment, and the GNU tools provide a familiar landscape for the UNIX programmer.

The hope is that Mono fulfills a similar role for Windows developers and applications, providing an easy route for the migration of commercially developed Asp.NET and other software applications from Windows Server to Linux and allowing .Net developers to migrate seamlessly from Windows to Linux.

The city of Munich is cited as an example where Mono has provided a useful service in migrating applications from Windows to Linux. Mono has a significant role as an enabler of cross-platform technologies, but may never fulfill de Icaza's ultimate objective of becoming a primary building block for the Linux desktop.

Embracing the .Beast?

Some key Linux desktop applications, such as Beagle and F-Spot, have already been developed for Gnome using Mono and this bothers many Linux users, as does the lingering suspicion, right or wrong, that, from Novell's point of view, the Novell/Microsoft "interoperability and patent agreement" may have hinged on the Microsoft technologies embraced by Mono.

Even more disturbing is the development of Silverlight, Microsoft's Flash replacement, implemented by the Mono team as Moonlight, which is seen as a proprietary extension to the web, which will lead to inevitable problems for the end user, and is perceived as contrary to the principle of "open standards" which are the touchstone for meaningful interoperability across the network.

GNOME, the GNU network Object Model Environment, grew out of misgivings with the licensing of the Qt widget toolkit for KDE in the mid-90s. Miguel de Icaza was a GNOME project leader from the inception of the project. At the time Qt was licensed exclusively under a non-free license, and GNOME was intended to be the entirely free alternative.

Since 2000, however, Qt has been dual-licensed under the GPL and can be considered as untrammelled free software. There is a certain irony that Mono and C# have been considered by some as potential future building blocks for GNOME, the project that was created to preserve the integrity of free software. Hence, the recent debates on mailing lists and elsewhere. There is little faith in Microsoft's good intention to pursue open standards, and considerable resistance to the adoption of technologies that are controlled by proprietary interests, and may or may not be patent encumbered.

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