Embracing the .Beast

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In recent times Miguel de Icaza has been the subject of much controversy within the Linux community. It hasn't always been so. de Icaza has contributed a lot of popular code to Linux, including large parts of Gnome, the Gnumeric spreadsheet, the Evolution personal and workgroup information manager, the Midnight Commander file manager and some of the SGI Linux hacks, all published under free software licenses.

de Icaza has credentials and a long history as a free software developer. His current (long standing) notoriety hinges on his role as the architect and lead developer of Mono, a free software implementation of Microsoft's .NET development framework which enables the easy transfer of Microsoft applications and skills from Windows to Linux.

In 2003 Ximian, the company de Icaza had founded to further the development of Gnome and Mono, was purchased by Novell, signalling a significant change in the business model of Novell, one of the older survivors of the computer wars of the 80s. Novell had been there, climbed the mountain and come down the other side, and was beginning to struggle. Linux was seen as an opportunity for Novell to re-invent itself as a young and energetic "open source" company with a new platform for its expertise in networking technologies.

The same year that Novell purchased Ximian, Novell also purchased SuSE Linux, the most successful distribution of Linux after Red Hat. Three years later the company concluded a fateful interoperability and patent agreement with Microsoft, which has been the subject of discontent within the free and open source software communities, because it offered a hostage to fortune in the shape of patent indemnity, and leant credibility to Microsoft's often iterated, never substantiated, and highly contentious claims of patent infringements in the Linux kernel.

"...The surprising aspect of the Microsoft/Novell agreement is that Novell was foolish enough to fall into the trap that Microsoft set for it, to induce somebody involved with Linux to take a license, so that Steve Ballmer could then go off to the press, and say 'See I told you there were concerns. Why else would they have taken this license?'" Mark Webbink, then the legal counsel for Red Hat, said at the time.

Novell claims that the agreement has brought significant marketing advantages to Linux and Novell.

A grave mistake

Since the inception of Microsoft .NET, under the aegis of Ximian, and later Novell, de Icaza has devoted his energies to developing Mono, a free software cross-platform implementation of a subset of the .NET development framework.

To ignore Microsoft's strategic move to web services might have been seen as reckless. Mono, and the alternative free software clone, DotGNU, were deliberate attempts to offer open alternatives to .NET, independent of proprietary interests. C# and Asp.NET developers can jump straight from Windows to Linux, or vice-versa, and applications developed for Windows can be migrated to Linux more or less seamlessly. .NET is no longer a single platform technology. Nat Friedman of Ximian explained it succinctly: "Microsoft claims that .NET is an open system. We're going to implement an open version of it, and see how they react."

de Icaza's purpose in developing Mono had been to bring what he perceives as the benefits of the .NET development framework to Linux, to offer a strategic alternative, and, more importantly, to build a runtime environment which would enable the rapid development of applications for the desktop, more specifically the GNOME desktop, on Linux.

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