Mono 2.0 has been released. So what?

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 14 October 2008 04:24

Opinion and Analysis

In the same interview de Icaza made the astonishing claim: "Today, pretty much every open source .Net routine out there is tested against Mono. When we released Mono 1.2, it was pretty much a novelty. But now, it's pretty much a standard rule that you will test your software on Mono before you ship." Byfield took this at face value. Does one need any more evidence to conclude that this "interview" is not worth the space it occupies on some server somewhere?

Microsoft Office 365

But that's not the extent of it. Another well-known technology writer, Carla Schroder, the editor of LinuxToday, had this, among other things, to say: "The Mono project has been branded as evil, a sellout, a product of a Microsoft-loving lackey from its inception. I think this is a misguided attitude that is rooted in a mistrust of the power of FOSS, and especially the GPL. The Samba project, like Mono, provides a cross-platform alternative to closed Microsoft technologies." (emphasis mine)

Glynn Moody, one of the few FOSS writers who still has his feet on the ground, was quick to rebut this, by pointing to the history of the two projects and emphasising the differences.

I wouldn't even bother to refute such a claim. Disingenuous is the mildest word one can use to describe it. To compare Andrew Tridgell, the founder of the Samba project and a passionate advocate of free software, to de Icaza, could lead to defamation suits - so massive is the gap in motivation, ability and integrity between the two men.

Though it is often claimed that de Icaza has no role in GNOME, he often goes to the extent of publicising his own roadmap for the project. When the question of his role in GNOME is raised, people are quick to deny that he has any influence on the project and that he is merely respected as one of the co-founders.

One of the many goals of the Mono project is to serve as the main development platform for GNOME. Here it is, laid out right from version 1.0: "Should GNOME programmers switch over to Mono now? Yes, we believe that Mono 1.0 is ready to be used as the main development platform for building applications for the GNOME desktop. Mono includes Gtk# a .NET binding for GTK+ and various GNOME libraries which together with C# and the System libraries provide developers with great productivity for building graphical applications especially when compared to GTK+ or Java Swing."

Sure, we need software that lays us open to patent lawsuits from Microsoft right in the middle of our desktop. We need it like we need a bullet in the left parietal lobe