Microsoft Mono move means exactly nothing

By Sam Varghese
Monday, 13 July 2009 06:21

Opinion and Analysis

But there are some other aspects of the whole Mono story which seem to be largely ignored.

One is the fact that Miguel de Icaza, a vice-president at Novell and the person who started the Mono project, announced on the same day as Microsoft, that he would now be starting work on splitting the Mono source code into portions covered by the standards submitted to ECMA and those outside.

It's telling that until now, the man who is supposed to be fully aware of no-go areas where Mono is concerned was blithely accepting promises from Microsoft and creating a potential time-bomb.

Else, why does the very person, who had been always assuring others that there was no danger in using Mono, now wake up to the fact that one needs to separate the source code for the ECMA-standardised areas and the rest? (This bit of information is neatly buried at the bottom of his post.)

His promises were thus worth nothing all these eight years. What are they worth now? Remember this is the man whose company, Ximian, was marketing GNOME - and using keywords associated with a rival, KDE, as Google adwords for its own ads! Integrity, anyone?

For a long time, people have tended to see De Icaza primarily as a free software developer - and not as an employee of Novell, the same company that tried to split the GNU/Linux community by signing a patent deal with Microsoft back in November 2006. Novell, incidentally, styles itself as a "mixed-source company."

Once one views De Icaza from the right perspective, then a lot of things fall into place. He is merely doing Novell's - and, by extension, Microsoft's - bidding.

I'm not sure how many people have read the tale of the camel and the tailor. I can't find it on the web, so here is a brief synopsis: a camel comes to a tailor in a tent, asks him to allow him inside because of the cold, and gradually worms his way in. He then kicks the tailor out. You. dear reader, would get the analogy.

To come back to Mono, once applications like Tomboy and F-Spot are installed by default in GNU/Linux distributions, is that going to be the end of the story - though even that is not safe?

Undoubtedly not. If Novell does not have funds to pay people to develop more and more Mono applications, then Microsoft will find a way to do so. And if there are good applications, the push for their inclusion will continue - unmindful of any risks they may pose.

Let's remember that De Icaza has gone on the public record stating that he believes .NET is the "natural upgrade" for GNOME. Here's a direct quote: "I'd like to see Gnome applications written in .NET in version 4.0 - no, version 3.0. But Gnome 4.0 should be based on .NET. A lot of people just see .NET as a fantastic upgrade for the development platform from Microsoft."

GNOME 3.0 is around the corner so he probably won't have time to realise his dream. What of version 4.0?

Not unrelated to this whole Mono debate may be the fact that some GNOME people have started a campaign to smear Stallman, to the extent of even releasing a private email exchange. But then is not new behaviour from people at the top of GNOME. Anyone who criticises Mono seems to come in for a rough time.