Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 23 September 2009 06:13
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
The appointment of Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza to the board of Microsoft's CodePlex Foundation has been done for one reason - the Foundation will serve as a handy vehicle to increase the use of Mono.
The aim of the
Foundation has been
stated rather simply: to enable "the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities."
To convince people of its open source credentials, it even has the press conference which Sam Ramji used to launch the organisation available for download as an Ogg Vorbis file, among others. (Windows Media is still first). For once, you can also download documents from the site in PDF format! A Microsoft site without .doc files!!!
The Foundation is still in its nascent stages and is probably waiting to see how it is received before setting things down in stone. The website
says: "Our governance documents are deliberately sparse, because we expect them to change. The most important document, the Codeplex Foundation Charter, doesn't even exist in draft form yet."
Before I go any further, let me advise you, gentle reader, that these are my opinions, something for which I expect the usual "compliments".
The need for more people to get involved in free and open source software projects is often stressed by leaders of the community - and they couldn't be more right. There is a dearth of people and it is growing - one only needs to look at the number of orphaned packages in the Debian project to get an idea of the magnitude of the problem.
One of the stated objectives of the Foundation is to get more companies contributing to open source
But the reverse if also true - the Foundation/Microsoft is planning to get FOSS projects to focus on writing software that runs on Windows.
Wouldn't that mean less time can be devoted to developing applications for Linux? After all, the same developers are writing the code for both ports, aren't they?
Bingo, the magician arrives,
Miguel with his magic Mono wand. No problem, says de Icaza, just switch to Mono. Then you can code just once and it will run on both Windows and Linux.
CONTINUED
