Where, oh where, is the ECMA-compliant Mono source code?

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 12 October 2010 09:49

Opinion and Analysis

Last week, Miguel de Icaza, a vice-president at Novell, announced the release of version 2.8 of Mono, a project he set up to create an open source clone of Microsoft's .NET development environment.

De Icaza is extremely punctual in announcing these Mono releases. However, there is one release which he hasn't spoken about for more than a year - and which, I think, he would like everyone to forget about.

The release that I'm referring to is something De Icaza promised on July 6 last year when Microsoft issued a clarification about the licensing of some portions of .NET - C# and the common language infrastructure, allowing developers to use both under the terms of its community promise.

The promise extends to two sets of .NET specifications, 334 and 335, submitted to ECMA, a standards body that has been in existence for nearly 50 years.

De Icaza, who said he was "overflowing with joy" at the clarification, made a confession at the time: what he and the other Mono developers had cooked up thus far contained much more than was detailed in the ECMA specifications.

There have been fears among free and open source software community members that Mono could prove to be a patent trap and this statement from De Icaza confirmed that people were right to entertain such fears - after all if he had boldly gone beyond the ECMA specs, he could well have incorporated code that violated patents belonging to Microsoft.

De Icaza made the following pledge: "In the next few months we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions. One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others."

The man is yet to deliver on that promise. I haven't seen or heard of anybody who has reminded him of the same promise either.