More Mono apps for next Ubuntu release?

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 04 November 2010 17:00

Opinion and Analysis

Much has been written about the fact that the next version of Ubuntu, Natty Narwhal, will switch its interface from GNOME to Canonical's own Unity interface.

Little has been said about the plan to introduce a Mono-dependent application, Banshee, as the default music player.

This is yet to be finalised; it is dependent on the application fitting into a single CD, along with the rest of the distribution.

Mono is an attempt to reproduce some parts of Microsoft's .NET development environment as an open source offering. It has been said more than once, and by more than one authority, that it may could well pose patent dangers to developers as it is core technology from Microsoft.

The man behind it, Miguel de Icaza, a co-founder of the GNOME desktop project and a vice-president of Novell, has been trying very hard for the last nine years to make it an acceptable alternative. Yet it has won few followers.

Last year, de Icaza admitted to having developed portions of .NET, which were not submitted to ECMA by Microsoft, as part of his open source project.

He promised to separately release the Mono source code for those portions which comply with specifications submitted to the standards organisation, ECMA. He is yet to do so.

It has often been claimed that it is easy to obtain a royalty-free licence to use code which has been written using these specifications. This is not the case.