Shifting sands: Mono, take note

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 14 February 2007 06:02

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft Office 365

Talk about KDE and GNOME often degenerates into a flamewar. The two projects are supposedly cooperating on some aspects of desktop development; according to Wikipedia, both "participate in Freedesktop.org, an effort to standardise Unix desktop interoperability, although there is still some friendly competition between them."

The word friendly seems a bit odd, considering that in 2001 Ximian quietly used terms as "kde", "konqueror", "dcop" (the KDE "Desktop COmmunications Protocol"), and kparts (the KDE component model) as Google adwords for its own ads. When KDE developers Kurt Granroth and Andreas Pour published an article titled "'Business Ethics' in the Open Source Community?" which chastised Ximian for this deceitful practice, Friedman had sufficient chutzpah to say:  "We knew what we were doing," noting that Ximian's goal was to ensure "as many users for Ximian GNOME as possible," within the context of "friendly competition." That's one for the people who are putting out the next edition of "How to make friends and influence people" to note.

In June 2001, Ximian set up the Mono project. Today the project defines itself as "an open development initiative sponsored by Novell to develop an open source, UNIX version of the Microsoft .NET development platform." The Novell bits came in in 2003 after the purchase of Ximian.

And now we come back to the question of shifting standards. There is no doubt that Microsoft has co-opted many ideas and methods first developed in the FOSS community and used them to its benefit. Even if it doesn't follow its famous "embrace, extend and extinguish" method, Microsoft has no difficulty in keeping up with any changes in FOSS ideas it borrows - the source is available.

But Mono cannot do this because it is aping (pun intended) proprietary software: Microsoft may have submitted standards for some classes of .Net to the standards organisation ECMA but there is nothing to prevent the company from changing everything tomorrow - and then just taking its ball and going home. KDE developer Tim Jansen puts it this way: "A cloned framework puts innovation in Microsoft's hand. You still have the chance to write better applications, but the innovation of the platform will always trail behind. What advantage does free software have when its innovation is limited to that of its competition?"

Both de Icaza and Friedman are now big names at Novell. When the deal with Microsoft was announced, both were ardent defenders. De Icaza even pointed out that "Although I did not take part of (sic) the actual negotiations, and was only told about this deal less than a week before the announcement, I had been calling for a long time for a collaboration between Microsoft and Open Source and Microsoft and Novell." I must add that this is his personal view.

Indeed, he seems to have come a long way from the youngster who co-founded a project simply because an existing one was using a proprietary toolset. Some ideals seem to have fallen off his handcart somewhere along the journey.