[Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34)
- From: vkanakala@xxxxxxxxx (Vamsee Kanakala)
- Date: Mon Jul 19 07:10:20 2010
On Monday 19 July 2010 12:00 AM, openbala wrote:
It is no news that RMS has termed Miguel de Icaza - the person behind
Mono (who was also behind GNOME) as a "traitor to the free software
community" for being part of the Mono project.
I have no interest in political part of this issue, for the reasons
outlined below. But, I would admit that at several instances Miguel's
statements disappointed me. I won't use such strong language to describe
him for sure, but having seen him and Nat (Friedman) present a brilliant
presentation on Mono all the way back in 2003 Foss.in (in its earlier
avatar, of course). I was quite disappointed the way it all turned out.
I'm a fan of .Net platform. I personally feel Mono runtime is an
awesome experiment to bring C# into non-Microsoft platforms. C# as
such is a wonderful language and would love to see a complete .Net 4.0
runtime implemented in Mono (currently Mono is fully compatible with
.Net 2.0 and some specifications of .Net 3.0). The interesting side
effect with mono runtime is that with little effort it was possible to
bring *other* .Net languages to Linux such as F# and Visual Basic.
With Miguel in the forefront Mono runtime is bound for some big
things.
I'd have to disagree, really. As far as I can remember, the real reason
why Miguel and Nat started working on Mono (as stated in their
presentation) was that they were worried that there wasn't truly useful
RAD-style development environment for Linux (both for desktop and
webapps) at that point of time. Meanwhile, MS was supposedly going to
take over the world with its new-fangled .Net thingy. The idea was to
implement .Net CLR in Linux, and create a whole toolset around it (which
led to MonoDevelop, I believe).
In other words, the whole of Mono project came about because people
feared MS was going to take over the technology world (I suppose it
seemed real enough in early part of the century). But the patent issues
would always stalk it, and not everybody bought into the Mono vision
that we have to re-implement MS standards, with a good amount of
skepticism that we're ultimately serving MS' agenda after all.
With Moonlight (Silverlight in Mono) and Monotouch (.Net platform for
iPhone and iOS 4!) the Mono suite gets really exciting.
As somebody already pointed out before, why do we have to bother with
extending a single company's strangle-hold over any part of technology
stack? Be it MS or Adobe, open technologies now have enough weight and
momentum to drive their own standards (Flash vs HTML5/Canvas). With a
lot of enlightened companies like Google (ok, in their own self-interest
of course) truly embracing the open technology platforms, why bother
with backward-looking, proprietary software sanctioned by a single
company? Coming to Monotouch, is it even legal to make apps with it,
given the dreaded Section 3.3.1 of Apple Developer License agreement?
Which kind of rounds out my argument in favor of not
supporting/re-implementing proprietary platforms - companies like Apple
can turn around and screw you in the end, no matter their love of all
things open.
P.S: Lets talk in technology!
Sorry I didn't talk purely technology - by asking to comment on Miguel's
actions/motivations, you also made it a subjective/political issue - but
these issues indeed go beyond the technical merits/non-merits of the
platforms or intentions or actions of a single person - however
influential they are. We believe in open source for a reason, and
trusting technology companies not to look out for their own interests in
the end, over and above whatever their professed love for developers and
their interests in these days (after so many scary stories) is being
extremely naive.
Vamsee.
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- » [Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34)- openbala
- » [Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34)- Rahul Sundaram
- » [Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34)- narendra sisodiya
- » [Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34)- openbala
- » [Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34)- narendra sisodiya
- » [Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34)- Rahul Sundaram
- » [Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34)- சிவகுமார் மா
- » [Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34) - Vamsee Kanakala
- » [Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34)- Rahul Sundaram
- » [Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34)- Vamsee Kanakala
- » [Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34)- openbala
- » [Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34)- Vamsee Kanakala
- » [Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34)- Kenneth Gonsalves
- » [Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34)- Vamsee Kanakala
- » [Ilugc] [OT]RMS on Mono, DotGNU (from foss news-34)- Kenneth Gonsalves