The Mono Mystery That Wasn't 268
jammag writes "It was shocking news, or so it seemed: Miguel de Icaza, the Mono creator, was switching his opinion about his life's work — he now seemed to agree with the free software partisans who oppose his Mono work and his Microsoft connections. The story flamed across the Internet and even got picked up on Slashdot. But Bruce Byfield reports that 'De Icaza has not changed his opinions.' De Icaza calls the rumors 'a storm in a teacup.' Tracing the misinformation trail, Byfield concludes that 'the FOSS community excels at communication. However, in this instance, that ability was used irresponsibly.'"
I accidentally an entire word (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, that should read:
Yes, yes, preview first, etc etc.
Re:Inflamatory headling superceeds mundane content (Score:5, Informative)
We have announced that our upcoming Mono release (2.8) will default to 4.0:
http://www.mono-project.com/Roadmap [mono-project.com]
For the first time in Mono's history our C# compiler and its supporting engine and core libraries were done before Microsoft released the product, we were usually one to two years behind. This time we are some five months ahead of time:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Dec-09.html [tirania.org]
There are still a handful of loose ends here and there, but luckily, nothing major.
Re:-1 Misses the point (Score:5, Informative)
"Miguel at the time argued that the free software world had failed to produce any real competitor to Java or .NET style frameworks despite their absolute dominance of mainstream programming."
Why would they need to? While initially some of the Java trademark and licensing mechanism were semi-unfriendly to open source, the situation was a LOT better than it has ever been with .NET, and is much better now.
Instead of trying to create a competitor, the OSS community worked with Java - A lot of Java's success can likely be attributed to the participation of the OSS community. (Heck, even Miguel's blog article effectively says this with his citations of various OSS "research" projects into JIT that became mainstream.)
Re:Inflamatory headling superceeds mundane content (Score:1, Informative)
Yes, so if you download your binaries from Novel, then you fall under that agreement.
Re:Inflamatory headling superceeds mundane content (Score:2, Informative)
What's the difference between Mono and .NET? How does the liberated open source software community connect to these standards? Where does De Icaza fit in the puzzle?
Your geek card please... Thanks
Mono is a free implementation of the .NET infrastructure.
De Icaza is just the one that started Mono and integrated it into Gnome.
Re:Who cares about core libraries? (Score:2, Informative)
I don't think WPF is really that alive, although I agree calling it 'dead' is a bit dramatic.
Microsoft, as is there frequent pattern, has moved on from WPF in that it's stable but won't be invested in significantly anymore.
Example: If you take a look at the last major Microsoft conference (MIX10) then you'll see there we no new WPF features added, while a whole bunch of new Silverlight things announced. Even Microsoft realizes that the web is having an impact on their desktop UI strategy, i.e. Silverlight is way good enough and far too similar to WPF to keep two forks alive.
Saying Silverlight is a 'subset' of a WPF is true, but misses out the portability side, i.e it has it's own run-time. It would be just as true to say that WPF is missing features that Silverlight has.
WPF isn't dead, it's just resting. (insert parrot joke here-> )
PS Apologies if you've bet on WPF, you should really have recognized the pattern by now...
Re:-1 Misses the point (Score:5, Informative)
Run fast, support multiple languages, provide 99.9999% secure code environments, support more than one thread executing at a time, etc, etc.
But... Java and Python are two drastically different technologies. Python is great at what it does but it's a scripting language not a virtual platform like Java. .NET is more comparable to Java since .NET was basically cloned feature for feature from Java with some additional features added.
Re:Inflamatory headling superceeds mundane content (Score:3, Informative)
.NET is Microsoft's implementation of it's CLR (Common Language Runtime). In general anything CLR tends to be referred to as .NET.
Mono is an open source implementation. It runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD and I believe I've even seen it for HPUX. There are probably other platforms. In my experience, if your platform has a libgdi+ library available for it, mono will run most .NET apps written in Visual Studios 2003 and earlier. I'm not sure about later MS dev environments. I also don't know if libgdi+ is needed separately in all environments or just FreeBSD.
Re:-1 Misses the point (Score:2, Informative)
Instead they specifically promised in writing not to do that.
They most absolutely did not. They promised not to annihilate any 100% compatible implementations [slashdot.org].
Still missing the point... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sure that as long as companies follow in Novell's footsteps they'll be fine.
Re:-1 Misses the point (Score:5, Informative)
Java's virtual machine (specially Sun/OpenJDK) is much more advanced than Python's (CPython).
Python takes a bytecode and then executes the one or more native instructions it takes to fulfill the purpose of the bytecode instruction. And that's basically all it does.
Java takes the bytecode instruction and compiles into a native format and uses thats for future executions. In addition, it does many other types of optimizations to increase the execution speed. You can run Java in a purely interpreted mode like Python does, pass the -Xint argument on the command line to the java instance. You'll notice it's 10000x slower than the optimized execution paths.
Java's class library is primarily Java code, whereas Python wraps native libraries for much of this work. Both methods have their pros and cons, but it means Python can be prone to more issues regarding different system libraries, etc. Since Java provides it's own virtual platform with most of the code in Java, you don't have these issues as often.
Java also allows for true threading, whereas Python threads are limited by the global interpreter lock preventing you from getting real performance gains from asynchronous execution. You have to resort to multiple python processes to take advantage of multicore processors for example.
Re:Who cares about core libraries? (Score:5, Informative)
Visual Studio 2010, a core flagship MS product, is written in WPF [onedotnetway.com].
Re:Inflamatory headling superceeds mundane content (Score:3, Informative)
Most new features have been announced on PDC'2008. Since then, there has been a public beta of VS2010 / .NET 4 in May 2009, a second one in October 2009, and RC in February 2010.
It's still impressive that they have implemented it all in slightly over a year, but there is no mystery here.
There haven't been any updates to Ecma-335/335 so far. This doesn't preclude Mono from having an ASP.NET implementation, though - in fact, it's probably the single non-Ecma library that Mono has the best (most compatible etc) implementation of, and had for a while.
Re:And what have YOU done for Free and Open Source (Score:3, Informative)
So a half-assed internet search uncovered a patent that covers the architecture for networked applications in .NET. And that's not good enough for you? How did that go again? "As far as anyone knows, Mono has no patent issues... except the one I found in two minutes of googling. But I'm sure that's it."
Yeah whatever.
I'm not doing "diligence" because I'd never set my foot in that bear trap in the first place.
Re:And what have YOU done for Free and Open Source (Score:2, Informative)
Wow, you fail at reading comprehension. Miguel has never claimed that Mono *doesn't* infringe on patents because he can't be 100% certain that it doesn't, it's not the same as knowing that it *does*.
No one has been able to point us (the Mono team) at a single patent that we may infringe. Not one. You'd think, with all the rabidly anti-Mono trolls such as yourself, that one of you, after 9 years, would have come up with at least 1 solid patent infringement claim, but no.
Same old vague hand waiving claiming we infringe patents that you can't point to but just *know* exist. Sorta like some people claim to *know* that God really exists, or like many children believe with all their heart that Santa Clause really exists.
Re:Who cares about core libraries? (Score:1, Informative)
SilverLight is a subset of WPF.