What is all this FOSS about Mono? July 7, 2009
Posted by rm42 in Computers, Linux, Uncategorized.trackback
I wrote a blog entry recently in which I expressed my displeasure with the situation around the use of Mono for FOSS development. Since then an interesting and unexpected development has occurred. Microsoft has promised, irrevocably, to not sue anyone using or creating a fully compliant implementation of C# as defined through ECMA.
http://port25.technet.com/archive/2009/07/06/the-ecma-c-and-cli-standards.aspx
I am glad to see that some of the questions about Mono have been settled. What other questions remain? Well, it will be interesting to see what happens in the future, when newer versions of C# come out of Microsoft. How will those be licensed? Will they be standardized as well? Under what terms? Will it matter for Mono developers? Will Microsoft become litigant against the other, non ECMA derived, parts of Mono? And, more immediately, what is meant by “only if the implementation conforms fully to required portions of the specification”? Those are some of the questions that I still have.
What about GPL compatibility? It seems that a lot of it has been settled. I don’t see a conflict any more. Of course, if a developer chooses to deviate from the ECMA specification he is free to do so, as per the Mono license, and he would have to fend for himself against Microsoft, or any other patent holder in the world. But, that is the same thing that could happen if I chose to write a program in C++ that infringed someone’s patent. It just so happens that any deviation from the standard immediately makes you liable. But at least a legally safe implementation is possible. And who knows, maybe the patent landscape will improve in the future allowing for non ECMA compliant implementations without the risk of a lawsuit.
Will this be enough to make me want to develop in Mono? No, not me, not yet. I prefer to use languages that have no questions surrounding them. I also still think that Mono should not be used for important infrastructure parts of FOSS projects like KDE or GNOME because of the long term questions that remain. But, I can see that some may want to avail themselves of Mono’s C# for writing some applications. I now feel that, as long as they are well informed of what the possible gotchas are, I can respect their choice. And I don’t mind if a Linux distribution chooses to include them as part of their default release. It is their free choice.
Congratulations Mono developers!
I have a background of developing applications in the corporate environment. It’s my observation that many of my corporate developer colleagues are locked in tight with C#, VB.Net or Java. When talking about Python, PHP, or Linux with them it becomes obvious to me that most have little interest in heading down that path since they have such a large personal investment in Microsoft technologies.
I’m excited about Mono because this offers these folks a way to leverage their existing skills and dip into the open source world. I think it’s a bridge to expanding the developer base. And growing the developer base is absolutely critical to the future growth of open source.
I’m sceptical and concerned. I was never truly concerned over patents, but over the possible foothold situation that now exists. Microsoft has its technology in Linux, and any code written in c# will be portable to Windows. Windows devs don’t have a history of complying with GPL.
I think it’s more important for Microsoft to keep FOSS developers thinking in terms of C# and .NET via Mono than it is for them to protect it from ‘outsiders’.
That way, should Microsoft ever find a way to put the boot in on Linux, all those orphaned developers can just slide on over to Microsoft’s development environment.
The ultimate assimilation of any culture by another is always made easier if you can get the losing group to adopt the winner’s customs and language first.
Lawsuit-free Mono is not doing the FOSS community any favors.
Just my 2¢
I just know that I went to dist-upgrade the other day and debian tried to throw in tomboy and a bunch of libmono ****. I stopped that, just did an upgrade. This is such a hot button topic, most distributions would do well to just have a yes/no setting for all the mono ****. I would set no to mono very quickly.
Note: This post was edited by the moderator. Please be mindful of your language.
Thanks to Tim we can do just that:
http://tim.thechases.com/mononono/
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