Fwd: Comment on Mono in FC5 for Gnome Journal

[Thomas McMahon <thmcmahon gmail com>]

Hey Everyone,

So I sent Miguel de Icaza some questions seeing if it could shed some
light onto why Mono's inclusion in FC5 is important for the Gnome
community. I also tried to get him to speculate on the more
controversial issue as to why Red Hat has decided that it is OK to
include Mono in Fedora now. (Why not earlier, what has changed?) But
he didn't seem all that keen on speculating, so I've sent him another
email to hopefully draw him out on it :)

I'm planning on sending Chris Blizzard an email to ask him some
similar questions to see whether we can find out some info as to what
is actually going on here. So much for openness and transparency (just
kidding :P)

Thomas McMahon

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Miguel de Icaza <miguel gnome org>
Date: Jan 17, 2006 2:03 PM
Subject: Re: Comment on Mono in FC5 for Gnome Journal
To: Thomas McMahon <thmcmahon gmail com>


Hello Thomas,

> 1. What does the recent announcement (of Mono's inclusion in FC5) mean
> for the legitimacy of Mono on the Gnome/Linux platform?

Well, we are all pretty excited, because Fedora is an important
distribution channel for Mono, and it will no longer be an extra
download, a separate component of the operating system.

We created Mono out of the desire to build applications for the Linux
desktop faster and better.   We wanted to improve our development
process on Linux, based on the lessons we learned from creating
Evolution.

Mono was a means to an end to create better applications faster.

Although Novell has developed many new free software applications on
Mono (Banshee, F-Spot, Beagle and iFolder) the community has realized
the potential of the platform and created hundreds of applications with
Mono, which was in the end our motivation.

> 2. Blizzard spoke of the "rift that was slowly growing in the Gnome
> community", would you say that there is still a "rift in the Gnome
> community" in regards to Mono? Was there ever a rift in your opinion?

At this point, I think that Mono has proved itself useful.  It has gone
from a "cute" technology released in July 2003 to a "must-have"
technology in 18 months.

I understand people who had valid criticisms over Mono, after all it is
a very young technology, but as I mention, in 18 months the community
has proved that Mono does deliver on the ideals that we had.

Mono is not a universal solution to all software development problems,
but they address an important segment of developers that want to write
applications or components for Linux and the Linux desktop.

> 3. Would you speculate on the reasons that Red Hat no longer see Mono
> as a problem? Do you think that it is due to Red Hat no longer seeing
> Mono as a legal liability (if so why not)? Or alternatively would you
> say that Mono (and her applications) were being accepted in the
> Gnome/Linux arena to the point that Red Hat's Linux offering would
> suffer from not including Mono?

My impression is that its the sum of multiple reasons.  As Chris
Blizzard said, what drove Mono adoption were the applications, but there
are probably other factors.

> 4. Do you expect to see an increased interest from developers as a
> result of the increased user base? In general what sort of an effect
> do you think this will have for Mono?

Mono was already available on Novell's own SUSE, on Debian and Ubuntu,
so this gives Mono a very good overall coverage of platforms.

To developers this means that they can write applications with Mono and
deploy on pretty much all of the major Linux distributions.

Since Mono is a binary format, this means that libraries and
applications will work unmodified and without recompilation across
multiple operating systems.  This in addition to the strong binary
compatibility guarantees that Mono has will be a compelling reason for
developers to adopt.

> Also if it is OK with you I will send a carbon copy of your response
> to the Gnome Journal List too. Thanks in advance for your time and
> assistance,

This is fine.

Am sorry if this sound too "high-level" of an answer, let me know if you
think I should drill down on something.

Miguel