Miguel's Ambitious Plans For Mono, Moonlight

[DavidNielsen]

That's not a very convincing argument.

Never the less it is true and valid, but this is at any rate merely an example of the applications Mono has for the fairly narrow scope of the GNOME desktop, Mono is much wider applied than the Linux desktop to great success.

I will though readily admit that the GNOME bindings for Mono are not as good as they should be. This is something about which I could speak more but it feels like it would be off-topic, the summary though is that it is getting better, we have a plan, code is starting to appear and a GNOME foundation supported Mono+GNOME love hackfest is being planned to address these issues as well.

And still, Mono has so many more applications that it seems trivial to always focus on icons for users to click on to hear sweet music.

MonoTouch e.g. is used in multiple of the most popular games section on the iPhone (so I am informed, I do not have an iPod, I sadly am stuck with an N900 for which I have growing amounts of hate).

Banshee, F-Spot and Tomboy are the only Mono-using OSS applications with any usage, and two of them have been more or less deprecated by distros.

That leaves Banshee for people who refuse to use Amarok and Rhythmbox.

The biggest desktop distribution (Ubuntu) still ships Tomboy, and have committed to switching to Banshee for the upcoming 11.04 release. A process the Banshee community is highly invested in to fulfill the job (I say this wearing my Banshee developer hat for clarity).

They did admittedly switch to Shotwell from F-Spot, out of fears that the F-Spot community would not be able to revive the codebase and build a community capable of maintaining it. So far Ruben who stepped up as the new maintainer of F-Spot has managed to revive the codebase and make it compile in MonoDevelop as well as share code with Banshee (he stepped up to the plate on the day before the decision was officially made). Thus laying the foundation for a small but growing and productive community around F-Spot. Progress though has slowed a bit after Ruben, who remains the superstar developer of that project, has had less time to devote to F-Spot. I think time will favor F-Spot provided the community continues to grow at the current rate. A prediction would be that F-Spot may be considered for the default once again. It would make sense since upgrades from the last LTS would still have F-Spot and that release they have to maintain for years. They are already invested in F-Spot and will continue to be so. Shotwell probably isn't a bad application either, though I have not tried it extensively.

You're probably right, and Novell is having some use from that, and they probably feel safer being in bed with Microsoft than being in bed with Oracle.

You say in bed, I say made a business deal to the benefit of both involved and one that has resulted in great benefits for Novell, Linux and has helped Microsoft starting to open up.

No comment on Oracle, them boys crazy, they'll pop anyone with anything no matter how thin to turn a buck. Ah capitalism and sociopathy, a match made in heaven. Hardly the image of Microsoft today, with what 4-5 Patent infringement suits filed in the history of their existence and the increasing engaging Open Source more on our terms.

Still, they could have used Python and saved a few million $$$. It probably owes its prolonged existence to Miguel's very high position within Novell. If he ever leaves, I expect Mono to be abandoned overnight.

If Mono is abandoned by Novell, I am sure Miguel would be the first person to start a company to develop it, taking with him many of the people working on it now. It makes money and it is what he loves. Then the situation wouldn't be to dissimilar from when he ran Ximian and started the project to ease development. Mono was one of the reasons Novell acquired Ximian for 50 million dollars. They saw it was a good investment.

[BlackStar]

A Mono-related thread, it's been some time since we've had one of those! Oh dear, let's see what kind of crazies will show up this time.

I really don't understand why Novell is burning money on this stuff. Reimplementing .Net for Linux costs a LOT of money and developer time, and there is not a single indication that the community cares in the least. 6 years later and what do we have? Banshee.

Do they deliver some high-end solutions based on Mono or something? Plan to attack Oracle with an alternative Java implementation? Is there a point to all this?

Yes, there is a point. With Mono, business can (and do) migrate from Windows Freaking Server to Linux. Not everything is rosy but the stack works and that's great.

Another reason: Mono provides one of the best (if not *the* best) scripting solution today for games. It's trivial to embed, it's fast, simple, interoperates with native code marvelously and has great IDEs, debuggers and profilers.

Third, this "alternative Java implementation" is one of the most pleasant programming languages available today. The only one that comes close is Python but that's a wholly different paradigm.

[pingufunkybeat]

Yes, it's a free, non-patented and truly open-source paradigm

[BlackStar]

Yes, it's a free, non-patented and truly open-source paradigm

Do you really believe the non-patented part? Because I've got a bridge to sell you.

[DavidNielsen]

Do you really believe the non-patented part? Because I've got a bridge to sell you.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/new...o-concerns.ars

About that bridge now? Do you have the deed in hand signed legally binding and all like I do?

[monraaf]

support for shipping Mono on Google's Android platform with full binding support for Android APIs

Great! Why drain your battery in 6 hours when you can do it in 3 hours

Seriously ever since Microsoft dropped Visual basic all the incompetent programmers are now flocking to this C# thing. God please let them stay on the Windows platform and not have any cross-platform or mobile ambitions.

Just look at F-Spot, it's so buggy, slow and memory hungry it's not even funny. This must be the worst piece of software written for the GNOME desktop ever. Really an embarrassment to Linux that some distros used to ship with that crap.

[DavidNielsen]

Great! Why drain your battery in 6 hours when you can do it in 3 hours

Numbers to back this joke up?

Mono has addressed a number of cases where it e.g. woke up the CPU unneededly, I am sure the experience on the mobile environments will be great. The iOS development experience MonoTouch provides is I hear very pleasant and is used in many top selling games in the iPhone store. I have no reason to believe the Android port will have such a negative impact if any. I have never heard of any with MonoTouch, no reason to expect to hear any from Android developers using it. And if they do voice those opinions they will largely come from paying customers so be sure Novell will work to get them fixed.

Seriously ever since Microsoft dropped Visual basic all the incompetent programmers are now flocking to this C# thing. God please let them stay on the Windows platform and not have any cross-platform or mobile ambitions.

Opinion, I could provide a long list of masterly skilled people who use C#. What would that prove.

Just look at F-Spot, it's so buggy, slow and memory hungry it's not even funny. This must be the worst piece of software written for the GNOME desktop ever. Really an embarrassment to Linux that some distros used to ship with that crap.

Just out of curiosity, have you tried F-Spot 0.8.x, the past 6 months F-Spot has been completely revamped, rebased on some common library handling code with Banshee. They closed nearly 300 bugs, and promised to maintain 0.8 as a long term release, while they do work on the advanced features and updated UI which this revamp has allowed them the foundation needed to provide.

There are still bugs but now once again F-Spot has maintainers and a growing community. Filing bugs is definitely the way to deal with any bug, and performance is a bug. One that F-Spot 0.8 and beyond certainly improves on over the older releases.

[wswartzendruber]

Yes, it's a free, non-patented and truly open-source paradigm

Only the ECMA-334 and 335 parts of the .NET Framework are open.

EDIT: This does not include Windows Forms, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, or LINQ, among other things. Hell, it doesn't even include System.Xml.

[DavidNielsen]

Only the ECMA-334 and 335 parts of the .NET Framework are open.

EDIT: This does not include Windows Forms, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, or LINQ, among other things. Hell, it doesn't even include System.Xml.

The SPECs are up for debate, in fact I believe there are stanadards members in talks now.

Any ECMA member can make proposals for changes to 334 and 335. If you want them expanded propose doing that to e.g. The GNOME Foundation who are ECMA members and can speak on your behalf. A request for something like that to happen fits nicely on the back of checks written to the The GNOME Foundation. There is travel involved as well as matters of expertise with these kinds of organizations, money make the world go round. Help it go in your direction might be worth it?

[XorEaxEax]

This is the whole fucking point;

You are implementing Microsoft's technology, using the argument that it's an open standard.

So why do you need Netflix to "lean on Microsoft" to force them to do this and that? It's an open standard, isn't it?

Well I doubt that the Moonlight devs are to blame for this as I assume there needs to be a binary DRM blob in order for netflix to operate on Linux. This binary blob would have to come from Microsoft since they have developed the DRM in Silverlight, but I seriously doubt they will do so unless Netflix really urges them on, which they're obviously not.

I wonder if Google's recent purchase of a DRM technology company indicates that they will be offering Microsoft competition as a DRM provider for video streaming? Atleast they are more interested in cross platform support than Microsoft is (which is perhaps not saying much) which might make them offer a DRM blob for Linux.

As for Mono and Microsoft's 'openness' about it, they need cross platform support for C# if they are to compete with Java on the enterprise, that's where their interest in Mono starts and stops. I see it as another tool in Linux's arsenal but I sure wouldn't depend on it myself, but that's a business decision everyone has to make for themselves.