David Worthington has an article focusing mainly on the developer side of mono.
It’s an informative article, mainly focused on the technical aspects of mono as it relates to a developement choice, and not too much on the larger issues.
There is one especially illuminating quote from Ian Murdock (the founder of Debian) in there:
It’s also worth noting that many of the high-profile Mono applications are written and maintained by Novell. That’s a pretty classic platform strategy—try to get your platform broader distribution (in this case, integrated into the Gnome desktop) by creating compelling applications that require it.
This sums up a couple of my issues in a very diplomatic way. There is an aggressive PR push for Mono, which forces people to take sides and almost the entire strategy is based on getting a freakin’ note-taking program in GNOME.
I’m sure Tomboy is a nice app and all that, but if any non-mono team was to come up with a sweet little calculator which required a 50+MB framework just to run it, they would be laughed out of the room. Yet somehow this note-taking app – for which there are several alternatives and one exact C++ port – is vital to inclusion of the GNOME desktop.
I’m also sad to see Mark Shuttlework spouting the awesome rocks line about Mono:
The driver for Mono in Ubuntu is the set of applications, which are written in it. Since we think they’re the best-in-class free software solutions, we want to make sure they are up to date and well integrated, and that drives Mono work.
So tired of hearing how mono apps are “best-in-class” or “best-of-breed”. If you look at any user feedback for Ubuntu, the vast majority of users do not want the mono solution. Beyond that, if you ask any 3 Linux users what the “best app” for a specific use is, you will get 5 answers. Most features != “Best”, usually Most features == “Bloat”.
The continuing insistence that the mono alternative just happens to be best-of-breed is not convincing, it stinks of propaganda.
#1 by Dan Serban on July 10th, 2009
I’d love to see some statistics on how many Mono apps are actually actively developed outside the umbrella of Mono-friendly distros.
By Mono-friendly distros I mean openSUSE and Ubuntu.
Please correct my facts on this if I’m wrong:
- Lead devs for Tomboy, F-Spot and Banshee = Novell employees.
- Lead dev for GnomeDo = Canonical employee.
Please add to this list if you have detailed knowledge on other Mono apps.
#2 by Jason on July 11th, 2009
Dan,
This is a very good question. I have been looking into some Windows “Open Source” projects, and some are quite dismissive of mono.
There are a few that Team Mono has targeted which have good mono support, and a few that seem to shrug and say “if it works on mono, great, if not I don’t care”, and a few that are actually hostile to mono.
#3 by Chris Halse Rogers on July 14th, 2009
Of course, GNOME Do was initially developed as a final year University computer science project, and David has only recently been hired by Canonical.
#4 by Chris Halse Rogers on July 14th, 2009
It might also be worth noting that Ian Murdock, Debian founder, is [i]also[/i] now vice president of emerging platforms at Sun Microsystems. This is a useful piece of attribution to have when taking the quote before “I think it’s very premature to say that Mono/.NET development has leapfrogged Java development on Linux, by a long shot.”
That doesn’t negate his actual point – Novell may well be deliberately promoting Mono by encouraging the development of compelling applications that require it. I’m not aware of any evidence for this, however, any more than Canonical is deliberately promoting Python by writing lots of apps in it. The fact that Novell also develops apps in other languages (Evolution, gnome-main-menu, gnome-control-center) might suggest that they are trying to use an appropriate language for the job.
#5 by Jason on July 14th, 2009
Chris,
Thanks for the comments!
One question: are you saying that Novell is not deliberately promoting Mono? Or that they are promoting Mono, but not by developing compelling applications that require it?
I wasn’t aware that anyone held the opinion that Novell was not deliberately promoting Mono, including developing applications (and plug-ins) that rely on mono. If people actually hold that opinion I would like to address it directly!
#6 by Chris Halse Rogers on July 14th, 2009
The latter. Certainly Novell promotes Mono as a part of its SuSE enterprise marketing, but from browsing their website this seems to be aimed at “you can move all your existing developers to linux, get better hardware support and lower costs!”. What evidence is there that Novell, the company, is promoting adoption of Mono into GNOME? Is the fact that Novell employees are writing software that is good enough to displace the current GNOME software for inclusion, or fills some lack in GNOME evidence for this premise? How would you distinguish this from individual Novell employees determining that C# is the most appropriate language for a new project?
It’s entirely possible that there is evidence for this “strong promotion” thesis. I don’t know of any, however I haven’t searched extensively. For projects where replacing existing GNOME functionality was clearly a goal (gnome-main-menu, gnome-control-centre), Novell employees have used C.
#7 by Jason on July 14th, 2009
Chris,
Those are good questions! Especially when you make the point on how to distinguish some effort from Novell vs. individual employees deciding on C#. I feel I could construct a well-reasoned argument, but I’m not so sure I could provide hard evidence.