Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Friday July 16, 2004

Mono's .Net late because it's free, or late because it's a copy?

Over here you'll find an interview with Miguel de Icaza about the recent release of Mono. In it, he asserts, with Alan Cox's backup, that free software is always late.

I have a lot of respect for Miguel and what he did at Ximian and with Gnome, but I have to respectfully disagree with what he says about "free software".

In Mono's case, they're chasing a spec that someone else went through the iterative cycles of prototyping, getting feedback and implementing. Chances are, Microsoft doesn't seek any kind of participation or input from Novell when deciding where to take .Net. It would seem to me the Mono guys have to wait until MS gets it to the next level, then work to catch up.¹

This is how things worked with IBM and OS/2's support of Windows, Sun's old WABI project, the current Wine project and even things like codeweavers. Does it mean you can't run stuff on these things? Absolutely not. But that doesn't mean that it's anywhere close to a level playing field for Novell.

Contrast that with Java. In Java, it's very very difficult to say Sun has tilted the playing field it's direction. Especially in the J2EE space.

I also have to respectfully disagree with Miguel on J2EE. He suggests that it's too complex and .Net is so much easier that companies are choosing it. He also suggests that technologies on top of Java just don't have the ecosystem around them that can make it part of a platform, like there is in .Net.

The last year or so has given us a release of JSF, which lead to a product like Creator, many ease of use features in Tiger, and even the most complicated parts of J2EE themselves, namely JDBC and EJB, look to be leveraging these coming features to make it drastically simpler to write this kind of code.²