The Mono Project

There’s been a lot of controversy and argument over the use of Mono in the Linux world rightly or wrongly, and this long running issue recently reared it’s head again when Richard Stallman (founder of the FSF) chipped in. Now, the controversy may be over thanks to a surprising move from Microsoft themselves. It’s been talked about everywhere in the the technology press I know, but just in case you don’t know the situation, I’ll give you a quick outline. The Mono Project is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s popular .NET development framework. It enables developers to code in C# – a language developed by MS – and run their applications on a variety of platforms: Linux, Mac OS X and the iPhone amongst others. I was a professional ASP developer at the time .NET arrived on the scene, and it certainly held a lot of promise. I originally thought the idea was to enable cross-platform development in .NET by using the CLi in a similar way to the Java Virtual Machine. I even asked when there would be a CLi released for Linux and other platforms at an official Microsoft training course. My question was met with muffled laughter and it seemed the intention was not to open up .NET to other platforms. Miguel De Icaza, the creator of the Gnome desktop and well known Linux developer decided to try and address this problem with Mono. It enables .NET developers stuck on Windows to port their applications to new platforms and expand their horizons. This is all a good thing, nobody would argue against this, not even RMS himself. On the Linux desktop many popular applications have been developed with Mono such as Banshee, F-Spot, Tomboy and Gnome-Do. The problem for Mono has been a fear in the Linux community that Microsoft would wait until it had worked it’s way into the Linux desktop (and Gnome in particular) significantly, then pull their software patents out and go to town. Some people saw this as an attempt to attack Linux by stealth. This is probably exaggeration and I am no doubt that Miguel and the team would never intentionally hurt Linux at all, as some have intimated. Read the rest of this entry »