Audio Interview with Miguel de Icaza (LugRadio)

Posted Feb 21, 2005 22:02 UTC (Mon) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]

Of course diversity means richness... but fairly, I found the interview semi-hostile as well.

As a disclaimer, I might be biased... I work on the mono team full time, and I think I know what Miguel thinks. But we did not talk of this interview.

It's OK asking provocative questions, that's part of a professional interview. But a provocative question should anyway have some "ground" to support it.

When you questioned the usefulness (or uniqueness) of the mono applications in the "top 20" list... much of the interview time has been lost just because Miguel tried to explain that the point was moot: since the free software world provides great diversity, probably none of the "top 20" applications was indispensable or unique. So what?

It was almost ridiculous that in the end Miguel just could say "we don't force you to use mono: if you don't like it, don't use it".

Come on, the mono project has many interesting points to show, some are controversial, some less so, but having an interview where the project founder (and leader) is just forced to "defend" his operate that way seems absurd. At least to me.

Nice controversial points are the "intellectual property" ones. Miguel has always been extra clear about them in his writings and also in the mono FAQ, but they did not come out so clear in the interview. This is a pity.

Also, the "skeptical" talking continued after the interview, when Miguel had no chance to answer. And this is bad (or at the very least unfair, because it leaves unanswered questions to the listeners).

I'd like to pick up at least one of these issues: that those twenty-something Novell developers could have done much more for those few mono projects in the "top 20" list simply coding them from scratch with existing technologies, without wasting time on yet another virtual machine.

The answer is terribly, terribly easy: mono is not about those projects. They are just the tip of the iceberg, it's nice pointing at them exactly because they're the tip, they are more visible, and some of them is really cool. But mono is behind many more projects than them.

Let's face it: there are several execution environment out there. You have perl, python, ruby, even plain shell scripts, and soon Parrot...

And Haskell, ML, SmallTalk, Scheme, TCL, ObjectiveC... not to count old and glorious C and C++.

Each has its strengths and weaknesses, and so has mono. A careful analysis of those strengths and weaknesses would be really interesting. I know It is not feasible in a 10 minutes interview, but one could try to come close!

Of course, just my (biased) two cents...

Ciao, Massi