Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com) [LWN.net]

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 5:15 UTC (Fri) by Janne (guest, #40891) [Link]

We should put the axe down when Miguel stops pushing Microsoft crap at us. What he's effectively doing is to validate those technologies and help make them more popular.

Those who do not learn from history, are doomed to repeat it. And history has clearly shown us that Microsoft is not to be trusted.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 5:34 UTC (Fri) by oblio (guest, #33465) [Link]

"What he's effectively doing is to validate those technologies and help make them more popular."

Take off your horse blinkers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinders) please. C#/.NET is used by more users and developers than are using Linux. They don't need any validation.

Mono people have presented reasonable arguments that Mono is safe. And those parts that are unsafe... you can just avoid them.

For the myriads of C# developers out there, having Mono means that *maybe* they can make a living developing C# programs on Linux, and have them work on Windows too.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 7:25 UTC (Fri) by Janne (guest, #40891) [Link]

This isn't just about Mono. How about Silverlight? When MS announced it,
Miguel was right there announcing Linux-support for it. And that was long
before Silverlight had any traction in the market. No matter what MS
announces, Miguel will support it.

Microsoft is the #1 enemy of Linux. Miguel is a huge Microsoft-fanboy. I
find that pretty damn worrying. Miguel applied for a job at Microsoft years
ago. Maybe he got it, and we just don't know it yet?

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 16, 2008 13:16 UTC (Thu) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]

AFAIK, the reason why Miguel liked (and likes) Silverlight is purely technical, and is related to Silverlight 2.0 and not 1.0.
As a disclaimer, I work in the Mono team, I think I know what Miguel thinks, but this message is about what I think.

The point is the following: HTML is nice to convey contents, but the HTML-JavaScript combination is terrible to develop applications. Since there is a great movement towards distributing applications directly into web browsers, people use it anyway, and also in sophisticated ways like with AJAX. But at the core there's always JavaScript, and not everybody likes it.
Actually, the simple fact that you are forced to use a specific programming language to do client side web programming is inherently bad. Having choice would be much better.

Flash is one alternative, but technically it only shifts the problem (you are forced to use ActionScript instead of JavaScript), and as Freedom goes it's the worst thing we have.

With Silverlight 2 you have two advantages:

The "data" is defined in a clean XML format (XAML), which is not SVG but is anyway better than Flash.
Most important, the logic can be implemented in any language that compiles to CLI bytecode. And, since the logic has also access to the browser's DOM, this effectively gives a nice and open alternative to JavaScript for client-side programming.

Do not understimate the second point: whether we like it or not, there's a strong push towards making richer and richer "web applications", and being constrained to a single programming language is not good to anybody. The more the complexity increases, the more there's a need for a sophisticated development environment (and-or framework), possibly providing static typing, clear modularization, and all the other things that good software engineering says that help in managing complexity. The "web standards" (XHTML, SVG, the new Canvas...) are totally ignoring this problem, providing JavaScript as the only programming language you can use.

So the "strong point" of Silverlight 2 is the programming framework.

Now, as all technical issues, this is debatable and there can be multiple solutions. But you can be sure that the interest Miguel had in Silverlight, just from the start, was due to this technical thing: having a strong (and Free Software!) programming framework for "rich internet applications".

In principle there are other solutions (like Java applets, or the new Java FX), but they should all be evaluated on technical merits. Plus, it would be very silly to say "this technology deserves to have a Free Software implementation, and this other doesn't": this is exactly against Freedom.

In the Mono team we think that, as a programming framework, the design of the CLI specification is on average technically superior to the alternatives.
This is why we work on it.
Of course everybody is free to disagree, and choose different solutions!

The "codec problem" is just an unfortunate side effect of the current patent legislation in some countries. Everybody that feels more comfortable using ffmpeg instead of the Microsoft-provided codec package can do so, this is Free Software, all your freedoms are preserved.

That said... have fun with the software you like most :-)
Massimiliano

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 19, 2008 17:27 UTC (Sun) by togga (subscriber, #53103) [Link]

Nice marketing.

>> "Actually, the simple fact that you are forced to use a specific programming language to do client side web programming is inherently bad."
>> "* Most important, the logic can be implemented in any language that compiles to CLI bytecode."

No-one is forcing you to a programming language, you can compile <random language> into Java or flash byte-code if you want with less amount of work than you've put in Mono. It's a free world and you are just choosing to play the Microsoft ball-game.

>> "* The "data" is defined in a clean XML format (XAML), which is not SVG but is anyway better than Flash."

My personal opinion is that this is a bad since XML is very bloated. OTOH, .NET is also very bloated so this goes hand-in-hand.

None of your technical argument has any merit. If you took all working-hours spent on Mono and made a open-source-platform with minimal overhead instead you could've made a difference.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 21, 2008 15:13 UTC (Tue) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]

Well, mine was not marketing, I was presenting technical arguments (or at least this was the intention). So I keep the reply strictly on the technical side, hopefully the discussion will be constructive.

No-one is forcing you to a programming language, you can compile <random language> into Java or flash byte-code if you want with less amount of work than you've put in Mono.

You say I am free to choose the language I want client side, and give me two proposals to avoid Javascript: compiling to Java and compiling to Flash.

About Java: compiling an arbitrary language into Java bytecode is possible right now, and has been technically possible since maybe 1995. Then, to execute it client side in a "web application", you need to use a Java applet. Now, why didn't Java applets ever take off even if they technically could be a solution? My opinion is that they have several technical disadvantages over the alternatives. On paper they work, but in practice... they are simply impractical. One of the reasons is the class file format, which is hard to load without wasting lots of memory. Another one is the bytecode format, which lends itself well to interpretation (which is slow) but not to jitting (I know that modern JVMs do jitting, it's just that their job is harder than it should be). Maybe the new Java FX platform will make Java more attractive for this scenario, but so far, in a decade, it did not really work (while it works very well elsewhere).

The fact is, technically Flash beats Java badly for applications living in a browser...

Anyway, I don't consider "compile to Flash bytecode" a reasonable solution. First of all, its bytecode is not general enough, it has not been designed to be a "general purpose bytecode" (and this is a technical issue). Moreover Flash is not an open standard, only recently its specification has been somewhat opened, and we still have no Free implementation that works well and is encouraged, or maybe even acknowledged, by Adobe (I know, this is not a technical issue...).

So we are in the situation where a "technology" (Silverlight), even if it comes from Microsoft, is more open than the other mainstream alternative (Flash)...

My personal opinion is that this is a bad since XML is very bloated. OTOH, .NET is also very bloated so this goes hand-in-hand.

Please, show me where .NET is bloated. For once, the file format it uses for executables is really compact and loader-friendly, it is really fast to mmap it and move along. Compare that to the Java file format and you'll see what I mean. Also, a lot of thought has gone in correcting the mistakes gone in the Java bytecode design. Not to blame the original Java designers (they did a good job at the time), but .NET is truly a step ahead. And if by "bloat" you mean "the API is too large", well... Silverlight comes with a much restricted API exactly to solve that problem.

About using XML... it's a tradeoff. Even SVG is XML, and it does mostly the same thing. The whole WWW is built with a markup language! Maybe a compact binary format would be a bit more efficient, but in this case it would also be more inconvenient... as I said, it's a tradeoff. In this case in my opinion the choice makes sense, because it allows you to create contents without a specialized tool.

If you took all working-hours spent on Mono and made a open-source-platform with minimal overhead instead you could've made a difference.

There is already such a clean and minimalistic platform, it's called Squeak (it's Smalltalk based). Now, it's nice and all, but... is it making a huge difference?

Please, don't underestimate the "language neutrality" issue. It's really important, and in the Squeak case, the world is not willing to learn Smalltalk, and that's it. The problem is, designing a good language neutral platform is hard. Look at the new Parrot execution engine for Perl: it's taking ages to get right. So, Microsoft did the effort to design a good platform, and publish the specification as a standard: what's bad?

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 5:41 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

No large corporation is to be trusted.

But I don't see anybody screaming at the kernel developers for adopting ACPI even though that comes from Microsoft. How is that exactly? I can say with pretty decent certainty that Microsoft has patents on aspects of your computer that perform power management.

-------------------------

C# is very good and there is no reason why Linux shouldn't have a top-notch support of a _VERY_ popular language because of a vocal minority are irrationally paranoid and/or spiteful. Are you folks saying "Hey we know that C# is probably one of the top 5 most popular and well known languages out there, but it's from Microsoft, so f-you to anybody wanting to support it." or something like that?

And just because you avoid Mono doesn't mean you avoid Microsoft patents. Patents dealing with manage code, garbage collection, and any other features of .NET can just as easily apply to any other language with similar functionality... java, python, perl, ruby, etc etc.

Patents are no respecter of language and I expect most patents are going to cover rather specific low-level solutions to common programming problems and have very little to do with what sort of API you choose to expose to other applications.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 11, 2008 7:00 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

There is no reason for linux not to have access to an excellent language, even if it is developed by Microsoft.

However, C# is not that language. Its productivity is vastly lower than many admittedly slower languages, and its feature set is fairly directly comparable to the now-open Java. But much more importantly, its semantics export win32-isms into Linux, making it a foolish choice for any development targetting Linux. File semantics, window's undefined globbing behavior, command launching, and other nastiness abound.

C# is not a very good technology. Don't believe the hype.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 12, 2008 14:14 UTC (Sun) by Nelson (subscriber, #21712) [Link]

its semantics export win32-isms into Linux

Such as?

The language itself does no such thing that I can see. Some of the class libraries may. There is the whole POSIX tree though. Between the GNOME/GTK and the POSIX stuff, you could make a lot of apps without ever touching any of the real .NET stuff.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 9:53 UTC (Fri) by russell (subscriber, #10458) [Link]

Obviously he feel passionate about it, and good for him. So, he's not a poet. Is LWN only for dry topics that nobody has strong opinions on?

Try joining the conversation rather than shutting it down.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 9:57 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]

Search dulles post history.

I call troll.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 10:02 UTC (Fri) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]

I am with you on strong opinions - it's perfectly fine to have those, and in fact many of us do (including me). However, it is *still* unwarranted to say "what kind of a freak would ...". That doesn't foster debate, that's flamebait.

You asked for my take on the issue, so here it is:

First, Miguel is not much involved with GNOME at this point anyhow (is he even involved at all?), so there is no need to fork it. GNOME is a nice project that is doing well and I see no problematic influences on it.

Second, I do have concerns about Mono, namely that it might have patent problems and that it allows .Net to appear to be cross-platform (which of course it isn't). I wouldn't have started Mono myself. That said, I have found myself needing to run C# applications recently and Mono has made that possible for me on Linux, so I am conflicted about this. On the one hand I would use Java/Python/etc. for a new project, but on the other hand I do appreciate the great amount of work that went into Mono and that it has been useful to me.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 13:26 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

Maybe someone should start a porting tool?
Something that uses the mono C# parser to generate Java source. Microsoft already has one (or used to), which obviously works the other way.
Even better would be a bytecode translator, but that would require to re-implement the .NET class libraries (a la Wine).
That would be a useful project for those wanting to break the lock-in.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 13:40 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]

Did you just say, in a thread about Mono, that someone should write a .NET porting tool and re-implement .NET class libraries in order to break the lock-in?

That is what Mono IS! A bytecode interpreter and JIT for MS CLR and a reimplementation of .NET class libraries.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 11, 2008 11:23 UTC (Sat) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

There's a difference: a porting tool allows you to let .NET behind once the port is done.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 13, 2008 18:11 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

Uh, yes, and Mono lets you leave .NET behind once you have ported your
application to Mono. There are no dependencies on Microsoft proprietary
code whatsoever. What exactly do you have in mind?