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

DesktopLinux.com features an interview with Miguel de Icaza. "GNOME project co-founder Miguel de Icaza discusses the release of Mono 2.0, in this detailed interview with Henry Kingman, executive editor of DesktopLinux. The conversation spans Mono's history, current state, and future, with stops along the way for updates on Moonlight and Mono Develop."

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Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 1:18 UTC (Fri) by dulles (guest, #45450) [Link] (26 responses)

At best, Miguel de Icaza is a Novell whore. At worst, he's a Microsoft whore. What kind of a freak (who named his project Gnome) would hold an interview with Novell public relations in the room? Certainly not a FOSS person. Incredibly, this guy's working on Microsoft Moonlight as a Novell employee, while promoting his Mono 2.0 for Linux? At this point, I urge all FOSS people involved with Gnome to consider forking the project away from Miguel de Icaza. Call it Gnome 2 (or something better) and move on.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 1:59 UTC (Fri) by drfickle (guest, #1093) [Link] (9 responses)

Might I suggest putting your axe away and creating half the amount of Free Software that Miguel has before you castigate him? LWN doesn't need posts like yours.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 5:15 UTC (Fri) by Janne (guest, #40891) [Link] (8 responses)

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] (4 responses)

"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] (3 responses)

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] (2 responses)

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] (1 responses)

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 (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

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 (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

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 2:24 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] (4 responses)

You know, there's always KDE...

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 3:53 UTC (Fri) by pradeeps (guest, #53816) [Link] (2 responses)

yes there is KDE(4). But like it or not it is fast loosing to Gnome IMHO.

OTOH may I suggest xfce4 :).

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 13:41 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (1 responses)

> But like it or not it is fast loosing to Gnome IMHO.

Well, Google disagrees

http://www.google.com/trends?q=kde%2C+gnome%2C+xfce&c...

Apparently GNOME generates _slightly_ more searches than KDE (since 2006), but that's it. The trend is for both to go slowly down. XFCE is very small in comparison.
Curiously, it looks like KDE is much more news-worthy than GNOME, starting also in 2006 (casuality?).

KDE v Gnome - statistics

Posted Oct 10, 2008 20:20 UTC (Fri) by RogerL (guest, #4046) [Link]

Statistics...
Try to search both of the terms.

There are other gnomes than GNOME... World of Warcraft, Garden...
But there are not many other kdes than KDE!

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 8:05 UTC (Fri) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

Yes, but please, you have to see the dilemma: *they're* obviously freaks because *they* named a desktop environment after the letter *K*. I'm sure you can't provide a logical response to *that* argument.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 8:23 UTC (Fri) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link] (7 responses)

Regardless of the validity of your opinions regarding de Icaza, such language is never acceptable. There is no reason to stoop to name-calling ('whore', 'freak'), we're not children here.

Perhaps LWN isn't the best place for you to write comments. Slashdot sounds more up your alley.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 9:53 UTC (Fri) by russell (guest, #10458) [Link] (6 responses)

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 (guest, #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 (guest, #43281) [Link] (4 responses)

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] (3 responses)

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 (guest, #2285) [Link] (2 responses)

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] (1 responses)

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?

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 13:59 UTC (Fri) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't post here very often lately, but I did feel a need to state my disgust for that comment.

On my first version of Linux (Slackware with Kernel 1.5.59 or some such) was Midnight Commander. I fell in love with it, and I have been using it regularly to this day.

You see, I have very bad eyesight, and am extremely grateful to anyone willing to develop software that makes good use of the keyboard. I have a few minor issues with the program, but those all have to do with some different keyboard values. Besides, it doesn't hurt to have to do things a little differently in different environments; keeps one on the ball.

Well, in a nutshell, I'm very grateful to that guy for making Linux useful to me; I came from an MS-DOS world, with the Still River Shell being my mainstay there. Were it not for mc, I'm not all that sure I would have stayed.

Don't get me wrong; I know UNIX pretty well. But frankly, the shells weren't all that easy to use in those days, and I had rather not bother much with it if I could do my work on Windows.

The fact of the matter is, Linux *still* has usability problems, not to mention that it still hasn't attracted enough commercial application developers to make it appealing to the majority of computer users, and if Miguel and people like him can come up with ways to change that, nore power to them.

I'm not in a position to write software at this time, but I am awaiting the day when I can walk in to a meeting with my totally-blind friends, start up a blank computer, and show them how easy it is for them to install and use Linux right from the CD.

Miguel and friends, are you listening? You are good people. I may have my own bad opinions of the Redmond juggernaut, but you can like Microsoft if you want to. Maybe it will help them get on better with us, too.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 15:33 UTC (Fri) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link]

<aol>
he's right - mc is awesome and I still use it every day. The VFS stuff is brilliant.
</aol>

I do now use thunar too for some things and sometimes get into a slightly confused state where I end up using both for different bits of the same task in a rather inefficient fashion. Keeping 'tab' for 'switch pane' was a poor choice of keybinding, though, given it's use in command-completion.

BTW has anyone ever worked out if there is a keyboard shortcut to access the dropdown of directory history? It seems to be inaccessible without a mouse, which can't be right?

I suspect I would disagree with Miguel on many things these days, but his overall contribution has been huge, and that, particularly mc, is certainly enough for me not to be rude about him in public.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 11, 2008 2:46 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Gnome 2 would be a remarkably bad name for a forked GNOME. The *current*
version of GNOME is called, er, GNOME 2.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 19:14 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (6 responses)

>>> Q2b. Games for the Wii and iPhone would need to statically link the
Mono runtimes, invoking the need for a commercial license. Is that right?
Is Novell seeing a lot of commercial licensing around Mono at this point in
time? <<<

Wait a sec. So this guy started Gnome because you couldn't develop
Commercial apps for FREE with Qt, only GPL apps. Now he runs a project with
exactly the same business model?

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 23:14 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (5 responses)

I don't know if you remember, but back in the day KDE 1.x was not free software (whether or not you wanted to develop 'commercial' applications for it) because Qt was not free software. Nowadays Qt is available under the GNU GPL or a proprietary for-money licence, but back then it was always non-free, though you could use it without paying money if your own source code was free software. This was one motivation for making GNOME, though certainly not the only one.

FWIW, large bits of Mono like the compiler are MIT / X11 licensed.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 11, 2008 8:05 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (4 responses)

I know Qt wasn't GPL back then, but they were working on that. I can see how it takes a while for a company to make their source GPL. Either way, it's considered a huge advantage for the Gnome libs that they are LGPL - clearly the Gnome community has changed their minds, or at least Miguel has.

And no matter what Miguel is telling everyone, I don't think you can seriously argue Microsoft is a better company to work with than Trolltech has been in the last years - or Nokia now, for that matter.

The situation might be a bit more complex as I portrayed it in my first comment. True. Yet, the game has clearly changed - the KDE community and infrastructure are much more about Freedom than Gnome is these days. And that's not just Mono, but everything - ODF vs OpenXML, the influence of big companies in development. Anyway, that's how I feel about it - it's not a hard fact, I suppose. Even if I'm not alone in thinking along these lines.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 16, 2008 10:33 UTC (Thu) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link] (3 responses)

I think You are missing the point entirely.

Mono is Free Software, period.
For everybody.
Just like Gnome and KDE and now QT, and this is what really matters for everyone.

That said, there are people interested in using Mono in particular environments where releasing the framework as Free Software is not an option (like game consoles). More generally, there are also people that want to include Mono in their products, but want to do so without the restrictions imposed by the LGPL license (they want to link it statically or anyway in a non-replaceable way and not share their code, typical for games and in the embedded space).

For these people, Novell provides a commercial license, while maintaining the framework Free Software for everybody.

What's wrong with this?

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 16, 2008 12:17 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (2 responses)

Nothing's wrong with that - that wasn't my point at all. But I didn't see Mono is LGPL, I thought it now was GPL so commercial users had to pay Novell... That was why I was kind'a surprised.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 16, 2008 15:25 UTC (Thu) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah, ok... BTW, sorry if I sounded rude.
I did not want to.

To clarify the licensing issue, different parts of Mono are distributed with different licenses, but the intended effect is that everybody can use it freely (and gratis) for any purpose, in "most" situations. To obtain that effect, the licenses are the following:

The runtime (the VM, JIT and so on) is LGPL. This means that anybody can use it to run any application, and that anybody can also "embed" it into their applications if they obey to the LGPL (otherwise they should ask for a commercial license). This "embedding" of Mono is done by linking the runtime into the application as permitted by the LGPL, and can be useful more or less as it can be useful embedding Python or other runtime frameworks, with the obvious technical differences (JIT compiler, supported languages...).
The class libraries are generally under the MIT X11 license, so they can be taken and used everywhere with no restrictions. For instance, we know that the Mono XML libraries have been used in commercial applications running on the .NET Compact framework (which lacks good XML support), and we are fine with that.
Finally most tools are released under the GPL license, but we are in the process of relicensing some of them under the LGPL or MIT X11. As an example, there's the C# compiler: historically it made sense to release it under the GPL (it is a compiler after all!), but now that we see that there's value in embedding the compiler in other places (we are also doing it ourselves), we think a more permissive license is better.

So, the whole story is more complex that saying "Mono uses license X", but the spirit is easy to understand: "protecting" the core with the LGPL, and being extremely permissive with the rest.

Have fun!
Massimiliano

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 16, 2008 17:28 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Ok, I had a look at the page, and your explanation makes sense. I guess it doesn't help with the patent/MS thing, but the code is as free as it gets. Personally I'd actually prefer it being GPL, as that would ensure the code will STAY free including apps build upon it. But LGPL/BSD etc are Free Software just as well...