Image contributed by Beranger

We recently mentioned Novell's MonoDevelop in a very negative context. While we maintain our strong stance on this subject, here are some of the more optimisic reports that see it as benign, if not beneficial.

Mono Culture

BrainShare was full of it. Full of Mono, that is.

Commercial Linux distributor Novell is kicking off its BrainShare 2008 user and partner conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, this week, and the highlight of the show thus far has been the prototype Linux-MaxDB setups that I told you about last week that German software giant SAP is prototyping to run its applications. But Novell has also announced a new open source development tool for its Mono clone of Microsoft's .NET tools.

Mono, Mono, Mono

In case you know nothing about Mono's dangers, be sure to look at our past coverage. With MonoDevelop, Novell will continue to infect other distributions and platforms with what Microsoft considers its "intellectual monopoly". With MonoDevelop, Novell supplies the tools, as in the 'needle'. It allows innocent developers to get themselves 'addicted', as in enslaved to Microsoft's command.

Novell’s MonoDevelop allows application developers to quickly write desktop and ASP.NET Web applications on Linux and Mac Operating Systems. With MonoDevelop, developers can easily port .NET applications created with Visual Studio to Linux and Mac OS X and also maintain a single code base for all three platforms, which is of great benefit.

Mono Means Monkey

Time to kiss goodbye the illusion.

I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that you wouldn't have seen Microsoft employees, including execs, casually carrying around Macs at a conference a few years back. Winds of change are welling up. However faintly.

Does this mean that Microsoft is agnostic about whether developers develop to Windows and .NET? Of course not. But it's worth noting this week I'm in Salt Lake City at Novell's Brainshare user conference. (Yes, it has been a busy month.) Novell execs such as CTO Jeff Jaffe make no bones about their preference for a J2EE on Linux software stack. Yet, Novell remains a major force behind the Mono Project that allows .NET applications to run on Linux and other non-Windows operating environments. And Novell is doing the Linux port of Silverlight ("Moonlight").

In other words, in this day and age, expressing interest--even a strong one--for a given development stack increasingly doesn't translate into prohibiting any sort of interoperability or compatibility with the "enemy." The on-the-ground reality is naturally much messier than executive-level shows of mutual love and respect, but it's still a qualitatively different reality from the old days when walled gardens had high walls indeed.

Gordon Haff completely misses the point there about software patents. Also, Moonlight is not a Siilverlight port. It's more like a project mimicking Silverlight, playing catchup.

Thanks to a reader of ours, "CoolGuy", we now know about yet another Mono infection in Ubuntu GNU/Linux. Will it ever stop?

Pass the needle, Novell. That's just what Microsoft wants you to do. ⬆



Context:

I could probably make some money selling my mother's blood, if I had no conscience. Or I could rob a liquor store. There's money in that, I hear. Profit isn't the only indicator of whether a deal is a good idea or not.