I got in the room a few minutes late … the presentation had already
began. One thing right off the bat … it is truly refreshing to
hear this conversation. So far the speaker has been very
complimentary to C# and .NET … expressing the power and value of what
they provide. He expressed the adoption of .NET and C#
within IT organizations, and the broad availability of information,
training and certifications. He spent some time to express the
advantages of .NET and C# over C/C++ and also over Java. I agree
with him on all counts.
In discussing the “Internal Impact on Novell”, he addressed the value
of Mono … extending Novell’s application reach to many new operating
system platforms. What he expressed is his understanding that
abstracting away the operating system – and the kernel specifically –
is a valuable offering. Mono is allowing Novell to provide
solutions on both the NetWare kernel (I am going to look for actual
examples of this in the lab!) and the Linux kernel. In
addition, it appears that this would be a route to get these same
applications to FreeBSD, Mac OS-X … or other UNIX systems.
He talked about MonoDevelop … the Mono IDE. It looks nice, however I was confused since Novell seems to have committed to Eclipse … I am hoping they are just going to integrate the functionality into Eclipse.
The Mono project is governed by three different licenses: GPL, LGPL,
X11 Different parts use different licenses. They expect to
release v1.0 this summer … C# compiler, VM with JIT and pre-compiler,
IL assembler/disassembler, development and security tools, .NET v1.0
and v1.1 APIs, etc.
It was interesting that he took some specific time to address that this
is “*NOT* the Novell commercial product … this is v1.0 of the Open
Source project.” I am curious why this distinction … so Novell
is going to sell and charge for their Mono product? It will be
interesting to watch.
I asked about support for Mac OS-X and the speaker indicated that he is
running Mono on Mac OS-X right now! So it is going to be (and
stay?) a fully cross-operating system solution. Nothing specific
to the Linux kernel here …
The demo was great … but I’ve already been playing with Mono and am very impressed …