After one of the longest held oppositions in the GNOME community, Fedora Core 5 will ship with Mono included.
Could this be the end to the longstanding debate between the opposing views of “Mono is the self-actualization of the Linux desktop” and “Mono is the Beast of Novell, sent to destroy us.”
In the interest of disclosure, I have a bit of a halo effect regarding Novell, not in small part due to their stock’s recent performance. However, I’ve used a few Mono apps, Beagle, F-Spot, and Tomboy, and here’s the thing: they’re useful apps. Moreover, aside from something like Apple’s Spotlight, Beagle doesn’t really have a clear competitor in the proprietary software world. This makes Mono a clear selling point for the unwashed masses of PC users looking for a new way to think about computing.
So where does the truth lie? Well, Mono is based on Microsoft technology, which makes me more than a little uneasy, but if a company like Novell will stay behind it, it certainly makes writing quality apps a little more rapid.
I never quite understood the objection to including .NET support, except from an irrational “anything from MS is bad” sort of perspective. .NET doesn’t encourage the creation of non-free software any more than Java, or a C compiler for that matter, and Mono itself is free.
From my limited experience, I found the .NET class library far more consistent, free of cruft, and better documented than Java’s. Also, the .NET CLR is reputed to be more language agnostic than the JVM, which allows me to entertain the fantasy of a Lisp compiler targetted to the CLR; MS made such an effort putting .NET everywhere, why not piggyback on their success?
You mean to say that not everything MS is inherently bad?
Mono is great, like I said, and it could conceivably be a reasonable direction for GNOME to take. Just thinking back to the all famous Halloween documents it seems very “embrace, extend, and destroy” of Microsoft to release a cross-platform development framework, while carefully extending a few key patent oversights.
Like Java/Blackdown, C# developers need to be cautious to insure that their software can be compiled and run on a free system, or as RMS says, the software isn’t really free.