The Mono 'experiment'

At Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference this week, I was able to spend some time with Miguel de Icaza, pictured at right, the leader of the open-source Mono development project. If you're not familiar with Mono, it's a software development system that, in simple terms, mimics the core of Microsoft's .NET development system in a way that lets .NET developers write programs for Linux and other operating systems. More significantly, it also can be used to convert existing Windows programs, written using .NET, into new versions that can run on Linux.

As you can imagine, that has caused a certain degree of consternation for some people inside Microsoft. For more details and explanation, see this morning's story that I wrote on Mono's presence here at the PDC, and a separate Mono meeting Tuesday night at a nearby hotel.

As Miguel explains in this post on his weblog, that meeting was arranged after Mono was unsuccessful in securing a spot among the "Birds of a Feather" sessions at the PDC itself. Miguel and the Mono sponsor, Novell, were inspired to hold that meeting by this post from Stephen Walli, who left Microsoft last year and is now vice president, of open source development strategy at Optaros. During his time at Microsoft, Walli's work included overseeing the release of some Microsoft tools under open-source licenses.

As noted in this morning's story, I got a chance this week to ask S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president in Microsoft's Developer Division, for his take on the Mono project. Here's a more complete version of what he had to say:

"Whenever somebody does something on the .NET framework, I get excited. The first thing that comes to mind is, hey, they see value in the .NET framework and they want to do something with it, so I'm excited about that. These guys now have made good progress in terms of reverse-engineering the .NET framework. Good for them. To me, it means that the .NET framework is that much more interesting to people who have different opinions, different ways of looking at things."

We didn't talk directly about any of the questions that people often have about whether Microsoft would ever try to pursue Mono for patent infringemement. Apart from that, however, I did ask Soma whether he sees a risk of Mono succeeding on a level that further fuels Linux as a competitive threat to Windows.

"We can cross that bridge when we get there," he said. "To me it's a good science experiment that is happening there, so we'll see."

Posted by Todd Bishop at September 16, 2005 06:33 AM