Yet after three years of toil, Miguel de Icaza, the founder of the Mono project, has managed to bring at least some of Microsoft's slick tooling to the Linux camp. And now that Novell has taken over the stewardship of Mono, after acquiring Ximian last year, Mono has the potential to be more than just a curiosity for open-source zealots.
Mono is not a development tool, like Microsoft's Visual Studio. Rather, it's a port of the guts that underlie Microsoft's development tools. That includes Microsoft's C# development language, "libraries" of prewritten code and Microsoft's common language runtime, software that allows a programmer to combine code written in different languages in a single application.
To de Icaza, replicating Microsoft's hard work -- much of which has been published to standards body Ecma International -- will make other operating systems, notably Linux, more attractive to developers. And with the "universal virtual machine" of .Net, programmers can have a greater choice in languages.
In his office decorated with small stuffed monkeys ("mono" means monkey in Spanish), de Icaza spoke to ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com shortly before the company began shipping Mono version 1.0.
Q: Now that Mono 1.0 is done, what can you do that you couldn't do before?
A: Oh, Unix is a world of pain for developers. Now, basically what we got is very modern IDEs (integrated development environments) for developing software on other platforms.
So, for example at Novell -- and this was a choice that I really wasn't involved in -- but they looked at the (Mono) technology and they found exactly what they were looking for implementing this thing called iFolder 3.0, which is a new version from scratch with many new features, similar to the Longhorn WinFS with synchronisation of data, backups, all kinds of interesting things. They could write in C++, but the schedule would just go out the window, or they could do it in C#, but it would be Windows. And when Novell acquired Ximian they had the option of building the same software that runs on Windows and on Linux.
So today they support Windows, Linux and the Mac OS with the same tool base. It helps developers focus more on what they are doing instead of with the nitty-gritty details of the specific platform. There's a lot of new development happening on Mono. We (at Novell) are centralising on Mono as our internal development platform.
