Given that Mono is a port of technology that Microsoft submits to Ecma for standardisation, how are you going to keep up with Microsoft and what they are doing?
Well, Mono 1.0 is just shipping now in about middle of 2004, and we started three years ago. Microsoft released their products a year and a half ago. So, we are late. We are very late -- we are 18 months behind Microsoft. But we still shipped, and people are still using it.
In general, and I like what Alan Cox says, which is "free software is always late." The moment you write the first line of code, you are writing that line of code because you have a need. And you have the need now and not in six months or in three months when you are finished. You always have to put things for later. Free software is always like that.
We are already working with .NET 2.0 features. (Mono) 1.0 is already done -- we are just going through packaging. But my team is not waiting and sitting, not doing anything. My team is already working on 2.0 features. Like, for example we have been working with Microsoft on the C# 2.0 specification.
Has Microsoft been regularly submitting updates to .Net to Ecma?
Well, they have been relatively good citizens. All of the core pieces that they did for 1.0, they've been submitting to Ecma in advance (for .Net 2.0). So, actually by the time they unveil their first production compiler for generics, we actually had a generics compiler. It was not finished, but we had a generic compiler and now we are complete. They still haven't shipped their generic compiler as a product; it was only a beta. So, we think that we are going to have the same functionality in the compiler and the VM (virtual machine) by the time they ship. But that only helps me in some pieces.
What about all the changes Microsoft is talking about in Longhorn?
Yes. There are always things like Longhorn. I love Longhorn -- Longhorn is just changing continuously. That cannot be standardised, right? Actually, we are not touching Longhorn yet, until we know what's happening there and see whether developers need or don't need some of those features.
All of their APIs (application programming interfaces), they are calling WinFX. And there is this tiny little chunk that they call WinFS. We have an equivalent technology in Novell called iFolder. So, since this thing is still changing, we don't know if we can implement WinFS on top of Ximian or not. Since that thing is still evolving, it's hard to tell. When things are relatively quiet, then we are going to start implementing, because the goal here is to be as compatible as possible.
