People always talk about the battle for the hearts and minds of developers, who choose between Microsoft's .Net and Java. Do you think Mono will attract Java developers to the .Net fold?
Today what's happening is that ASP.Net (Microsoft's system for building Web applications) is replacing, it's basically pushing J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) aside. We did a study at Ximian when we were trying to find customers for Mono. We found that people said that it was 25 percent more efficient to build in ASP.Net, because they have to do all this academic crap (with J2EE). Microsoft later funded a similar study and they came up with 30 percent. We interviewed about 25 customers about why would you buy Mono, why not J2EE, and we came up with that.
The problem with J2EE really is that it became very, very academic and the complexity of all these perfectly designed systems in schools does not necessarily map when you have deadlines and all kinds of other things. Twenty-five percent means we can develop it in a shorter time period. We can actually hire less people to do this thing. So those shops that spend $200,000 to $2m say it's a one-year project. We are talking about relatively small shops -- four or five developers or six developers to maybe 20 developers. If you can save 25 percent, it's a very big savings there. So, it's just because the technology is not as pretty as it could be or as nice as it could be, but it gets the job done. So, it's not Java's fault; it's more the framework has not been designed for these users.
But don't developers have a lot of options in the open-source world?
Yeah, and you see a lot of people using all the alternative technologies with Java like Struts. The problem is that other than a couple of O'Reilly books, there is nothing else there. It's not something that you can attend a course on. It's not something you can just pick up training or support anywhere.
Basically, the ASP.net technology and J2EE have become players because there is enough money behind them to push them. All the other ones might very possibly, like Plone, could absolutely be a very good high-level platform, but it's just a niche thing right now. What we are doing basically is, if you can get trained on ASP.Net or are familiar with Microsoft tools, you can get your software running on Linux.
If you want to run J2EE, run J2EE. If you run ASP.net, we will run it. So, Linux becomes our perfect choice for running both J2EE and .Net, as opposed to being a disadvantage to Windows.
Will you be able to port everything that Microsoft does on Windows to other operating systems?
The new UI stuff, I have struggled a lot with what we are going to do with our toolkit.
