Toolkit

Story: Delay hits open-source .Net project

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One of the curiosities of open source is that many of the articles written about ope source are influenced by a strong tradition of writing about closed source products.

This articles by-line "that the results of the Mono project will now not be available until next year" is a clear example of such journalism.

Mono, while not released as version 1.0 yet, is available for testing, or even development, already and can be downloaded and run from the mono website (http://go-mono.org/).

This is typical of open source software, and while I wouldn't recommend rushing into use of this software prior to the declarion of a version 1.0 release it has many advantages over it's closed source counter-part.

For example, people interested in using mono for software development can trial the software now, getting a feel for whether or not it is suitable to their needs. Under the proprietary model of software development, you must wait until the software company deems it release worthy, only to find out that often it's been released too early and you've just payed handsomely for software that really doesn't work as you thought it would.

Even better, having found that mono meets most of your needs, but there are some areas you'd like to see working before you start development, the open source nature of the product means that you can actually add those features you need, rather than having to wait for the company in question to get around to it.

Novell may not have declared mono at version one yet, but that certainly doesn't mean that you can't download it and try it right now. Mono is already being used in production environments, including the serving up of (some of) the web pages for the project itself.

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