sontek ( John M. Anderson )

Matt Asay has posted a blog here claiming that Miguel de Icaza is wasting away his talents by “cloning” C#/.NET with mono, rather than

“going back to the innovation in GNOME that originally made you one of the most interesting developers on the planet”

C# and CLI are open standards, so they are just implementing an open standard, not cloning it. This short sighted outlook on the future of Linux and GNOME shows the difference between Miguel and Matt. Miguel and his team at Ximian/Novell have been leading innovation in Linux for over 10 years with GNOME and Evolution and the reason they began

“Squandering one of the industry’s best open source talents”

by working on Mono was because they realized that Linux could not compete with Windows without a better development environment, so rather than always trying to play catch up to the proprietary world, Miguel and his team set out to even the playing field.

And Joe Shaw points out the most frivolous point in Matt’s post here.

Matt says:

“You [Miguel], personally, would convince more by going back to the innovation in GNOME that originally made you one of the most interesting developers on the planet. I want the old Miguel (and Nat - where has Nat Friedman been?) back, the one who demo’d Nat’s Dashboard with Nat at OSCON. The one who led and pushed GNOME forward for so many years.”

Dashboard is one of the very first C#/.NET/Mono desktop applications on Linux. It is still one of the most innovative applications on the Linux desktop, and Matt agrees with this, which shows just how great Mono is.

Miguel isn’t only allowing for innovation on the Linux desktop but he is also allowing corporations that were mainly a C#/.NET shop to be able to port their applications to the Mac and Linux platforms.

Matt, I respect your opinion and believe you did great things when pushing open source at Novell, but I think you need to look at the bigger picture and get past the fact that .NET was designed by Micrososft. C# is a great language and the .NET class library makes it easy to quickly develop desktop applications such as F-Spot, Beagle, Tomboy, and Banshee.

Jeffrey Steadfast also provides an interesting view on this here.