Page II: Novell's Miguel de Icaza is working on a technology that he says can replicate Microsoft's vaunted software development platform on Linux.
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.
Are people in the open-source community ticked off at you for having done something with Microsoft's C#?
Well, there are many positions of course on these situations, and I wouldn't say it is the open-source position versus the rest of the world.
What about patents? Is there a danger that Microsoft may at some point demand that you license portions of .Net?
Well, at this point, we don't know of any patent infringement that Mono has (committed).
Have you looked into it specifically?
We have looked at some of it, and we haven't found any infringement. But in general, the problem is that Microsoft at least has 30,000 patents. I don't know if you have ever seen a patent or how it works, but they basically have these law claims where they say this is the invention, and the claims are relatively hard to read.
So it's not possible to enforce?
It has to be brought up to your attention. That's the problem in general with patents. Even if you try to do a patent review, which we looked at some, the scope wasn't really anything that we infringed on.
Then there is prior art. The question is have these been done before? For example, in this particular case, you have a multi-language VM (virtual machine). It turns out that it's a very old concept and it's actually being used in production. The OSF (open software foundation) commissioned a development that did exactly that. It never made it to market. Well, it made it to market -- it just was a complete failure.
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