Colin Charles Agenda

Miguel de Icaza from the Mono project, tells us more about Moonlight, and where the Mono project is headed, at LugRadio Live USA 2008.

- shows us about Silverlight 1.1 (Moonlight is the Mono equivalent)
- works a charm in Firefox, but there’s issues with the implementation in IE (something JavaScript related)
- Demos the chess application
- Microsoft will provide a Media Pack (they will incur the licensing costs for the media codecs) for all Moonlight users on Linux. Microsoft will also provide regression test suites, and complete specifications for implementation. Novell will deliver a 100% compatible Moonlight and will support it on all major Linux distributions (contractually, only the top 3 Linux distributions - no mention of what the top 3 are). This is the Microsoft/Novell agreement, as of last September 2007.
- The codecs come with a restriction - you can’t use it outside Moonlight. Its only for the in-browser experience. If you use Totem, you’ll need to make use of gstreamer, etc…
- The MSPL is better than the X11 license. Miguel would like to change the Mono license to the MSPL, but everyone that hates him now, will hate him more because of the “Microsoft” substring! Why is the MSPL better? It has a patent clause, so that the code you use there, if covered by a patent, you will not be sued, ever. That in a way, is similar to the Apache license.
- Self-contained applications - traditional GNU software is spread out, quite unlike Mac OS X applications where you drag an application into the Applications folder, and everything is contained in one directory. Mono has an application guideline, where everything is also in one directory.
- Like all good demos, something broke. Miguel starts debugging on stage, and fixes the problem, and the demo works!
- “Programmers have no taste for design”
- “I have a roadmap, but I don’t think anyone gives a fuck, so lets just go to questions”
- How long will it take to get mixed-mode assembly working? If you are Chris Toshok, it will take 2 weeks. If you’re not, definitely longer. He spoke to Dan Kegel from the WINE project :) Patches are being accepted… The aim is to allow WINE to run Windows applications on a fully open source stack

Technorati Tags: lugradio, lugradio live usa, miguel de icaza, mono, moonlight, microsoft, patents, media pack, licensing, codecs, mspl, wine

While catching up on some interesting chat on IRC today, I decided to watch the Alan Cox video series that Red Hat Magazine recently placed online.

In Alan Cox and the state of free software:

• Alan speaks about software patents, as a problem for free software. Lots are starting to understand that they don’t work and they violate international treaties.
• Alan talks about political systems - so you can’t get free software into government or schools, because of certain vendors that they choose. Approved suppliers cause grief, when they only supply proprietary software.
• Alan talks about the OpenDocument Format and OOXML mess, and it confuses people, who want standards (FUD).
• A challenge now, seems to be that there are a large number of free software users now, who are not technically adept. So software has to adapt to their requirements - people don’t apply patches, etc. anymore so you just have to find new ways and tools to deal with bugs, etc. We in the free software community have to scale.
• Liability, with regards to poor quality products. Security software for instance, has this problem. The free software community has to work with liability law, as governments will increasingly require it. What standards/expectations should free software hold up to?

In Alan Cox on community and the enterprise:

• Alan speaks about his history at Red Hat, and his history with Linux and how he began hacking on it.
• A subscription model, and Mark Webbink figured this out - he built the model, while staying true to free software. If Red Hat hadn’t done that, they’d have lost a lot of community support. Alan focuses on how having a community distribution in parallel made sense. I can’t imagine if he means Fedora and RHEL, or CentOS and RHEL? :)
• He was referring to Fedora! Red Hat is just helping, enabling, providing resources, guidance & advice - the right way to work with the community. Everything else is generally community controlled.
• In developing markets, open source is important - buying local resources to create/maintain it - keep the sovereignty.
• “At the right place at the right time”

In Alan Cox on the kernel, patent promise, and the progress of free software:

• Late 90’s, everyone jumped on the open source bandwagon without any idea what it was about. This was the same period where you stuck an “e” in-front of any company name, and it became a new business model. How true.
• The 2000 crash, helped the serious companies work open source better. Oracle for instance didn’t take Linux seriously - now its an important part of their business model.
• Alan talks a lot about how he now spends time cleaning up code.
• Red Hat, at the end of the day, have a patent portfolio. Nobody particularly wants to launch any, but if you don’t have any to launch you have a problem - kind of like nuclear warfare.
• Software patent promise: people doing free software will never have to worry about software patents. People doing proprietary software, it gives Red Hat a mechanism in case of patent lawsuits (also, to trade patents). No one knows if how well this works, yet. Just hope this nightmare, never happens.
• Who knows, that in the US, the Supreme Court might decide that software patents are not valid? No one knows, since no one has pushed it this far.

Technorati Tags: alan cox, free software, software patents, subscription model, community, enterprise, open source, patent portfolio, patent promise