Matthew Revell

There’s been some discussion, on various blogs and news sites, suggesting that we - the LugRadio guys - were hostile during our interview with Miguel de Icaza.

This has concerned me. Were we hostile? If so, did we appear to be hostile to Miguel, and not just some of the concerns surrounding Mono? During the recording, and after having listened to it several times, I know that we weren’t hostile to Miguel the man. It could be argued, though, that we were somewhat combative, at times, with regard to important reservations that people have about Mono.

I feel no regret that our interview with Miguel was a little boistrous and maybe asked questions that made him feel uncomfortable. It’s true, the interview wasn’t perfect but we asked him questions that we hear open source advocates ask all the time. Mono’s genesis in a Microsoft technology - ECMA approved or not - is a worry to many people. And why shouldn’t it be? Microsoft has employed some, shall we say, crafty techniques before, in the face of far smaller competition than that posed by open source.

Our interview may not have answered all the questions people have but it gave our listeners the opportunity to hear the Mono project leader’s thoughts, direct from his own mouth. Most importantly, though, we have encouraged debate. Debate is essential in all communities and particularly in ours, as it goes through a period where commercial interests offer both fantastic opportunities and unknown threats.

Paul Sladen has transcribed the LugRadio interview with Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth.

Transcript of LugRadio interview with Mark Shuttleworth.

Thanks Paul!

Yesterday, we published season 2 episode 9 of LugRadio. The response has been astounding.

The main feature of the show was an interview with Novell’s Miguel de Icaza, who heads up the Mono project. Briefly, Mono is a somewhat controversial project to implement an open source version of Microsoft’s .NET framework on non-Microsoft operating systems. As Miguel’s roots are in open source, particularly the Gnome desktop project, the primary work has been for Gnome based Linux systems.

Slashdot, Newsforge, OSNews and others picked the story up, meaning that we’ve done approximately 86 Gigs of traffic on audio files since yesterday lunch time. Crumbs. We reckon that, including BitTorrent, we’re standing at around 8,000 downloads.

So, why has this episode piqued so much interest? Well, listen to the show But the main reason is that Mono divides the Linux community. Some see it as an excellent benefit to open source, allowing us to take advantage of a new development technology which is published as an international standard and so can’t hold any nasty surprises. Others worry that Microsoft will come up with a way to destroy Mono, and in turn anything that depends on it, just at the moment that it starts to matter to Linux.

I can’t claim to understand a great deal about the particulars of whether or not Mono is a good development platform. However, it certainly does raise some interesting questions about the future of open source.