[ale] ximian and mono

[Mel Burslan]

Wondering if Miguel de Icaza has an under-the-covers deal from
Microsoft. Otherwise, he may not have overlooked such an obvious threat
to the project/community he is spearheading. Please read the article
below if you have not already.

========================================================
NICHOLAS PETRELEY:   "The Open Source"    InfoWorld.com
========================================================

MICROSOFT'S BAIT AND SWITCH

AS I SAID last week, I believe that Miguel de Icaza's
enthusiasm for porting the Microsoft .NET development
environment to open source as a project called Mono to
be naive and potentially dangerous to the open-source
movement. (De Icaza is the leader of Ximian Gnome, an
open-source desktop environment for Linux and other
versions of Unix.) I consider it even more dangerous
now that Microsoft has decided to work with Ximian to
create the open-source port of .NET. This leads me to
suspect that Microsoft is engaged in a bait-and-switch
scheme to finally wipe out the threat of open source.

There are two elements of Microsoft .NET crucial to
Ximian and Mono's success: .NET, the e-commerce
development environment; and .NET, the infrastructure
to manage Internet e-commerce security. At issue is
the latter portion of .NET, which is part of Microsoft
HailStorm. HailStorm includes an e-commerce
authentication service called Passport.

Ximian's effort reproduces only the development
environment in open source. It does nothing to
reproduce or replace Passport. The FAQ published by
Ximian underlines the significance of Passport, even
if it understates the consequences (see
www.go-mono.com/faq.html). Because the Mono
development environment has hooks for using Passport,
people wonder whether their e-commerce applications
will depend on Passport. The appalling answer winds up
being, "We do not know at this time whether the
Passport protocol is documented and whether we will be
able to talk to passport.com."

Microsoft is already promoting Passport aggressively by
making deals with the likes of American Express, eBay,
and VeriSign, among dozens of other popular e-commerce
sites. So for Mono to be of any use in developing
open-source e-commerce applications, Mono will have to
support Passport.

There's talk about alternative technologies to
Passport, but technology is not the issue. Unless some
entrepreneur creates a company to kill off Passport
with a cheaper, better service, Mono will be a
covenant with death. If Ximian encourages open-source
developers to write e-commerce applications that
access Passport, it actually hands Microsoft the key
to killing off open-source e-commerce once and for
all. Once Passport has a foothold, Microsoft can
update Passport and the .NET run-time environment to
break all those e-commerce applications built with Mono.

Businesses that saved money by building their sites on
Mono would suddenly lose money waiting for a solution.
Most likely they would fire the open-source developers
and switch everything back to Windows. And Ximian can
do exactly squat to prevent this future. Ximian may
re-create an open-source version of the first
iteration of the .NET run time, but Ximian cannot make
.NET itself open source. So as long as Passport
succeeds, the future of Mono rests with Microsoft, not
Ximian.

Nick is the founding editor of VarLinux.org
(www.varlinux.org). Reach him at nicholas at petreley.com.
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