The Sikh Geek

Miguel de Icaza has the low down on the release of Mono 2.0, the Opensource Project to bring .NET to Linux and other platforms. I’ve been following Mono since its inception but for me it was never feature complete enough to do any serious development on. This release has a complete implementation of Winforms (…and thank heavens they dropped their reliance on Wine to achieve that!), rewriting the forms rendering from scratch. They’ve managed to sneak in C# 3.0 and LINQ as well.

The Project Leader, Miguel de Icaza, is the original developer of Gnome which is one of the two main Linux desktop systems used today. He sold his business Ximian to Novell and has since worked for them on Mono.

The road has not been smooth for him as he is a strong advocate of the technical advantages of .NET which has not endeared him to the wider Opensource community. Bringing Microsoft technology to Linux? That’s heresy to many! Worse still he works for Novell, which many in the Opensource Community, feel sold out to Microsoft.

In reality he’s a pragmatist, it’s about getting the best technology to run on the best platforms and to have binary compatibility between them. It’s kind of strange to run a .exe file on Linux. I did a quick test on compiling a simple Winforms app on my OpenSuse 11.0 distro and then took the exe and ran it directly on Vista without a problem.

There’s no WPF and it’s not on the roadmap either, it’s apparently just too hard to implement with their current resources. Unless .NET gets major adoption on Linux then I can’t see this happening anytime soon. However, Silverlight is coming to Linux via the Mono subproject Moonlight and has technical support from Microsoft. In fact Microsoft has recently given its media codecs to Moonlight to port to Linux and Silverlight 2.0 support is on the roadmap. So, whilst you won’t get full WPF support there will be a desktop version of Silverlight to run on Linux as part of Moonlight.

So, this is a good example of Microsoft’s open technology approach around .NET, which is allowing an Opensource implementation of it’s framework.

Sponsored by Novell and built on the Mono/.NET framework, iFolder is described as :-

… a simple and secure storage solution that can increase your productivity by enabling you to back up, access and manage your personal files-from anywhere, at any time. Once you have installed iFolder, you simply save your files locally-as you have always done-and iFolder automatically updates the files on a network server and delivers them to the other machines you use.

Sound familiar? Sound anything like Mesh?

Port25 is announcing the opening of the Interoperability Lab at Cambridge, Mass. I think this’ll be a unique place to work.

The Linux implementation of Silverlight called Moonlight developed by the Mono team have formalised their cooperation with Microsoft. Miguel de Icaza, the Port 25 guys and Scott Guthrie have it on their blogs. Great stuff!

Groklaw is reporting that a US court has ruled that Novell owns UNIX and UnixWare copyrights. Basically SCO is Toast and is going to have to pay some serious money to Novell. So, SCO’s claims against IBM that “Big Blue” used parts of UNIX (which SCO thought it owned) in Linux is null and void. Throughtout all the years that the SCO vs IBM case has been in discovery phase, SCO has poured over the Linux Kernel source code line by line and not once been able to prove that there is any copyright or IP infringement. Groklaw is full of praise for Novell’s legal team and to be fair Novell stepped in to challenge SCO to protect Linux. It knew if it won its case, then the SCO claim against IBM would be worthless. It was a high risk strategy by SCO. It thought it would get billions of dollars from IBM but now it faces the reverse. It’s the end of SCO! If you’ve got customers on SCO Unix, I would get them migrated pretty damn quick!

UPDATE

SCO’s shares dropped today (13 August) by 71% to $0.44 per share.

The recent edition of LinuxToday magazine has some info on the Virtual Machine Driver Pack (VMD) from Novell for Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10. The VMD Pack allows for unmodified Windows OSes to run on the Xen Virtualisation technology in SLES 10. No more having to install VMWare server to do this or modifying the OS kernel, you can do this straight out of the box now. An Annual subscription for the VMD Pack for up to four virtual machines costs $299, while if you want to run unlimited VMs, then it’s $699.

I’m assuming the VMD Pack has come out of the Microsoft/Novell deal and I have to say this is great news! The corollary of this is that SLES 10 will be running on Microsoft’s Virtualisation Technology in Server 2008 and this has already been demonstrated. What a great choice for customers!

I recently received an email from Novell regarding an overview of the interoperability aims between Novell and Microsoft. The following link has a webinar, presentation and a virtualisation white paper.

There seems to be some momentum building behind this agreement from the customer side. Apparently 12 new customers have signed up and Dell is joining the “love in”.

I saw a news story that someone had tried to get Ubuntu to authenticate against Longhorn Server and failed. This is precisely the issue that the Novell/Microsoft agreement was designed to address.

That’s a good question? It’s something that an article over at The Register asks. In fact it could be broadened out to ask why not chose FeeBSD or OpenBSD? What it shows is that there is real choice out there. So when I previously said that Microsoft should open source Windows, this is not something which is without precedent for a major vendor. Sun open sourced Solaris for its x86 OS and created Open Solaris and enjoyed a bit of a rebirth and it has more recently open sourced Java. In reality the battle so far has been between Linux taking market share from various versions of UNIX, moving towards commodity Intel based servers. Ubuntu is showing some interest being generated on the commercial Linux side but it’s all funded by a wealthy benefactor in the form of Mark Shuttleworth. So, are you going to bet your business on the good will and deep pockets of a single person? My view is that you’re better off sticking with a commercial Linux vendor like Novell, Red Hat and running it on supported hardware platforms such as IBM, HP or Dell which all support these distros. It’s not going to be free as in “free beer” but you’ve got some form of insurance for your business. 

Novell’s first quarter results for 2007 have been released and they show revenues are down from the previous year by 5% but Linux revenues for the quarter were $15 million, up 46% and invoicing was $91 million, up 659% year-over-year.

Novell has recently released its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server v10 and is a supported platform by iQubed and also by Microsoft under their recent agreement. I’ve always preferred SUSE Linux over Redhat in the commercial Linux arena. The ease of management of SUSE Linux is way beyond Redhat’s, as many tasks can be completed via YAST (the GUI management interface). Also, SUSE was the first to move to the 2.6 Kernel and add support for Xen (virtualisation hypervisor technology). Microsoft and Novell are working on supporting each other’s OS on their respective virtualisation solutions. If you want a sneak preview of this work check out this post on Microsoft’s Port 25 Blog. Exciting stuff and I would bet part of my business on this strategy paying off! It’s something that I’m keen to have as part of my business strategy.

I’ve now read the Microsoft/Novell Press Conference transcript and the Patent issue is troubling me because Steve Ballmer brings it up quite a few times. Both Novell and Microsoft should be upfront about what Patents they think are being infringed. Really, Microsoft should either put up or shut up and PJ of Groklaw has an analysis which I agree with in part. Just because a company says something is so, doesn’t make it true and that’s what SCO vs IBM has taught us! I want the collaboration between these two companies so that customers have maximum choice but on fair and equitable terms. I’m no expert in these deals but I hope this is not some kind of warning shots being fired across the bows of Linux by Microsoft!