… by hiring the top guy into your company and then cut off all incentives for the community to get interested.

Yes, I’m talking about IronPython and in this case, the company happens to be MS.

Read what Edd Dumbill has to say about it, especially this part:

Third-party patches won’t be considered until after the 1.0 release. Hugunin encourages people to be involved, but only in filing good bug reports and feature requests. And when doing this involves a .NET passport, and using the GotDotNet web forums rather than good old mailing lists, it’s a bit of a disincentive. Added to that, there’s some uncertainty about the freeness of IronPython’s license. While it looks free, it’s got the same name, “Shared Source”, as several Microsoft licenses that definitely are not free.

I have nothing more to say except that such an awesome ‘open source’ project has been effectively killed off – IronPython may go on to become 1.0 but it is now reduced to a one-man show when so many people could have contributed to it.

Yesterday, I attended the LINDEC 2004 or "Linux Desktop Conference 2004" organized by gnomebangalore.org backed by Novell. The chief geek was none other than Nat Friedman.

It’s interesting to note that the conference was held at PESIT, yep, my alma mater. We never had these kinda things w.r.t. open source when we were in college but I’m glad to see that changing!

There were interesting talks by Nat and we learnt about some cool stuff such as the Linux Desktop Testing Project – it’s amazing how the testing of GUI applications can be automated and the results verified. I must dig more deeper into it some time.

Then, of course was the presentation and demo of Beagle by Nat and John Trowbridge – this software can really change the way we use computers. I don’t think I had ever imagined searching for stuff in the computer in such a simple way. When we are searching for something, we usually know where we have to search such as in our email application or use a search engine for the internet, but to combine all of them in one is something really worth looking forward to.

At the end of that session, Nat and Trowbridge were handing over copies of Mono: A Developer’s Notebook to the first people who answered their questions. They were having a hard time thinking of a question for the last book, and so I shouted to Trowbridge, "Just give it to me!" and everyone burst laughing , then Trowbridge immediately asked who said that and just gave it to me! This was such fun and I heard people saying "Very clever…" , ok, ok, back to the book – I had looked for this book before in Book Paradise but apparently no Indian edition was available, and so I am really happy to get my hands on this book and that too directly from Nat and Trowbridge! After that, me and Uday attended the Glade session which helped me refresh my memory (I have given a talk on Glade at BLUG before!)

And I had great company throughout the day as well! A few of the BLUGgers planned to meet up at LINDEC and so that we can get to know each other (Thanks to Manish for the initiative!) this way as well. The guys who had met up were Manish, Uday, Tejaswi, Srichand, Arun, Shyam, Ashish and myself. Manish has put up some snaps as well.

Manish, yet again, took another initiative to have a BoF session today in Jayanagar but unfortunately couldn’t go coz I got to fulfill some deadlines at work, but I’ll surely make it next time.

All in all, open source and great (new) friends and Mono…. makes a great day!

IronPython has been released as open source!! Get it while it’s hot at IronPython.com !

Mono Beta 2 released! Wow, Miguel, Maurer, Pryor, Gonzalo, Kestner and the rest of the gang are really moving fast! Lots of improvements have been made especially the bug-fixing and performance enhancements. Can’t wait till 1.0!

If only, it worked on FreeBSD – my only gripe yet

Mono Beta 1 has been released! Download it now! And it has a very cool logo as well.

I have just one gripe with it – if only it worked with FreeBSD…

It’s great to see new versions of MonoDevelop and Gtk# also being released. I have to check it out very soon…

As you must already know, Microsoft’s next-generation Windows which has been code-named Longhorn has been making lot of waves. They’ve been making lot of innovative strides in this Longhorn and they have a lot of cool names for many of Longhorn components as well.

One important thing to note about Longhorn is that it is completely based on .NET. All the Longhorn APIs will be in .NET and hence .NET can soon become the preferred development platform. This is my case for pushing Mono to become the preferred development platform as well since (atleast theoretically) Mono programs will be cross-platform and will run on .NET and Longhorn as well.

Coming back to Longhorn, I was reading some fascinating articles today:

• Avalon graphics model
• WinFX
• Bloghorn: A Blog Reader Built in XAML
• ObjectSpaces – a new convenient way of accessing databases
• The Official Microsoft Longhorn website
• System.Help
• Longhorn Screenshots
• Longhorn Roadmap for Avalon
• Indigo – The Longhorn Communication subsystem
• WinFS – The Longhorn Storage subsystem

I’ve been completely bowled over by all these articles. I just had to add LonghornBlogs.com to my list of feeds on my Bloglines account!

Looking from the open source angle, does Linux/FreeBSD/KDE/GNOME/…. have anything to match Longhorn? I personally feel that they can’t match Longhorn yet, maybe Mono will counter that in future but I can confidently say that only when Mono developers are innovating and not just playing catch-up with the Longhorn people. Of course, there is still time till 2006!

This reminds me of a joke I read somewhere on Slashdot:

Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow?
BSD (which also means OS X): Are you guys coming or what?!?

IronPython is to .Net/Mono what Jython is to Java. That’s the simple way of saying things. The reality is that IronPython is a remarkable software and if it is good, then it is due to the talent of it’s creator Jim Hugunin.

Jim Hugunin has presented a paper on IronPython at PyCon 2004. The benchmarks are amazing – IronPython runs on the JIT compiler of .Net faster than on the CPython native executable written in C!

Miguel de Icaza must be a very happy man to note that IronPython has proved that .Net is indeed usable with interpreted languages.

The combination of Python and .Net is very compelling indeed. The advantage is that you get to write powerful Python programs using the excellent .Net libraries. I cannot imagine anything more awesome than this from a Mono/.Net programmers’ point of view and all this at very good performance!!!

I can’t wait to get my hands on IronPython and play around with it!

There is an open discussion going on about the future of open source software. It all started when Havoc Pennington started a discussion on Java, Mono or C++ – Thoughts on the future of open source desktop development. This was followed by replies from Lupus and by Miguel de Icaza and further discussion from Havoc on his log. This is a very intriguing and interesting discussion.

My thoughts on the discussion… well, see my writing on Why Mono?

For me, the only thing stopping Mono from taking over the world is the legal situation, especially, vis-a-vis Microsoft. It’s sad that creating software has got more to do with lawyers than programmers now-a-days. I am keeping my fingers crossed for the results of the Novell Legal Review of Mono!

Edd Dumbill (of XML.com fame) asks the question Will Mono Become the Preferred Platform for Linux Development?. He goes on to talk about the state of Mono, about MonoDevelop along with some cool screenshots, as well as what’s in store for the future.

I just wrote down a few of my thoughts in an article titled “Why Mono ?”. It’s about why I think Mono is great and how it makes sense for the next generation of softwares that are going to be written. Mono has the potential to enable much better softwares than was ever possible before. So, read on !