Miguel dropped in last week to clarify Novell’s positioning on the Java v Mono debate, which I’d touched on in this post which discusses some comments from the GNOME group vis a vis Java and Mono. For the sake of brevity (which I pay too little attention to, I know) I discussed Novell as being pro-Mono and anti-Java, which was – as Miguel rightly pointed out – a rather dramatic oversimplication of the situation. Having worked with Silverstream way back in the day, I’m well familiar with Novell’s J2EE capabilities. What I was intending to impart was that with respect to desktop development – and more specifically, GNOME – Novell favors Mono over Java, but the stark Anti:Java label did not convey the subtlety of that positioning.
So just to make sure Miguel’s feedback gets the air time it deserves – as not everyone reads comments – I wanted to drop in his response on Novell’s positioning:
I just wanted to point out that Novell is not anti-Java, in fact we have more than a few products that run on top of Java (exteNd: a software to help developers write high-level applications on top of J2EE).
That being said, one of the major problems of Java as a platform for open source software is the fact that there is no complete open source Java implementation. It is being worked on certainly, but today it poses a problem for those distributions which are `pure open source’ like Debian GNU/Linux: Java-based solution so far have been a non-starter.
The reason to prefer Mono for desktop development at Novell over Java is that Mono can run both .NET and Java code, so if we write code for the CLR, we get to serve both languages.
Also, .NET has learned a few tricks and has been able to fix and introduce concepts that are not available on Java (like structs, and P/Invoke) which make it more suitable for our desktop development.
Another bit which I consider important is this: Java and .NET have both powerful backers and neither Novell or Red Hat have the power to make ISVs choose one or another, the forces are too strong.
So the position that we are taking at Novell is supporting both: we will run your Java code and we will run your .NET code on Linux.
I agree with the rest of your post, I just wanted to make sure that Novell was properly portrayed.
We are like Switzerland: we love everyone, but we have chosen Mono to build our new generation of applications. Some of those were demostrated at Brainshare: iFolder, Simias and F-Spot: both on the server and the client.
All of the above technologies have also been open sourced to encourage its adoption in the Linux world.
So to Miguel, mea culpa. I promise to qualify my assertions in that regard better in future, and thanks for stopping in to clear up my mess 😉
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