Miguel de Icaza – more foolishness?

Aug 6, 2008 · 2 minute read (archived post)
Category:  IT
Tags:  Free SoftwareLinuxMicrosoft
Words: 539

A, sadly, unsurprising interview that I read at derStandard.at, but alerted from the Boycott Novell blog.  de Icaza has been lampooned in the past for his unpopular views on Microsoft, .net, and C#, but this interview really takes the biscuit.  The guy comes across as extremely naive, foolish, and also, because of his position, frankly quite dangerous for Free Software.

He extols the virtues of using C# and mono (an implementation of .net) whilst disregarding any dissenting voices in the community.  Still, when he comes out with stuff like this:

I find Silverlight incredibly appealing – you get C#, you get a DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime), you get a fantastic graphics engine with a fantastic animation framework, you get video, you get audio, multi-language compatibility and so on and so forth.

Well, that’s great.  It’s lovely technology.  Shame it comes from a convicted monopolist that has repeatedly called Free and Open Software (FOSS) ‘cancer’ and keeps trotting out patent threats against the free software community.  So what’s the sensible thing to do?  That’s right build technology based on Microsoft ideas and try to get it into as much FOSS as possible.  Perhaps not.  But then he goes on:

The business side explanation is that we want to make sure that Linux remains a first class citizen on the web. As websites start using Silverlight we don’t want Linux to be in a position where you can’t access those websites.

Perhaps it would be better to not to use Silverlight in the first place.  This is like the whole ActiveX thing all over again.  This is why we want OPEN web standards not driven by ONE company.

Please read the rest of the article. One thing is very, very clear to me.  Miguel de Icaza seems to be several things:

• In love with all things Microsoft.  He even went for a job there; perhaps he did get it.
• Cares not one jot about the damage that he might do to the community by validating and pushing Microsoft technologies into the FOSS community.

Still, the above is an ad hominem attack.  But, I have no respect for the man; I personally think that he is doing a very bad thing by developing Mono, by his blind desire to replicate .net, and with his completely naive attitude to Microsoft.  He wants to push mono in GNOME.  Which is a shame, because I like GNOME.  Still there is always KDE. Now, what can I use to replace TomBoy and F-Spot.