YOOT

2 weeks ago in Brussels, I had the pleasure to attend FOSDEM 2010, regarded as”The best Free Software and Open Source events in Europe“. I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve no experience with Mono so far, but I’m a curious guy, and the event was not far, and even better, free … so I thought, let’s go have a look to see how things are going in the free world

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised from what I saw. Apart from the fact that the attendees are somewhat different from those you see at the typical Micro$oft conferences, the atmosphere was very nice and you could see a lot of geeks, some younger, some older, having all one common point : the passion about softwares & new technologies.

I mainly followed the Mono track and here are a few things that I think are worth mentioning:

• The Mono project & Microsoft are not at war (this may be obvious to some but anyway) … they seem to have healthy collaboration (obviously, within the usual legal boundaries that apply). We are far from the clichés of Microsoft, the Evil Empire vs The Good Free World. This is a good thing, diversity brings more creativity, and thus more choice to people.
• Miguel de Icaza, the charismatic leader of the Mono project, and Vice President of Developer Platform at Novell, was there to make a state of the union speech. Among other things, he praised entrepreneurship (he seems to like Apple and the iPad), talked about the evolution of C# and how good a language it is for most purposes, and granted the audience a few good quotes:

Any developer below the C# bar is just miserable.

No Coca-Cola today ! (Talking about the fact that he would try no to make a marketing talk about Novell’s products)

• Mono Develop is improving very nicely. I wouldn’t trade Visual Studio for it yet, but it’s interesting to see how those guys are doing their best to provide a free alternative to the Microsoft star IDE.
• If in the past, Mono was usually lagging far behind and mostly playing catch-up, they are now able to release their free implementation almost at the same time as Microsoft releases major revisions to C#, .Net & Silverlight. Ok, they may not have all the features of the original implementation but this is still an amazing achievement.
• Mono also has a few unique features that are yet to make an appearance in the .Net world : Ahead of Time compiler & SIMD extensions.
• Last but not least, MonoTouch allows you to develop for iPhone & iPad in C#.

All in all, those guys are doing a great job, and, for us, typical .Net developers / consultants, looking at the other side of the fence from time to time, is inspirational.

Therefore, DotNetHub would be very happy to welcome speakers that would like to do a session about the Mono project & related technologies. Don’t hesitate to contacts us !