I have a lot of good friends that are smitten by Microsoft's take on IT and their direction. These friends include new friendships I have made while in Texas or even back in the day when I was an employee for Microsoft Consulting Services in Puerto Rico. A lot of them follow that company's decisions and mood as if it was their own. I don't blame them, I can be just as passionate about the Mono community and some of the great Mono luminaries.
Recently, a very good friend of mine who is also from North Texas and has done a lot for the porting of ASP.NET applications to Mono, was reminding me about how important it is that we disseminate the Mono story at local .NET User groups and events.
I have become somewhat discouraged from actively pursuing this because I have perceived a certain discomfort coming from the folks responsible for scheduling and organizing these events. At one point, I really thought about looking at their public event schedules to see if there were meeting dates that had not been filled. Maybe they would be interested in having my friend and I do a two hour block on Mono. Is not that they were not interested, they sure are.
When I have attended some of those events and I as much as mentioned how Mono can complement or serve as an alternative to the topic being discussed (let that be Compact Framework, ASP.NET, Web Services consumption for rich clients when hosted in either mod_mono/Apache Linux or IIS) , I would later be followed to the parking lot by various interested folks that wanted to know more about Mono and by extension Linux and Mac OS X. At one point I was talking about giving a presentation in my own terms, one that would not be at a Microsoft facility or even at any of the facilities used by the local User Groups. The funny thing there is that ALL of the organizers of these local .NET Users groups were very interested in attending such an event themselves.
But here is the rub. Mono is great for Microsoft and/or for those who make their name by publicly speaking about .NET when Mono can illustrate just how open the new post DOJ Microsoft is. How they turned over some of the CLI , C# and Managed C++ to ECMA for standardization and how Miguel de Icaza and his brilliant group of collaborators took those standards and flesh them out into a great reality for other non-Microsoft platforms. Mono is great when Paco can stand up and make a testimonial about how NUnit and test driven development is used in parts of the Mono C# compiler builds, and how the new Visual Studio .NET 2005 will bring test driven development to new heights in terms of ease of use, etcetera.
Hmm, I wonder. Just where are the Microsoft .NET enthusiasts' blog entries that show all this excitement? Where are the mentions of Mono in Visual Studio .NET magazine. Why are people not banging at my door to see if I can speak at their events. I just told you they are interested.
Here is one man's theory. Mono is becoming the new scarlet letter to avoid wearing in the Microsoft .NET circles. I even heard a comment form some one that said: We are interested, is just that Mono is too political!
Hahaha. That is plain sad and downright pathetic. Has anyone heard of this product called FoxPro? Here is a Microsoft Product that was inspired by the great success that then Ashton-Tate's original Dbase III Plus had achieved during the 80's. You would be sure that FoxPro no longer is. After all, can't Microsoft Access and MSDE replace it?
Well, here is a case of the users influencing "if not driving" Microsoft's product release and management. I remember that FoxPro users where a very vocal group at one point.
I bet that if a lot of those millions of VB.NET and C# users were to become vocal about their interest in running THEIR (and by that I mean ownership) code and solutions in multiple platforms, Microsoft and a lot of the scared consultants and evangelists that never want to upset the giant, would be cool with talking more and embracing their peer: The Mono Community.
I am also convinced that a lot of the Linux and Mac OS X developers/Users would be willing to install a copy of a Microsoft operating system and their developer tools if they become aware that a lot of their work could run unmodified or slightly tweaked under Win32. Microsoft may not be terribly interested in this yet just because there are not so may millions of desktop application users in Linux, but get ready to see that change dramatically over the next 18 months.
There is a lot to be said about collaboration and knowledge transfer. In the end we all want a better world to live in. I hereby give the first step into embracing my North Texas .NET colleagues even if they are not willing to publicly embrace me and/or the technologies that the rest of the other Mono contributors are putting together for all of mankind.
May the year 2005 be the year of cross-platform Mono, Gtk#, Gecko#, C#, VB.NET and MS .NET. And may this be the year where I can finally run MonoDoc and MonoDevelop in Win32 without needing a lick of Cygwin.
My great friend Kevin Shockey is becoming quite the prolific blog writer. He now has a blog over at O'Reilly and has decided to give a lot of attention and focus to Mono matters. His latest entry is about installing Mono using Red-Carpet.
I used to be a Microsoft Regional Director four years ago, and then saw the future. These days I am an Open Source, OSX, Linux kind of person. I still talk at Microsoft developer conferences, but here is the kicker, I only show up with an OSX box.
Usually at the conferences I will open the OSX box, start the talk and say how .NET is cross-platform, etc. Even if the talk is not about Mono. Then I will cynically say in a Steve Job's voice, "Hey I am cool!". Usually that gets a few laughs. AND I notice that during the talks, or later on those with OSX boxes will show me their OSX boxes.
When I talk about .NET, I talk about .NET in generic terms. If there is something specific regarding Microsoft, I just ignore it. Remember the following, it is not about pleasing Microsoft, it is about pleasing the audience. Remember "The Gladiator" movie? Same concepts apply, if the audience loves you, then you "get away with murder".
My advice is that you do talk at user groups and conferences, etc, etc. And with each talk think, "The Gladiator".
Posted by: Christian Gross at December 29, 2004 02:58 AMNice. I willing to meet up with you. Name a time and place, and I will be there.
Posted by: Zac at December 31, 2004 11:37 PMI would love to have you guys give a Mono presentation at the Plano .NET Users Group. I wish I could help make that happen. So, I did what I could; I made a blog post:
http://thecodinghumanist.blogspot.com/2005/01/what-mono-can-do-for-net-dudes.html
If you can think of anything else that can be done, I'd love to hear your ideas.
Posted by: Eric Sowell at January 6, 2005 09:18 AMhey Paco!
You and I have talked quite a few times about doing something at the Plano .NET Users Group. You know that I'm very interested in Mono, even so far as making sure that nGallery had worked with Mono.
I spoke with you in October about trying to get something together, with Novell, for a meeting in November. Unfortunately, November fell through for us due to some last minute rescheduling and shuffling of calendars, and never really having heard back from you on confirmations I had to make sure we had speakers lined up.
From there, it was unfortunate that you were unavailable in December, as I was very interested in getting something setup.
Now, January and February of this year have been booked well ahead of time, but I already had it in my head for either you and/or Jonathan to come speak in March.
I'm certainly not trying to dodge you, nor brand you with a Scarlet letter. But, logistically, planning UG's are not always as fun, or ideal, as any of us would like them to be.
As always, give me a yell and let's talk and get this thing on the calendar for March.
Thanks,
-Jason
President, PDNUG (http://www.pdnug.net)
Er, Joseph, not Jonathan. Sorry, I always do that. :)
-Jason