miguel de icaza has stirred up the unix community before with his famous unix sucks speech.
in that paper, he argued that unix needs higher-level code reuse and object-orientation. so it seems very reasonable that he wants to clone .net.

the mono project aims to implement several technologies developed by Microsoft that have now been submitted to the ECMA Standards Body.

for the time being, this is a gnome effort. in order to succeed, mono needs to attract a much wider audience, though. kde comes to mind, as do other projects like soap for apache. dave winer of userland seems to be aware of the project, lets hope they can find areas to work together.

miguel gave an interview to o’reilly where he said some interesting things about .net. With .NET, Microsoft is starting with a clean slate and building for the future. It’s a new development environment for the next 20 years.
Almost anybody could develop a compatible implementation of .NET, because what you need to know is out in the open.
I don’t think we as a community can design something that is going to be as completely thought out as .NET. It’s taken them several years already to design this, and I believe that Microsoft hired a lot of smart people to build it. It would definitely take us a lot of time and debate to get there. He doesn’t believe that the open source community needs to leapfrog .NET, but rather they should make it their own, much as Unix led to GNU/Linux.

dave winer has, as always, interesting commentary on mono. he argues that open source had to come about in the unix world because there are no easy ways for interop at higher levels (like com or corba provide) than the source code levels. integration is always done at the source level. this has very much truth to it, and dave goes on to argue that the focus should be on interop with .net first, source level compatibility later. a way to leverage the installed base is indeed missing. the unix culture to keep policy out has hampered any attempts to fix this.

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