Tech Presentations

Presentation about current state of Mono and why it’s an important project for Linux community. Presented by Miguel de Icaza who is employed by Novell and in addition to Mono fame is also known for creating GNOME desktop for Linux.

Given at FOSDEM 2007 on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 (video, ogg, ~300Mb).

Presentation actually changed my impression of Mono being an evil seed of MS .NET monster into Linux – in reality it looks like it’s a way to make huge amount of MS .NET developers easily port their apps to Linux. With a huge amount of apps running on Mono without modification. Right now it’s 11% and by the end of summer he expects that to be about 60%, plus another 25% of apps to be easily portable to be cross-platform (about a week of work each).

I can’t say I’m overly optimistic, but it’s one of the moves that can give Linux much better chance.

As one of showcases, he also talks about Second Life migrating their LSL scripting language to Mono and gaining huge performance savings.

P.S. I wish they had BitTorrent set up for those videos.

Google TechTalk by Mark Shuttleworth on November 9, 2006 at Ubuntu Linux Development Summit. (video)
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Not really about technologies, but about organisational infrastructure of Open Source software project.

Interesting notes (not necessarily quotes):

• Open Source is new economics, culture, new way of producing software (Ubuntu is different from RedHat and Novell)
• Open community – because company is distributed, most of the employees work from home.
• Launchpad.net – community software development site knowing about other Open Source prohect developments (Apache, for example, being important part of Ununtu distribution), bugs, translations, source control, etc.
• Desktop will kick in when Dell will choose chip vendor (from vendors with the same price) based on their Linux drivers.
• “Kernel guys live on the tip – they’re not concerned about older systems.” (meaning that it’s fine for servers but bad for desktops)
• Check Google trends for Ubuntu