[Mono-dev] MonoSummit: Planning the Sessions

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> As a member of the Mono community, I feel a sense of pride whenever Mono
> gains respect on the Linux platform.  As a consequence, I am hoping that
> more "must have" applications get developed with Mono.  Whether it is games,
> tools or whatever, I truly love to hear that developers are having success
> with Mono.  Java is the Honda of the market.  It sells itself.  Maybe we
> need a proselytizing campaign?  To misquote Rodney Dangerfield "How can we
> get some respect around here?"

I agree;   There has not been a concerted campaign to promote Mono other
than the sporadic talks that some of us do here and there plus the causl
blog entries. 

There have been some members in our community that have done some
efforts (mono-live.com, the Mono forums, a couple of Mono web sites) but
they have not really received a lot of attention.

> A big concern of mine is penetration on RHEL.  This is a very large user
> community and it seems to have diplomatic issues with Mono.  Can this be
> resolved?  

Not likely, but am not sure that shipping with a particular distribution
is much of an issue.

Because shipping another runtime (or another hundred runtimes) makes
very little difference to a user.   What matters are the applications,
and applications will drive the adoption of the runtime, whether it is
shipped with the OS or not is irrelevant, people will get it.

Here, probably the best thing to do is to port existing .NET apps to
Unix and then provide packages for those (we can use the OpenSUSE Build
service to create packages for multiple distributions:
build.opensuse.org)

Then we should engage proprietary software vendors and proprietary
applications to get their software working with Mono, and to get the
software certified on Mono.  

Again, the apps will drive Mono adoption.

Miguel