[Mono-list] Mono early history.

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> who is Saurik? Jay Freeman? Is he a Ximian Worker?

Yes, Jay Freeman.  No, he was not a Ximian developer.

> > About this time Sam Ruby was pushing at the ECMA committee to get the
> > binary file format published, something that was not part of the
> > original agenda.   I do not know how things developed, but by April 2001
> > ECMA had published the file format.
> 
> Is Sam Ruby a ECMA committee worker?

Sam was the IBM representative to the ECMA 334/335 working groups.

> > The Labsl team effort's eventually resulted in work in Bonobo-conf,
> > ORBit2, bonobo-activation, Soup, and the Perl/Gtk bindings.  The
> > intention was to build tools to improve our productivity: create more
> > applications in less time, bring more abstractions and standards to the
> > desktop and reduce our time and cost of development.
> 
> 
> The Labs1 team? A group of Ximian programmers?

Ximian Labs was a research and development team inside Ximian that
developed infrastructural components for Gnome and the rest of Ximian to
consume.

The product teams were the desktop, red carpet and evolution.  We
provided foundation tools to them.

> > We remained quiet, as we moved the teams over from their existing
> > projects to the Mono effort, they were winding down on their existing
> > projects, and only a couple remained behind: Alex Graveley (building
> > Soup) and Michael Meeks (working on Bonobo and ORBit).   The rest,
> > Dietmar, Paolo, Dick and myself started work on Mono.
> 
> All these people were part of the Labs1 team?

Ximian Labs.  Yes.

> > Ravi will join us later to assist in the C# compiler development.
> 
> A new Ximian worker, isn't it?

He was a developer that joined us, because he had worked earlier in
another compiler with Michael Meeks.  Ravi left Ximian to pursue a
degree in St Louis, but still remains involved as a contributor (and
helps us fix bugs when he can).

After Ravi left, Gonzalo joined the team to focus on ASP.NET.  Lluis
joined almost a year later, specifically to work on our web services
infrastructure and remoting.

> I'm sorry for my ignorance and my curiosity, but I think that it's an
> important and interesting story and I would like to know the details.

I also happen to like the history of software a lot.  In fact, I find 
the historic and human side of software more interesting than the
software itself.

Miguel