[Mono-list] Novell's Brainshare and Mono.

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello guys,

   Ben asked me to update folks on my recent trip to Novell's Brainshare
event in Barcelona.  Mostly because I was so excited after the trip and
he felt people that were not on irc should hear the story.

   The trip was very interesting, because I typically get to talk to
Linux audiences or developer audiences.  This trip was different in that
most people attending the event were interested in deploying enterprise
solutions.  This was a completely different audience than the one am
used to talk to, so it was one of the most educating events I have
attended in the last year.  Knowing what people actually are using free
software for was fascinating. 

   Most of the attendees work for large companies that use many
systems.  There was a massive interest in the product line that Ximian
produced, I will only talk about the Mono interest in the event.

   Since Novell is going to support its full software stack on Linux,
and is now entering the Linux desktop space, Mono helps in a few areas
here: people considering a migration from Windows, OS2, DOS to Linux
have to migrate applications in many cases, and Mono is a perfect fit to
help the migration process.  

   Mono fits in two key areas: application migration is one;  And
another one is the use of C# as a development platform.  Not only of its
.NET components, but also the components that the community has built
around those (Mozilla, RelaxNG, XmlRpc, Gtk# and more).   

   If you are a large company and are considering Mono, please let me
know, we want to know what are your needs and we want to make sure that
we prioritize our tasks accordingly.

Miguel.