[Mono-osx] An open letter to the OS X Mono group.

[Robert Mullen]

I work for a company in the automotive logistics sector that is
investigating alternatives to Windows on the desktop. I have long been a
proponent of Linux but there has simply never been a strong enough
business case to justify the risk and labor involved in a changeover.
Recent events with our CIO have potentially provided this justification.
Our CIO is Dale Frantz who has had an ongoing conversation with the
media about our company's displeasure with regard to Microsoft tactics
and strategic direction. A glimpse of this can be found here:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&
articleId=285550&intsrc=article_more_bot

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&
articleId=286292

Our investigation of OS X has been somewhat of a watershed event. For me
and another in the company with a small bit of background in the open
source community, OS X creates a compelling package for a business
desktop. I know some of the open source community will not be happy with
the closed portions of OS X but it appears to me that for the first time
there is a desktop that is strategically aligned to compete with
Microsoft. A good portion of this is due to having the weight of Apple
behind the desktop. When you combine the polish and support level of
this desktop with the goodness of the UNIX underpinnings you have a
knockout one-two punch in our opinion.

To that end I have been working with Mono as we do not see programming
in Objective-C and Cocoa as an attractive alternative. I have a small
application running on Windows-OS X-Linux via Mono as a proof of concept
that our backend systems can be accessed via multiple OS's from one
application. Unfortunately the OS X version is pretty rough around the
edges. I have followed the conversations about the state of the port and
would like to say that a native Quartz implementation of Windows Forms
would be a major point of attraction for us. It seems that work has been
done in that direction but more bodies are needed. Being a simple
business application development shop I don't think we have the skill
set necessary to donate man hours to this worthy cause but I would like
to know if there is another way that we can help in moving this project
along. 

I welcome comments from anyone (including the possibility that I am
looking at this in a flawed manner) and would especially like to strike
up a conversation with some of the forces behind this development effort
to see how my company can support it.

 

TIA,

Robert Mullen

 r o b e r t m AT a u t o w c DOT c o m 

 

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