I thought of putting together some of my old mails and user group posting as blog entries, with some patches so that they are’ blogopatible’. They would have ended up on my blog, if I had a blog when I made these posts. I feel some of these are of lasting importance, at least with respect to the impressions they had on me.

All of these are personal opinions, probably more relevant in the context that they were originally written.

-----Original Message-----

From: James, Roshan

Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 5:37 PM

To: MVP Mailing List

Subject: An Audience with Miguel

written in a hurry:

An Audience with Miguel

Hi, yesterday Pooja and I got to catch a part of Linux Bangalore, the annual Linux convention, and I thought that it would be nice to write to mvplist and share our experiences. We had missed the dates for the event and I was rather shocked at having missed a chance to see Miguel De Icaza in person.

Miguel, for those who don't know about him, is the creator of mc (the Midnight commander), Gnome (the rather popular open source desktop) and in recent days the lead for the Mono project. The Mono project is the only other major (when I say major here, it is not that I don’t know of dotGNU and other attempts, it is because I personally feel that Mono is more complete than those) .Net implementation outside of the Microsoft world. Mono runs on Windows as well as on Linux and probably other Unix flavors. This guy has been famous/notorious in the open source community for writing papers like 'Lets make Unix not suck' and has a rather 'misfit' personality for the typical religious ramblings of the free software types. In short this man has written his own windowing systems, his own .Net, his own enterprise servers and was running his own company called Ximian.

Ximian has been recently bought by Novell making Novell a major player in the open source world. Novell has also bought Suse - major Linux flavour and Novell seems to be on the path of becoming a significantly important open source company, along the lines of maybe Red Hat and such. However unlike Redhat and many of the 'Linux companies', Novell has a focus on delivering products rather than making Linux distributions and delivering them dirt cheap or free if they have to, to get into the market. So in short Miguel is as much a demi-god as our own Anders Hejlsberg, or Don Box.

The above paragraph was to set things in perspective. This is the mono website (http://www.go-mono.com/). Having been rather disappointed to have missed Linux Bangalore dates and missed Miguel, I happened to check their talk schedules by sheer accident around 11.30 yesterday. As fate would have it, there was a talk by Miguel, his last one, scheduled at 12.00. After a ~12km drive and some conversation with the registration counter we were at the IISC Bangalore venue – the last time I was here, I was attending the Microsoft Tech Ed.

One thing you notice up front as you enter is a big banner of Abdul Kalam, our president. The poster quotes him saying that it is probably not good to have important national software depending on proprietary solutions as proprietary solutions and highly dependant on the market that the vendors cater to and that sort of unreliability is probably not a good thing. And also that free software would really help a poorer country like ours as prices of commercial software are rather high. At least that was the message in spirit - don't think I have got any of his words right.

The crowd, as far as I could say was probably the same caliber as the technical crowd I usually get to interact with at UGs and various .Net technology events. Probably not as good in some respects - but there was this thing in the air that they were all up to 'something important'. Also one other thing that was noticeable was the set of demo computers setup, where people could sit down and try out many of the software that was being talked about in the talks.

Miguel's talk was at the main hall of the IISC venue (those who know the place will know what I mean). He was accompanied by Nat Friedman of Novell, a fellow mono-ist. What happened at the talk was something I wasn't prepared for. For those of you who have a mental image of Miguel by now, this guy is young, in his early twenties. He was carrying a digital SLR camera with a hefty lens and flash addons and was dressed in baggy jeans and black t-shirt. So was the other guy Nat. Now these guys hop on stage (literally), sit down on the floor - one of them rolls out a length of cable that he had wrapped around his neck the whole while. They pull out two laptops and they get a network setup between their systems and the presentation starts up.

The presentation showed of some parts of C# , web services, GTK# for windowing, GTK + for generating XML markup for the UI (and some jokes about how XAML is a copy of their own 6 year old idea) and more. These guys did the whole presentation sitting or lying down on the floor of the stage, sometimes editing the presentation right there in front of the audience, pulling jokes on each other and writing code the whole time for a full hour - and the whole thing was on their own Mono. Awesome.

After the talk Pooja and I met up with Miguel and introduced ourselves as being from the ‘dark side’ (He asked me if I was an ASP.Net developer because of all the questions I was asking from what otherwise seemed to be a relatively .Net ignorant audience. He was interested in the fact that I was an MVP.) and asked him if we could meet him sometime later, maybe over dinner or so. He was fine with that – that however was not to happen as his schedule did not allow him to. Various activities were planned for him for the whole of the next day (today, Friday) and he was going to flying on Saturday. He did promise to talk to our .Net user group the next time he is in India (expected to be in the second quarter of next year). I had to get back to office so I had to leave then; with the intention of returning for Jani's talk a little later in the evening.

I managed to sneak out of office again to attend the talk by Mr. Janakiram (I hope you know him - he heads Microsoft India's academic/university relationship program). Along with Jani was Mr. Gaurav Daga (he is a Program Manager of the famous Services for Unix team at Hyderabad; SFU won last years best open source software of the year award). Their venue didn't do any justice to their talk. Their talk was scheduled at one of the smaller halls and the crowd was so packed for the talk that I couldn't get close to the door of the hall. Jani and Gaurav as usual pulled a great show. They were talking about the new 'Unix' being built in windows ;) (Their demo was rather awesome: they took a Unix app ran it on windows literally, they wrote .Net code and exposed it as a web service, they built a proxy around the service and consumed the proxy as a COM component which was used by excel which was used to dump – did I miss anything?)  

All the while, from when he finished his talk, Miguel and his gang were there in the main lobby, showing off code or sitting or taking photographs or ready to talk to anyone at all about anything. When he was not doing that he would be sitting around in some corner with Nat typically typing away at a piece of code he was working on.

Since I couldn't get to listen to Jani at all due to the crowd and having driven the ~12km stretch in Bangalore traffic for the third time that day, I was walking around looking rather moody. Miguel then walks up to me, 'Microsoft dude', and gets our picture taken together. He kept calling me 'Microsoft dude' and he himself wanted to be called 'The Dude'; it was interesting talking to him.

I wanted to introduce Jani and Gaurav to Miguel and Nat after their talk. It was funny because on meeting Jani and Gaurav, Miguel seemed to freeze up a little bit - I think it's that Microsoft-effect. But on the whole they were nice folk. And Jani and Gaurav were good too. Jani mentioned how he wrote a wrapper around the 'Tk' widget library and called it a windows forms assembly and got to run some regular winforms code on Linux’

In retrospect, if I wanted to pick faults with the event I could and I could say that the organizing was bad, because the projector was shaky and the stage wasn't setup properly and the food was bad and all that and be complacent about the whole thing. But looking at the good side, you see guys who are probably the gods of their community actually sitting around with the developers showing off their code and laughing and talking rather that running off after a talk or sitting in a separate area. These are probably something's that we could learn from these folk. The number of people who Miguel touched that day and the number of people who will remember him are much more that those who will remember any of the speakers at technology forums where I have had the opportunity to speak or attend.

Miguel was different from my vision of the open source advocate. Probably because he was less of an advocate and more of a real programmer.

Miguel said that no they don't say that they are going to beat Microsoft or that Microsoft is going away or anything - which is normally common talk for OSI folk I have previously met. There is place for both he said. He said he has friends at Microsoft. He said that Dave Stutz is a good friend. We talked a little about Stallman and Free software. I asked him if he would be joining MS like Don Box offered and he said probably not. He would rather be doing his thing like this and be 'helping out the poorer countries'. He says they will keep on writing software, take good ideas wherever they find them and give it out as dirt cheap or free. There was this time when he said that 'they took out the GC and put in a toy GC in rotor and took out the JIT and put in a toy JIT in rotor - but the GC in Mono is your GC as much as its my GC' and he said that to Jani - 'its your as much as its mine and I would like to keep doing that'. There is this certain element of real sincerity which I find so missing in my work place and often at our technical seminars.

Free wheeling aside and sorry for all the typos and bad language in my writing, one thing that I probably miss from speakers and from many of our communities is that people hardly seem to be doing all that for themselves as much as for the community - I haven't seen anyone sit down and give all their time and energy to the community they are trying to foster. I don't see anyone on our side actually be there with the people and spread that sense of what they are doing - most of the audiences at our talks see us as speakers on podiums, rarely as people, we don't usually give them the room for that. I wish we could do that. And I wish that when we work on our user groups we can do it for the sense of community, rather than for the sakes of meeting numbers and budgets and revenue targets and stuff. I wish we all do this because we like our technology first - the Microsoft communities have never been able to do that the way these guys have. (This was probably rant, but reading this months later I feel that a lot of human touch is still missing in the communities. Somewhere the communities are built around a carrot culture and people who do things for carrots. Miguel has his carrots, but the way I saw his carrots were from a kind of passion that I personally feel in speakers I have known, myself being equally at fault. Something about what happened there that day felt like the spirit of those things I have thought about so much – hackerdom, the free hackers, the hacker ethic, mentor’s manifesto. Something is missing here and I am sure we can fix it because we have some extremely smart people who are so passionate about their technology)

I hope I have not tipped off any one by writing all this; this is probably something that could use some thought.

Cheers

Roshan

(Left to Right: Natt Friedman (Ximian/Novell of the Mono Project, cofounder of Ximian), Me, Miguel De Icaza (Ximian/Novell - author of Mono and other great feats of hackerdom, cofounder of Ximian), Gaurav Daga (Program Manager, Microsoft - Services for Unix Team), Pooja Malpani (CTS - programmer, Microsoft MVP .Net). This was taken at Linux Bangalore 2004, the annual Linux convention.)

(President’s quote put upon a hoarding at Linux Bangalore 2004)

This was recently posted on Miguel’s blog (there is more - go read the entry):
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2004/Apr-24.html

Jeff seems to like Cringley's statement of "The central point was that paying too much attention to Microsoft simply allows Microsoft to define the game. And when Microsoft gets to define the game, they ALWAYS win."

A nice statement, but nothing more than a nice statement, other than that, its all incorrect.

Microsoft has won in the past due to many factors, and none of them related to `Let them define the game', a couple from a list of many:

·         They leveraged their monopoly to break into new markets. The most discussed one is when they used brute force and anti-competitive strategies to get their products into new markets, but in some other cases they got fairly good adoption of their products with little or no effort: just bundle it with Windows: MSN messenger, Media Player.

·         Competitors were outmaneuvered or were incompetent (See HIgh Stakes No Prisoners).

·         People were sleeping at the wheel.

In 1993-1994, Linux had the promise of becoming the best desktop system. We had real multi-tasking, real 32-bit OS. Client and Server in the same system: Linux could be used as a server (file sharing, web serving), we could run DOS applications with dosemu. We had X11: could run applications remotely on a large server, and display on small machine. Linux quickly became a vibrant innovative community, and with virtual-desktops in our window managers, we could do things ten times as fast as Windows users! TeX was of course `much better than Windows, since it focuses on the content and the logical layout' and for those who did not like that, there was always the "Andrew" word processor. Tcl/Tk was as good as building apps with QuickBasic.

And then Microsoft released Windows 95.

·         A few years later, everyone is talking components: Netscape is putting IIOP on their client and server (ahead of their time, this later became popular as web-services on the browser); Xerox ILU; Bonobo; KParts; the Borland sponsored event to build a small component system that everyone agrees with; language bindings are at their top.

The concensus at that time? Whatever Microsoft is doing is just a thin layer on top of COM/DCOM/Windows DNA which to most of us means `same old, same old, we are innovating!'.

And then Microsoft comes up with .NET.

Maybe, sometimes, rarely, one man can change the world – or at least make a significant dent.