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Hack Week Returns
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I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a few days — in case you’ve (nearly) missed it, this week is Hack Week 2 (or is that Hack Week II? Revenge of Hack Week? Son of Hack Week?) — we turn the developers loose for a week to work on “side” projects without having to worry about usual duties and deadlines. Or, as Hans Petter Jansson puts it, “the programmers at Novell, get to goof around with more or less whatever project we find interesting.”
You can see what Hack Week I helped create over on the SUSE Idea Pool. If you want to give developers some ideas on what to work on, you can add an idea on the ideas site.
A couple of interesting projects have caught my eye. Federico Mena Quintero is working to reduce login time for GNOME. Hans Petter Jansson is working on a Mono-based app called “Sterling” for money management that would be more streamlined than GnuCash. Andreas Schneider and Sven Schober are working on a rewrite of lomoco, a tool to manage the vendor-specific options of Logitech USB mice. (Since I’m using a Logitech USB mouse right now, this one sounds fairly interesting to me…)
I’ll be profiling some of these projects in more detail in the very near future. If you’re working on something fun and interesting for Hack Week II that you’d like to draw attention to, drop me an email or leave a comment. (Remove the “nospam” bit from the email before sending…)
Why, oh, why are we persisting with Mono-based apps – they really only add an “amusing” value rather than real things of substance (banshee and tomboy). I concede that it’s terrific to write compilers and to do optimization on inner loops, but what’s the intent here, this sounds like a college project on steroids? And are we actually wooing Microsoft developers to Linux anyway?. Shouldn’t we focus instead on the core strengths of GUI desktop apps for KDE and Gnome without fussing about another application virtualization stack (read Java) ?
We need a Visio, an MS project, a Photoshop etc, not a notepad app or a mostly working music content manager to make Linux stick. Mono is not the answer for these.
Hello Stephen,
Yes, we have brought many developers from Windows to Linux, you can see a list of commercial companies that have done so in http://www.mono-project.com/Companies_Using_Mono and in http://www.mono-project.com/Software there are some more resources.
Those are the companies that are willing to speak publicly about Mono, others are not public references, but Novell has worked hard to bring their software to Linux. If you are a Novell employee, I can share some more success stories.
But regardless of those migrations, Mono has value on its own, you might want to familiarize yourself with it because there is a lot more to it than “optimization on inner loops”, clearly your sweeping generalizations suffer from a lack of knowledge on the topic.
Miguel.
Actually, I do know Mono very well, I’ve been following it very closely since it’s inception; my point (that I made badly above) is that I see little value in it in the context of being a core part of a Linux distribution! My sweeping generalization (of inner loops and such like) was however, unfair, and I apologize.
I’ve struggled with my opinion on Mono’s merits for a long time now. But I’ve yet to see Mono being used for anything that actually needs Mono. It seems to be a technology looking for a problem.
I’ve only briefly reviewed the app list you linked to above, but isn’t Hula dead (the link doesn’t even work), and hasn’t iFolder been in limbo for long enough that it’s becoming more of a fond memory than killer app?
I will however do this, I will look through the Mono’s application resume in more detail and if I see the good stuff that needed Mono to solve the problem more than any other delivery platform, then I’ll eat a health serving humble pie on this thread.