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Microsoft's bait and switch AS I SAID last week, I believe that Miguel de Icaza's enthusiasm for porting the Microsoft .NET development environment to open source as a project called Mono to be naive and potentially dangerous to the open-source movement. (De Icaza is the leader of Ximian Gnome, an open-source desktop environment for Linux and other versions of Unix.) I consider it even more dangerous now that Microsoft has decided to work with Ximian to create the open-source port of .NET. This leads me to suspect that Microsoft is engaged in a bait-and-switch scheme to finally wipe out the threat of open source.
Ximian's effort reproduces only the development environment in open source. It does nothing to reproduce or replace Passport. The FAQ published by Ximian underlines the significance of Passport, even if it understates the consequences (see www.go-mono.com/faq.html). Because the Mono development environment has hooks for using Passport, people wonder whether their e-commerce applications will depend on Passport. The appalling answer winds up being, "We do not know at this time whether the Passport protocol is documented and whether we will be able to talk to passport.com." Microsoft is already promoting Passport aggressively by making deals with the likes of American Express, eBay, and VeriSign, among dozens of other popular e-commerce sites. So for Mono to be of any use in developing open-source e-commerce applications, Mono will have to support Passport. There's talk about alternative technologies to Passport, but technology is not the issue. Unless some entrepreneur creates a company to kill off Passport with a cheaper, better service, Mono will be a covenant with death. If Ximian encourages open-source developers to write e-commerce applications that access Passport, it actually hands Microsoft the key to killing off open-source e-commerce once and for all. Once Passport has a foothold, Microsoft can update Passport and the .NET run-time environment to break all those e-commerce applications built with Mono. Businesses that saved money by building their sites on Mono would suddenly lose money waiting for a solution. Most likely they would fire the open-source developers and switch everything back to Windows. And Ximian can do exactly squat to prevent this future. Ximian may re-create an open-source version of the first iteration of the .NET run time, but Ximian cannot make .NET itself open source. So as long as Passport succeeds, the future of Mono rests with Microsoft, not Ximian. Nick is the founding editor of VarLinux.org ( www.varlinux.org ). Reach him at nicholas@petreley.com.  RELATED SUBJECTS  Software DevelopmentE-CommerceMiddlewareDiscuss this article in our online forums MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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