NewsForge | One-on-one with Miguel de Icaza

NewsForge | One-on-one with Miguel de Icaza:

Joe: I heard yesterday, in an interview with Debra Anderson, the Novell CIO -- we were discussing the Novell migration -- that people were telling her that they couldn't migrate to Linux because they've got all this dot net stuff. She said she tells them, "Well, Mono is being ported to NetWare, so you can." So Mono is serving as an exit strategy for Windows users to cross over to Linux. And still, people have cursed you for making a "pro Microsoft" tool like Mono.

Miguel's Bell curve
Click to enlarge
'Bell Curve' sketch by Miguel de Icaza
(Miguel picks up my notebook and begins sketching in it.)

Miguel: In every population, you have this behavior, where it doesn't matter what you're plotting, but every time you deal with a population you have this curve, right, the standard distribution.

Joe: The bell curve.

Miguel: Right. So you always have two extremes, and it doesn't matter what you ask them. It may be, for example, the height of a population. Or it may be the preference towards salt or sugar. It doesn't matter, you always have this tiny percentage who respond at each extreme. So if you have a perfect curve, this would be 11 percent, this is 78 percent. So there are people who are very vocal in terms of not liking Mono, because it comes from Microsoft, and anything from Microsoft, they hate. I am not wasting my time with that 11 percent.