Miguel de Icaza pointed out in an e-mail this morning that
Ximian's relationship with Microsoft to this point is already in
the Ximian FAQ on Mono, the relevant parts of which are below. The
FAQ also, by the way, handles the frequently-cited, never
attributed talkback chestnut regarding which Ximian employee "was
on the Microsoft payroll."
Subject: Ximian and Microsoft.
From: Miguel de Icaza
Date: 17 Jul 2001 01:37:11 -0400
I woke up really late today as I was hacking until 4am last night.
And I found out that everybody was going crazy over some news about
Microsoft helping out Ximian.
The full details of this cooperation are in the FAQ:
http://www.go-mono.com/faq.html#ximian-and-microsoft
For your convenience, here it is:
Q: I read that Microsoft is helping out Ximian, is this true?
A: Initial contact between David Stutz and Miguel de Icaza happened.
It was a friendly conversation. Microsoft is interested in other
implementing .NET and are willing to help make the ECMA spec more
accurate for this purpose.
We were initially contacted by Sam Ruby at the ECMA TG3 committee
to discuss the same issue. And we are glad to have good contacts
to ask questions about the specs.
Q: Do you fear that Microsoft will change the spec and render Mono useless?
A: No. Microsoft proved with the CLI and the C# language that it was
possible to create a powerful foundation for many languages to
interoperate. We will always have that.
Even if changes happened in the platform which were undocumented
(which is very unlikely), the existing platform has a value on its
own.
Miguel once explained its motivation for working on Mono to Dave
Winer, and his mail got posted here
Miguel.
