Knuckles writes:
"Austrian newspaper Der Standard continues its recent series of in-depth interviews with free software developers. This time they sat down with Novell's Vice President of Developer Platform, Miguel de Icaza of Gnome and Mono fame. The interview was conducted at GUADEC (GNOME Users' And Developers' European Conference).
Miguel talks mainly about Mono 2.0 and .Net 3.5 compatibility, enhancing the collaboration with Microsoft over Silverlight ("Moonlight" in Mono), and the larger political situation of Mono and Moonlight. When the interviewer asks whether Moonlight is only validating Silverlight on the web, Miguel gives a quite detailed answer that includes a possibly well-deserved swipe at Mozilla.
And even the Mozilla guys — the keynote we had here was done on a mac, every single Mozilla developer uses a Mac. And it's funny, they constantly attack Silverlight, they constantly attack Flash and then all of them use proprietary operating systems, they don't seem to have a problem doing it. And then they had the Guiness record thing for Firefox 3 and you went to the website and it had a flash map to show where people are downloading — so there definitely is a double standard here. And that's after all their claiming that you can do everything in AJAX — so they definitely don't "walk the walk".
Another topic is Miguel's suggestion to "refresh the look and feel of the entire desktop" using Moonlight.
To be realistic I don't think we can do absolutely everything that would take years. So if I would have my choice today I would probably rewrite the gnome panel completely with Moonlight. I wouldn't go as far as doing the file manager although I think it would be great to do a new file manager or improve Nautilus but it would be a lot of work.
It should be noted that Miguel has not been responsible for Gnome development for a long time, so don't take this as "plans for Gnome"."