In a recent post to his personal blog, Dare Obasanjo reflects on life during his Microsoft internship,

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Intern Experiences

It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been five years since I was an intern at Microsoft. It’s still fun to go back to read my blog posts about my Microsoft interview, my impressions halfway through the experience and my parting thoughts at the end if the experience. I’ve started thinking about my internship again because I’m going to be the mentor/manager of an intern in a couple of weeks and I’ve been taking strolls down memory lane trying to remember the experiences that made my internship worthwhile.

Dare continues,

My favorite experience is the story behind how I got the article Using the ECMA Standards: An Interview with Miguel de Icaza published on MSDN while I was still college and Microsoft had only said negative things about Miguel’s Mono project up until that article was published.

I hadn’t realized the story behind the story before now. I would encourage you to read it for yourself to gain greater understanding of what I believe was one of the single most monumental turning points in the history of computing: The day Microsoft chose to openly embrace the Mono-Project.

You might have your own opinion, but it seems pretty obvious to me that it is because of the efforts of Miguel, Nat, and the rest of the Mono hacker community, coupled with the vision of the current leadership at Novell that has led to Microsoft’s recent embrace of the Linux Operating System, and the OSS communities in general.

From the original article on MSDN we discover,

Using the ECMA Standards: An Interview with Miguel de Icaza

Dare Obasanjo: On the Mono Rationale page it is pointed out that the Microsoft .NET strategy encompasses many efforts including:

* The .NET development platform, a new platform for writing software
* Web services
* Microsoft Server Applications
* New tools that use the new development platform
* Hailstorm, the Microsoft .NET Passport-centralized single sign-on system that is being integrated into Microsoft Windows XP.

And you point out that Mono is merely an implementation of the .NET development platform. Is there any plan by Ximian to implement other parts of the .NET strategy?

Miguel de Icaza: Not at this point. We have a commitment to develop currently:

* A CLI run time with a JITer for x86 CPUs
* A C# compiler
* A class library

All of the above with the help of external contributors. You have to understand that this is a big undertaking and that without the various people who have donated their time, expertise and code to the project we would not even have a chance of delivering a complete product any time soon.

We are doing this for selfish reasons: we want a better way of developing Linux and Unix applications ourselves and we see the CLI as such a thing.

I LOVE that last line, so I am going to repeat it,

We are doing this for selfish reasons: we want a better way of developing Linux and Unix applications ourselves and we see the CLI as such a thing.

The reason I love this quote so much is simple,

It contains solid business justification, and therefore, a business model.

Don’t get me wrong (though I don’t think its any secret that I’m a HUGE advocate of OSS software), I love OSS software as well. But there comes a time in the evolution of an OSS project in which you move from “the garage” into office space, and to make just such a move requires money. To get money,

In what seems as such an ironic collection of interwoven statements, if you want to *compete* in the business of providing software for *free*, you need to find a way to make *free software*, *profitable*.

With the help of Novell, the Mono Project is doing just that. As always, my hat goes off to the folks behind the Mono-Project for finding a way to make *free software* profitable. That list of folks includes Novell, by-the-way, a company in whom I personally believe is well on its way to becoming one of the greatest come back stories in the history of computing.

That list of folks also includes Dare. Like I mentioned, I hadn’t known the story behind the story before now, which leads me to my open letter,

Dear Dare Obasanjo’s Future Intern,

Chances like this rarely come more than once in a lifetime. You’re a lucky hacker. Pay attention to what Dare has to say, and then adapt your style accordingly.

Sincerely,

M. David Peterson