In doing research for a future column, see December 8th issue of IW, I had the opportunity to interview Miguel de Icaza, co-founder and CTO of Ximian, about Ximian’s Mono project.Ximian develops Linux cross platform solutions for servers and desktops. The Mono project intends to take the .Net platform and create a runtime open source version of the .Net CLR, a C# compiler and class libraries for Linux.One of the questions asked in my column was “will Microsoft sit still for this or will they throw a monkey wrench into the project?” If you recall, Sun was able to stop Microsoft from modifying its JVM so in theory couldn’t Microsoft prevent Ximian, acquired by Novell last August, from tampering with the CLR? But so far, De Icaza tells me Microsoft has been nothing but supportive. de Icaza emphasized to me that what Microsoft will eventually do is pure speculation. All he knows is that so far the engineers have been extremely helpful. “They are helping us to understand the specs,” de Icaza told me.Even the business people he has spoken to seem very positive, de Icaza said.Basically what Ximian is after is a better development environment for Linux. “Is .Net better,” I asked?“Absolutely,” de Icaza said. “Once we have that piece [Mono] people can migrate to Linux. You can write in .Net for Linux and deploy it on cheap Linux servers and workstations.”But will Microsoft sit still for this? My guess is that Novell and the rest of the world won’t know Microsoft’s true intentions until Mono becomes a commercial product. Technology Industry