Stranger things have happened, but it will be hard and very messy.

Many people have the problem that they are unsure about the licensing situation of mono. Jono: You should really interview Miguel or someone from the Mono team about the licensing thing.

Whilst these issues are somewhat off-topic, I’m afraid that would be a waste of time with the Mono people just pointing to their FAQ which doesn’t answer many questions. They try and tell everyone that the ECMA covered stuff is safe. .Net’s core technology, including things like the CLR, is governed by a RAND license granted by Microsoft and it is only there because the ECMA requires it. The question is, how long will that license last and can it be revoked? Nobody knows that, and the Mono guys have consistently side-stepped it over many years. A letter from Microsoft, Intel and HP was even talked about regarding this issue some years ago, and it has never materialised.

Having said that, if you want to write GTK and Gnome applications today, Mono is the most logical, pain-free method. Alas, rather than take what was interesting about .Net and then look at the enterprise world of Java and the open source development world of Python, Perl and Ruby and come up with something new that would benefit everyone, the Mono guys chased .Net compatibility. I feel it was a good opportunity lost.

Thorsten: Right, I oversimplified Designing is not easy. If done consciously, it can be an difficult and intensive work. What I wanted to say is that on the overall the required development effort is higher to much higher than the design one. It depends of course of the project.

I disagree – design work can be even more intensive. From assessing and documenting needs, developing and researching ideas, formulating them into a design/spec, gathering feedback, merging feedback back in and prototyping, its incredibly intensive work. I think comparing it development is like comparing apples and oranges.

It is not, because to do it well, you often will have a lot of things to consider. You wouldn’t say coding is easy because many people can manage to write a Hello World, right?

But I agree regarding tools, of course.

What do you mean by “works out”? Do you mean that quality programmers will never really make bad interface decisions as their experience will see them through in the right direction?

I wasn’t talking about programmers when I mentioned people. I meant everyone involved. Further, I do think programmers will make various bad UI decisions. Then either another programmer (note: I don’t consider most developers just a programmer), or just someone else actively involved with GNOME. Still, you don’t truly know if something is good or bad until you can play around with it. It is is a long time since apps defaulted to bad UI. Just don’t expect perfection in the first version.

All I’m saying is that if you want to ship MS-technology with a project that has GNU in its name you better get a unlimited supply of fire extinguishers

More on topic: I think tools like Glade have to be reinvented to really be usable by designers.

In my opinion, the only way to make these two groups together is to bring them to use an intermediary interface that benefits both of them. An interface, with a non technical side for the designer, and a technical one for the developers. More precisely, to bring designers to use a design tool that can generate a skeletton of code using existing and implemented frameworks. In the web world, that’s call WYSIWYG editors (Dreamweaver and so on. Implementing a web design in form of HTML files is a piece of cake!). In the heavy client world, we got… Qt Designer, Glade, the design interface in NetBeans. They are not perfect, especially for the designers (a little too technical) but that’s currently the best tool. If we were to improve this developer-designer relationship, it’s on these tools that work would need to be done.