SIL, mono, and COM on Linux

A developer named Mark Strobert contacted me a while back about the feasibility of using mono and it's COM Interop implementation to port Windows software written using C# and COM. I told him it should be possible, and we discussed one of the main problems being the lack of a COM infrastructure on Linux. I hadn't heard from him again for a while until...

he emailed and informed me that they were open sourcing their basic COM implementation, a.k.a. libcom. In looking over their blog/wiki, it seems as if the use of mono's COM Interop and their libcom is holding together fairly well. I won't say this is the first real world test of COM Interop in mono, as Shana has used it quite well to implement the System.Windows.Forms WebBrowser control. However, the fact that mono's COM Interop implementation is being used by others is exciting to me (if anyone is keeping their mono COM Interop use in the closet, drop me a line to let me in on the secret).

The developers are using mono to port and develop software in order to support a faith based organization that is involved in literacy, linguistics, and translation. I won't go on any further, because if you're interested you can click around their site (or Linux development site) to see better information than I could explain here.