Novell acquisition Ximian has promised that the first commercial release of Mono, its software that aims to run Microsoft .Net-developed applications on Linux, will be delivered this year.

Ximian chief technology officer and co-founder Miguel de Icaza told delegates at Novell's Brainshare Europe event in Barcelona that Mono is now a mature technology.

The core Ximian team and 150 external developers contributed to the development of Mono.

Components include a .Net virtual machine, two types of class libraries (.Net-compatible and Unix-specific), C# and VB.Net compilers and third-party components such as existing commercial compilers and development tools.

"We are not quite ready. Version 1.0 is not quite complete but it will be soon," said de Icaza.

Despite Ximian's reluctance to launch, four commercial products based on Mono are already available: Virtuoso application server from Openlink Software, Instant Messaging Platform from Tipic, Jabber SDK from Winfessor and SourceGear Vault from SourceGear.

Nat Friedman, Ximian's vice president of research and development, had earlier demonstrated the in-development Ximian Desktop2.

He explained that the challenges preventing wider adoption of desktop Linux are application availability, interoperability with file formats and network services, usability and manageability.

Desktop2 would provide lower total cost of ownership, better usability, interoperability and "complete desktop productivity", Friedman claimed.

Jack Messman, chairman and chief executive at Novell, said yesterday that he wanted Novell and Ximian to be the "catalyst" for desktop Linux.

In an interview with vnunet.com, Messman insisted that he sees Ximian as helping to establish Novell's credentials with the open source community.

After being "marginalised" as an infrastructure player, according to Messman, Novell is looking to win friends and influence developers working in the IT departments of enterprises.

"In Nat and Miguel we have two of the superstars of the open source community," he said.