Re: Plans for 2.8 - GNOME Managed Language Services?

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Fri, Mar 26, 2004 at 11:47:11PM -0700, Ryan McDougall wrote:
> MY understanding that all ECMA bits are unencumbered insofar as they
> *must* be licensed under RAND terms. Is my understanding incorrect? RAND
> is not great, but it is very possible that Novell could work some deal
> with MS that would guarantee mono is clean. Heck, given the anti-trust

  RAND is *not* sufficient. RAND means that there is no discrimination
who you allow to buy a Licence and how much they pay. No Open Source
project is gonna consider buying such Licence, this just doesn't work for us.
The only unencumberance possible is having a statement that the licence
is provided for free for anyone, and the only step I have seen from
Microsoft about this is a mail posted 3 years ago from a Microsoft employee
but not from the legal side stating they "will" do this. At this point
as a free software/OSS developper I didn't see the proof that I could use
the C# ECMA core freely granted by Microsoft.

> > It's not just Sun. Major Java supporters include... just about everybody
> > except Microsoft and Microsoft allies. All the major Linux-supporting
> > companies. And most large Linux-using customers are using Java on the
> > server.
> 
> I can understand Sun feeling an emotional attachment to Java, but I
> thought that for other companies the issue was more about technology, or
> whether the VM is free software. I sometimes think people are way too
> blinded by the place where ECMA CLR+CLI come from to consider this
> rationally. Just because GNOME implements an ECMA standard (which also
> happens to pave the way for using Java in GNOME, sans bindings), does
> not put GNOME in some "for vs. against" camp in some grand struggle. Its
> just a standard VM + object system, taken from a standards body. No
> more, no less. I can't see it any other way at the moment.

  I would more or less agree, except you can't really compare the
way C# got standardized compared to some other standards. It's a well
known problem that ISO and ECMA can select as standard technologies
heavilly patented and legally encumbered, sometime the process is
just a stamp of approval (which seems to have been the case for version 1.0
of the C# language), meaning most of the standard comes from a single
entity which is then very well placed to lock it thereafter. To MS
credit, at least they did get C# standardized (contrary to Sun who
promised a couple of time to do it but stepped back as soon as their
management though they would loose the control over Java).
  Sun decided to keep Java under its control, and MS smart ass as they
are immediately standardized the core of C# (but only the core) to gather
the support of people pissed off by Sun attitude. Having a technology
standardized is very important to the industry and OSS/free software
but it's not sufficient for us to allow using it.

Daniel

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