Re: Plans for 2.8 - GNOME Managed Language Services?

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus gnome org>]

On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 23:54 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 19:48, Ryan McDougall wrote:
> > As to the forking issue, you seem to know why there will be a fork if
> > ECMA standards are used in GNOME, so could you please let us know who
> > exactly will be doing the forking, and what their reasons are?
> 
> It's more like who _would_ ship Mono. Aside from legal problems and
> lawyers simply saying no, Java vs. .NET and Linux vs. Windows are the
> huge platform wars being fought out and people care deeply about this
> issue.

Lets clarify some things. Are you saying that Red Hat will not ship
mono?

> In particular many people do not want to see customers and ISVs coding
> to the .NET APIs. Even if you stick to ECMA core, there's perception
> that this makes it a lot easier to start using the whole of .NET. And
> currently the ECMA core is not legally unencumbered; standardization
> does not guarantee that.

So the Red Hat laywers have stated that they see issues with using the
ECMA core? 

> > Is this about not pissing off Sun?
> 
> 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.

Yeah, I find the silence on this issue from Sun rather confusing.
Doesn't Sun have an opinion on this issue, or do they just think its
better to let you and others argue for them cause they don't want to get
in a position where they have to defend the java licensing while at the
same time attacking the problems of Mono?

> This is only my opinion and you're welcome to go talk to people
> yourself.

Well I can vouch for the trueness of it, allmost all customers who run
some Oracle software on their Linux server (which is a very big
percentage if I am not mistaken) use Java. Oracle's products are almost
all Java based. 

> "Fork" is probably the wrong word; more like "not ship and use/develop
> an alternative" or "add patches to remove Mono dependency" or whatever.
> It's not like anyone will tell GNOME what to do, they will just quietly
> exercise their right to use other software.

Once again it would be nice to hear you clearly say if this includes Red
Hat or just 'other' people.

> > Gtk# is a starting point. So is CLASSPATH. ECMA core would allow either
> > C# or Java (via IKVM) to work out of the box, all free software. We
> > could do more, or stay with what C# or Java supplies. Once the _common_
> > _platform_ is there, the community can take it where it pleases.
> 
> If we're going to use choice of C# or Java, plus GNU Classpath, what is
> the point of the C# part? It loses support for GNOME, in order to get an
> incremental improvement in language syntax.

I think we should probably limit ourselves to just 1 of the languages in
the development platform at least, for the maintainability reasons
mentioned in other mails in this thread. So if GNU Classpath is to be
used I guess Java would be the natural choice.

Personally I think the Foundation Board just probably do some discrete
inquiries with the companies backing Java. Like IBM and Oracle. If they
are prepared to 'reward' us for using Java, by putting developers on
GNOME, pushing GNOME internally & externally etc., then I would feel
more positive about choosing Java rather than choosing it based on some
undefined problems of Mono for some undefined companies.

At this point I would prefer if GNOME choose Mono, not because of any
specific technical/legal things (I think Java and Mono seem to both have
their own issues), but simply because Mono is created a developed by
people who have for a long time been members of the GNOME project,
including the GNOME projects founder. And I think unless there are
strong technical and legal reasons for anything else we should show
eachother some loyalty in this community.

Christian