Re: Plans for 2.8 - GNOME Managed Language Services?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sat, 2004-03-27 at 02:55, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 23:54 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > 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?

At the moment, we are not. I can't speak for Red Hat though and I don't
want to give a categorical ultimatum for all time.

I think the issue is larger than Red Hat. Imagine for a minute that we
felt legally able and willing to ship Mono; all of our partners and OEMs
(take some time to list these) can veto our decision by refusing to
accept an OS containing Mono. We'd have to respin CDs with Mono (and
anything that depended on it) removed.

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

I can't pass on legal advice from our lawyers.

> 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?

Remember that the Java decision makers at Sun are outside of the desktop
group. The desktop group can lobby for what's needed for Java in the
GNOME context, but the #1 concerns for Java are probably J2EE, Windows,
and other contexts besides GNOME.

I'm not arguing Sun's case - I imagine Sun absolutely is not a fan of
"open source Java subset," see Hans Muller's blog post here:
http://weblogs.java.net/pub/wlg/1136

They would prefer we use the Sun JDK with the full Java API.

Where I disagree with many though: to me if we have problems with Java
then our fallback is C/C++/Python, not Mono.

> > "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.

It does include Red Hat at present. But again, I don't want to say "you
can't do this because Red Hat won't ship it." We have a lot more room to
argue and convince Red Hat than most of the rest of the industry.

> 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.

Remember that it's not just Java vs. Mono, there is a third choice:
stick to C/C++/Python.

Havoc