Re: Plans for 2.8 - GNOME Managed Language Services?

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello,

> > MY understanding that all ECMA bits are unencumbered insofar as they
> > *must* be licensed under RAND terms. Is my understanding incorrect?
> 
> One problem is that RAND is still GPL-incompatible. That's why you can't
> ship MP3 or MPEG4 codecs licensed under the GPL, even if you buy a
> patent license.

RAND + Royalty Free in the case of ECMA.

In any case, am wondering why RAND is incompatible with the GPL?  This
is news to me, and a google search did not reveal anything, nor could I
find anything about this on the gnu.org site.   

> 
> > If we choose a open source JVM, then we get no language other than Java
> > and get Novell mad at us.
> 
> I don't know that's true; Novell had a Java thing back in the day:
> http://developer.novell.com/research/appnotes/1998/january/01/05.htm
> 
> But if true, it probably leaves us back at C/C++/Python.

Novell uses Java for a large number of products, and there is no plan on
abandoning Java in any shape or form. 

Java and .NET have their own strengths and weaknesses.  We now have a
choice of picking the right tool for the right task.

iFolder and Simias are not only products, but platforms that implement
the WinFS-like system for Linux, Windows and MacOS and those have been
built on top of Mono.

Simias in particular is a technology that we want to build more and more
things on top of as it provides a general purpose metadata-aware file
system with synchronization on top of it.  It solves many problems that
we feel exist today on the desktop and they solve them in a general way.
So we are likely going to use Simias/iFolder technologies more and more
in the future, and hence more Mono in our products.  

We will likely keep those features conditionally included, for those
that choose not to use Mono. 

There were a few talks at Brainshare by the iFolder team on why they
chose Mono over C/C++/COM/Java despite the fact that it was still an
early project when they decided to go with it.  Different people will
have different needs.

Miguel