Re: The Desktop language FUD wars

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <marco gnome org>]

On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 19:26, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
> Ok,
> I think we managed to FUD both C#,Mono,Java and JVM's to death now. I
> think at this point it is clear that neither of these technologies will
> go anywhere into the core GNOME platform before MS and Sun provide
> written statements guaranteeing that the parts of the technology we want
> to use is 100% royalty free. So while we are waiting for such letters,
> which may or may not come, we should look at the more readily available
> alternatives.
> 
> I remember Havoc mentioned using XPCOM as one solution in his original
> mails, and I know people talked about trying to leverage the Mozilla
> technologies as a XAML competitor. It would seem that these two issues
> together would create a good argument for looking at leveraging mozilla
> technologies into GNOME, both as a way to strengthen the platform and as
> a way to further integrate Mozilla into the desktop. 
> 
> This might also be a nice way to reach out to companies using Mozilla
> technology like Lindows or OEOne. It would also strenghten our ties with
> companies planing to certify Mozilla with the software, such as Oracle.

Hi,

I think mozilla SDK has a lot of potential and interesting technologies
to offer (XUL for example). My worries are:

1 The SDK is starting to mature just now and it has never been widely
used outside.
2 IHMO there is a conflict between their approach to multi platform and
gradual adoption of their technologies. So far they have been rewriting
everything, from the translation system to the svg library. I fear that
the integration of their technologies in GNOME would be painful because
of this.
3 Connection between the two communities is weak.

2 is a critical problem. I think the only possible "migration path" is
to gradually adopt technologies that make use of our platform (see gtk
bindings for Java or Mono). My impression from the outside is that this
is not, at the moment, on the Mozilla foundation agenda (if not a very
superficial level). So our choice would be either adopt everything or
nothing, which is insane both at developer and at user level.

Marco