Re: Plans for 2.8 - GNOME Managed Language Services?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

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.

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.

> 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.

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

"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.

> 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.

Havoc