Re: Plans for 2.8 - GNOME Managed Language Services?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sat, 2004-03-27 at 01:47, Ryan McDougall wrote:
> 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.

> 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.

>  If we choose a ECMA CLR standard VM and ECMA
> CLI standard object system, we can implement a library stack in any
> compliant language, and use it from any compliant language, including C#
> or Java. How does that "lose support for GNOME"? If the objects are
> highly interchangeable between languages, what does it matter what
> language they are written in?? 

You're thinking in purely technical terms. It's unclear we're trying to
compromise here between some people who want the positive attributes of
C# and some who want the positive attributes of Java. Rather, some
people want to avoid the negative legal/political attributes of C# and
some want to avoid the negative legal/political attributes of Java. So
saying "allow both" isn't a workable compromise, two sets of negatives
are twice as bad, not twice as good.

Similarly, if we prove Java is bad we rule out Java, we don't rule in
Mono. If we prove Mono is bad we rule out Mono, don't rule in Java. If
they're both bad then it's C/C++/Python.

Havoc