Re: Plans for 2.8 - GNOME Managed Language Services?

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Hi:

First of all - before I say anything here
(1) I do not speak for my employer
(2) I am reluctant to get caught up in this discussion, and may feel a 
need to bow out over some sensitive issues, particularly where my 
opinions differ from those of some Sun management.  So please try to 
bear with me if I don't pursue all responses.

That said...

Ryan:

> I guess you feel that if an app was written in Java, any VM could run
> it, which belies the assumption that what we want is a *language*, and
> what people are concerned about is the VM *implementation*. I think its
> the other way around. ...
>
> Once again, this boils down to the question, "Do we want to be the
> language or the platform?"
>
>  
I think that both are important to some of the people and groups with 
strong feelings about this.
Sun would almost certainly wish to use its own runtime VM on its bundled 
systems, for a multitude of reasons.  Also any group with an investment 
in Java may tend to see C# as a "competitor" or at best redundant, and 
so would have issues with shipping/supporting a C# code base.

Of the two, I think for Sun in particular the VM issue is probably the 
touchier one.  If it's possible to write GNOME code that can run on a 
free runtime but which can also run on a proprietary runtime, then we'll 
avoid the thorniest issues and give the corporate interested parties the 
most flexibility.

Also - and this is important to bear in mind I think - RAND licensing 
isn't free, it presents real problems to free distributions.  Why?  A 
"reasonable" license fee conflicts with free software distribution, 
since it can't be collected, and making a special allowance for free 
software / non-commercial use etc. is inherently "discriminatory".  (For 
this very reason W3C largely reversed its position with respect to RAND 
licensing of its standards, in favor of royalty-free licensing, a couple 
of years ago).

...

> 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
I agree with Havoc here, from a pragmatic viewpoint.

- Bill