Re: Plans for 2.8 - GNOME Managed Language Services?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

On Sat, 2004-03-27 at 12:42, John Luke wrote:
> RAND alone might be GPL incompatable, but Miguel has stated many times
> that the ECMA submission was also royalty free.
>  It was also reported in
> one of the Oreillynet blogs that they may have an announcement after
> doing a formal review to make this more certain and legally safe.

What it comes down to is that the lawyers at each specific company have
to look into the matter and conclude that they are willing to ship Mono
on legal grounds.

> So are we past the point where we are not deciding this on technical
> terms?  

I don't see how we can decide on technical terms. We have survived this
long on C/C++/Python, and Java and Mono aren't _that_ different from
each other.

The potential political and legal issues are pretty high-impact compared
to the potential technical issues. We can at least write code to address
the technical issues.

> I think knowing that the actual reason mono can not be used is
> legal/political helps this debate greatly.  I don't think anyone has
> explicitly said that until now.  That way it is very simple for Novell
> to know what they need to prove in order to allow for adoption of mono
> in the core of GNOME.

I'm not sure it's simple at all :-/ the legal stuff is relatively
simple-ish perhaps, if we get a clearly-worded public letter from
Microsoft eventually.

I'm even more worried about political/strategic views. Lots of people
out there dead-set against a platform that Microsoft has already
explicitly embraced and extended.

Sun most obviously, but a lot of companies not directly involved in
GNOME still have high impact on GNOME's success.
 
> As far as I am concerned (maybe I am biased), Java and the JVM offer no
> advantages over mono.  But mono has several including: language interop
> (managed to unmanaged and also the reverse),

Achievable in Java, see UNO, Jython, and so forth.

>  complete and mature open
> source implementation based on two published standards

The Mono implementation is a pretty new codebase. I don't think the JIT
is super sophisticated, it isn't ported to all platforms, etc. Yes these
things can be addressed, but they can also be addressed for a JVM.

> , a minimum of
> RAND license granted on patents covering that standard, a large and
> vibrant community behind it that already write GNOME apps and would be
> willing to make accomodations for the needs of GNOME.

But on the flip side the community is focused on Microsoft and GNOME and
not the rest of Linux, including the Linux server side. So we lose
potential "synergies" there.

> Sticking with C would be workable, although not as desirable as mono, as
> Gtk# already works with that very well. Allowing Python into the core
> might not work as well for working with other languages.

I don't think we'd allow libraries to be in Python, only apps.

Havoc