Re: Additional questions for the board candidates

[Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>]

On Sa, 2005-11-26 at 11:21 -0500, Richard M. Stallman wrote:
> I think it is clear that C# should not be the main or preferred
> language for GNOME, should not play a major or central role.  Giving
> it such a role would be a very bad strategic move, since it would
> encourage a large community to move in a direction that serves our
> declared enemy.

In what way does moving to C# serve Microsoft? I do see
a) patent issues
b) we adopt technologies developed (*) by Microsoft

a) There are many companies out there trying to enforce patents. We can
never exclude that some patents are pending. The Nautilus sidebar for
instance has a feature opening subfolders on drag inside the browser
window when hovering over them, and they say the windows explorer has a
similar feature. This might pose a heavy infridgement of the
spring-loaded folder patent by Apple. For now it was decided to keep
this feature in, but don't frivolously copy the "open a new window" part
of the patent. IANA, but I think if Apple wanted to sue us they already
did so. Not to mention that Big Blue, and others also have many patents
that may affect any software developer out there. It's quiet ignorant to
exclusively focus on Microsoft here.

b) One may argue that it shows how mature their framework is. I see no
problem with Microsoft claiming that even free software is developed in
C#, proving how good the concept as a whole is. But discussions like
that don't really serve anybody. When we're able to develop better
software in a shorter amount of time using C#, why not use it? I see
that you come from the political side, but running code itself is
preceived to be totally unpolical (**), and the software market is
really laid out in a way that the most convinicing product wins, not
that one promoted by politicans.

(*) Some people claim that the whole framework was significantly
"inspired" by Sun/Java (thus adopted), except for the CIL/JIT thingie,
which is really a key concept of .NET.

(**) Of course, much software in fact also conveys political ideas,
especially FOSS, has political impact, and just exists for political
reasons (cf. how GNOME was born) but it is not perceived by its users,
who decide what software is successful:
sucess of a project ~ 1/(1+e^-usefulness_for_solving_tasks)