Hi Bhaskar
A very interesting point put up by you but somewhere between the lines you are conflicting yourself.
On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 02:31:55 -0800 (PST), Bhaskar Ghose thegnuer@yahoo.de wrote:
I don't understand why everybody here is such a big fan of Mono where there is another project DotGNU which also aims at implementing the .Net for GNU/Linux on a plethora of other arch plus other OSes too in a way being 100% portable. The DotGNU project is managed by the FSF itself with RMS in the steering committee. Now here a lot of people may ask why there are two projects with the same goal ...
Free Software is all about freedom ... freedom of choice. Based on the same argument one can spark a debate abt gnome, kde, xfce etc
the thing is that the DotGNU people earlier have tried to merge the two projects together but all they got were verbal volleys from our very favourite Miguel de Icaza. The main problem at the moment is that the Mono guys (read Novell) doesn't want to have Mono under a Free Software license and they also recently changed their library licensing from LGPL to MIT's X11 license to make it more unrestrictive.
is there anything wrong about that ? should all software be only GPL / LGPL ? Is MIT X11 non free software like other commercial license. is MIT license taking away your code from you without your consent ?
They also plan to sell Mono to companies under proprietary licenses if they want to. Talking about technical issues, DotGNU is faster than Mono as Mono is self hsoting (written in C# itself) and Mono also has a very weird approach towards implementing the Windows.Forms thingy ... they have done it using Wine whereas DotGNU only needs X to run Windows.Forms What Mono seems to me at the moment is that it's just a C# development environment for GNU/Linux and doesn't intend to be 100% compatible with MS .Net ... they are trying to push GTk# instead of Windows.Forms ... who'll use GTk# if Windows.Forms works perfectly ? As far as DotGNU is concerned, GTk# or any free software libs can be easily made to work with DotGNU's Portable .Net.
I have personally not used dotgnu but it ships with sus
The fact that Gopal V, one of the major contributors to the DotGNU project ported the Portable .Net to the Encore Simputer in 3 hours flat on Linux Bangalore/2004 this time bears testimony of the portability issue. While I don't intend to demean Mono in any way, I dislike their attitude towards the Freedom aspect in general and the DotGNU project in particular. (Rhys Weatherley and others have relicensed DotGNU code to Mono under their MIT's X11 license but the reverse has not happened till date). The DotGNU project needs our help and it's time we got our facts right and decided whom we should support. More info on http://www.dotgnu.org Regards, Bhaskar Ghose
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