[Mono-devel-list] DotGNU competition??

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> DotGNU is having a collaborative competition to implement Windows.Forms.
> http://www.gnu.org/projects/dotgnu/competition.html
> 
> Will this benefit Mono?

Their code should work out of the box on Mono.

There are two problems with it:

	* It wont ever be a complete Windows.Forms implementation, as most
	  Windows.Forms applications today PInvoke into Win32 to use special
	  functionality (most third party controls have to talk to Win32,
	  due to limited functionality being exposed by System.Drawing and
	  System.Windows.Forms).

	* The GPL with linking exceptions makes some people nervous since
	  each contributor in the end is free to interpret the GPL with the
	  exception and proprietary software vendors might have troubles
	  depending on this.

	  We switched our class libraries from the LGPL to the X11 license
	  for this reason: we did not want anyone to ever be discouraged
	  in using Mono for proprietary use.

	  Things are not particularly reassuring, since the DotGNU folks
	  have used a bait-and-switch strategy in the past with their code
	  licensing: they release under a license, and quietly change the
  	  license to something more restrictive.

	  This is what happened with the I18N code they donated to Mono.

For more information, you can read:

	http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/tmp/toolkits.html

Miguel