[CoreTeam]Re: [DotGNU]Re: [Mono-list] Mono/dotGNU Love-In Proposals

[Barry Fitzgerald]

At 02:47 PM 8/16/01 +0100, Simon Cozens wrote:
>On Thu, Aug 16, 2001 at 02:34:03PM +0100, Martin Coxall wrote:
> > I think that's what Rhys Weatherley thought. It seems that Mono hackers 
> had
> > other ideas.
>
>And there was me thinking I was a mono hacker.
>
> > The idea here is to reduce duplicated effort
>
>I thought the idea was to come up with an open source C# library.
>
>See, you're assuming the duplicated effort is by definition Bad, and
>therefore we shouldn't do it. This is, unfortunately, a flawed argument,
>because the assumption isn't provable; it's especially flawed given that
>we have two open source projects that can freely borrow from each other,
>assuming pride doesn't get in the way. What you call duplication of
>effort, I call diversity: it's why we've got more than one editor, more
>than one Unix kernel, more than one mail user agent, more than one mail
>transfer agent. Diversity is our strength. Think about it.
>
>Competition is *useful*. A lack of competition in the software world
>leads to... well, you know full well what it leads to.


I'm inclined to agree about competition, however, you have to understand 
that there are side-effects to everything.  Having two libraries that are 
meant to achieve the same exact goal (compliance with the ECMA C# standard) 
could do some very bad things for development on our mutual C# 
platforms.  Granted, most of this work could be managed and solutions can 
come to be, but having two projects which do the exact same thing when one 
with a larger developer count is possible - having one would  simply be better.

Do what you want with the rest of mono, but I think that sharing the burden 
of the library may have some serious advantages.

Barry Fitzgerald