[Mono-list] FW: From the [DotGNU]Ximian shows its stripes at last

[Miguel de Icaza]

> Miguel, thought you might like to know that the dotGNU people have turned to
> character assassination on their little list. I think it may be time to
> clear the air once and for all regarding this issue, before Slashdot et al.
> decide that Ximian plans to steal all of the other Mono contributor's code
> and release it under a proprietary license.

Contributing to Mono is exactly like contributing to Mozilla.  If you
want your code to make it into the Mozilla code base, you have to assign
copyright to AOL/Netscape.

The same applies to Kaffe (a popular JIT engine for Java on Linux): You
have to sign copyright assignment to Transvirtual in order for them to
be able to incorporate into their code base, and allow them to relicense
the code to proprietary developer customers.

Ghostscript is just the same; Sleepycat DB: just the same; The Qt
toolkit: just the same.  

Richard Stallman even encourages the use of dual licensing as a
mechanism for free software companies to make money.  Indeed this was
the case for example for Ted Tso's tools that he relicensed to the guys
at PartitionMagic or Donald Becker relicensing his ethernet device
drivers (which are part of the Linux kernel) to other companies that
wanted to use them.

I think it is the best of both worlds: on one hand you get a product
that continues to evolve and be built, and you get an open source
implementation.  Those who want to "reuse" the code in a proprietary
setting finance the development of the open source edition.  

Anyways, if you do feel uncomfortable with this, I would like to hear
the concerns people might have and possible solutions to this problem.  

I am going to build a product that can be used to build new GNOME
applications (and we know that GNOME wont take anything which is
remotely non-open source).  And if I can also find a way to finance
further development, improvements (speed, size, precompilers, profilers,
GUI tools, finance SharpDevelop) or other Mono related technologies I
will be very happy.

But as I said, it is not new territory.  It is being done today by major
components of free software. 

Miguel.