[Mono-list] problems with relicensing

[Miguel de Icaza]

> While I have faith in the intentions of Ximian in general and Miguel in 
> particular, it is important that we do not assume, when asking ourselves 
> this question, that the funds collected through relicensing will go to 
> "further Free Software developments".  We have no guarantee that any 
> proceeds generated from our contributed code will be use in such a 
> laudable fashion -- just as we have no guarantee that Miguel or any of 
> the current employees of Ximian will be calling the shots in the future.
> 
> This, to me, is not a deal breaker.  But it is worth keeping in mind.

This is a good evaluation of the situation.  There is indeed no
guarantee of what Ximian will do with the money.  We are at heart an
Open Source company, but we also need to find ways to finance our
operation and pay developers to keep working on our projects.

At this point, Mono is a development project to close the gap between
our existing development platform for GNOME and the state-of-the-art
technology for developing applications.

That being said, I am resource constrained at Ximian, because Mono does
not generate any direct revenue for us at this point (only a side
effect: reduce our future development costs).  So I am open to ideas on
how I can increase the number of paid developers that can work on Mono. 

I love the technology behind the .NET framework, and I believe this is
the most fun thing I can be working on, but my ultimate goal is not to
work on compilers or JITers, but work on the applications that run
above.  

I believe that there is a lot of room for innovation that can be built
on top of .NET;  This will allow us to focus on high level an
interesting problems rather than solving the same problems over and over
(which is what we face right now with low level languages and
inconsistent APIs in C and C++ lands).   Ok, and now am completely
off-topic. 

Miguel.