[Mono-list] Mono and the community

[Joe Mozelesky]

I'm not sure I understand.  I thought Mono was an 'open source'
community project, that happened to have a corporate sponsor.  Why would
there be any confidential information?  Shouldn't everything be
disclosed to the community?

It was my impression that Mono is not 'owned' by Ximian, it is owned by
the community of contributors as a whole?

I would think that if any company were going to build on the product and
implement their own unique optimizations and strategy (which is
perfectly legitimate), that that work and discussion would be kept
separate and internal to the company.  I certainly would not want
company trade secrets disclosed in a public forum if it were my company.

Are the members of the hackers list compensated employees of Ximian?  If
so, then I would think they have every right to regulate the list
membership.  If not, then it seems to me it is not the appropriate forum
to discuss corporate strategy.

Unless one is being compensated and receiving consideration from a
company for their work or contributions to an OSS project, I don't think
that company has any right to restrict the persons involvement in any
other project of their choice.

The DotGNU project also caught my eye a few weeks ago when I first
started looking into open source .NET platforms.  They are taking a
different path to a similar goal, but I'm not sure I understand why
there would be a problem sharing notes, resources, etc. when there is
commonality.

Unless Ximian takes the entire project in house and hires all the
programmers, I don't believe they have any right whatsoever to say 'well
dotgnu is a competitor, and you can't work on that.'  Baloney.  Front
some green, then you can attach non-compete strings and restrictions
just like any other employment contract.

...my 2 cents.  YMMV.


-----Original Message-----
From: mono-list-admin@ximian.com [mailto:mono-list-admin@ximian.com] On
Behalf Of Adam Treat
Sent: Saturday, November 23, 2002 7:48 PM
To: Mono-list@ximian.com
Cc: Miguel de Icaza; Nick Zigarovich
Subject: [Mono-list] Mono and the community

Nick and I were recently removed from the mono-hackers list because
we've been 
helping/participating in the DotGNU/Portable.NET project.  This was done

because Miguel has confidential information about Mono that he does not
want 
disclosed to the competition.  I was under the impression that
mono-hackers 
was created for technical discussions of the development of the Mono
runtime, 
compilers and libraries, however Miguel stated that it is also intended
as a 
place to discuss strategy and to announce Ximian partnerships/contracts
with 
various groups.  This is unfortunate in that it limits the amount of 
community participation in technical discussions.

I would suggest the creation of a new list, perhaps hosted by
sourceforge or 
another similar group affiliated with the community.  This list would be
open 
to all developers and important discussions relating to the technical
details 
and plans for the runtime, classlibs, and compiler could be discussed
there.  
Ximian could use mono-hackers (or it's predecessor: ximian-mono-list) to

relate confidential information and technical discussions could still go
on 
with the full participation of the community.

Cheers,

Adam

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