[Mono-list] Dot_GNU PR Folks on Slashdot

Paolo Molaro lupus@ximian.com
Tue, 26 Nov 2002 16:30:26 +0100


On 11/24/02 Adam Treat wrote:
> On Sunday 24 November 2002 12:32 am, G.Kumaraguru wrote:
> >  http://slashdot.org/articles/02/11/23/2214215.shtml?tid=156
> >
> >  I was laughing my ass off reading absurd things like
> >
> >  "Mono's commercial nature also limits community participation"
> 
> First of all, I am not a 'Dot_GNU PR Folk'.  I am a Mono contributor who no 
> longer is allowed to participate in the mono mailing list for technical 
> discussions because of Mono's commercial nature.  So, the statement is 
> accurate (see: 'Mono and the community' on this list).  Hopefully, this can 
> be rectified in the future.

Adam, mono-list is fine for technical discussions. Some technical 
discussions have been moved to mono-hackers because mono-list has so
many subscribers and some of them did complain about them;-)
I see no problem in having technical discussions on mono-list until we
set up a mono-devel list. But there are some topics that are better
discussed among the people that contribute and fully support mono.
The issue is not about contributing to competing projects (technically
I'm a pnet contributor, too, since I sent them a patch or bug reports
and they are using my code and I'm not claiming I should be invited to
their internal meetings about the project:-).
mono-hackers was intended to be a list not only about technical
discussions that would be boring for most of the mono-list audience, but
also about things of interested to people that care about mono.
For example, the license of our class libraries allows them to be forked
and improved under other licenses. Now, this is all legal of course,
but, would you trust with sensible information someone who wants to
fork your own project? Let's say you have some big news about Qt#, but
you think it's better to keep the info confidential for some time (for
whatever reason, be it commercial or not).
Now, you're free to disclose the news to the main developers of Qt#, but
would you disclose them also to someone who wanted to _fork_ the Qt#
codebase? I doubt it. The reason is that forking the code is not good
for your project and it's not good for mono as well.

Hope that clears things up.

lupus / who is still amazed that Adam started working with mono in the
	early days when mono would barely startup:-)

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