[Mono-list] Dot_GNU PR Folks on Slashdot

[Adam Treat]

On Tuesday 26 November 2002 10:30 am, Paolo Molaro wrote:
> 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.

Sure, that sounds fine.  Miguel has said he will setup mono-devel-list when he 
returns from Mexico.  I just do not want to be excluded from technical 
discussions because I've shown an interest or preference in DotGNU for 
certain applications/situations.  I still would like to contribute to the 
Mono project and the world of Free Software CLR projects in general.

> 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:-).

Yes, my sole code contribution to pnet so far consists of the following patch:

-                               char[] bfr;
-                               bfr[0] = value;
+                               char[] bfr = new char [] {value};

> 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.

I understand.  And I care about Mono.  I would hope everyone can see that.

> 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.

I assume you are referring to my conversation with the pnet folks about using 
Mono's System.Xml.dll.  You see, I've talked with Miguel about this and he 
has said that 'forking would be bad for Mono', but I don't understand how 
this would be a fork and I've requested how best to do this ie, how Mono 
would like it done.  I am not interested in hurting Mono, just interested in 
improving another project by taking advantage of code that is already there.  
That is the reason the X11 library was chosen I thought?  So, I ask what is 
the best way to approach this for everyone involved.  I would like to reuse 
the System.Xml in pnet, but without forking.  The same situation with the 
i18n libs.  

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

Hehe, yah I remember writing the first binding generator completely with Mono.  
I never really used .NET to bootstrap.  My project really grew up with Mono 
;)