[Mono-list] Mono Foundation?

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

    Over the past few years, people have suggested that we should create
a foundation to further develop Mono.  The idea in general is good, it
has worked fairly well for Gnome, and has worked fairly well for
Apache.    

    This comes at a time when some third parties would like to see Mono
developed in a particular direction and the process that we have at
Novell for getting paid for Mono is not optimal (which is to say, today
the best thing you can do to fund Mono is buy SUSE, which is not a very
direct way of funding Mono). 

    But am not sure that everyone has the same idea about what a Mono
foundation would do, I would like such a foundation to be a mechanism to
funnel more money into the development of Mono and its ecosystem.   

    A foundation might have other uses, as it does in Gnome and Apache
cases (defining release schedules, promotion, opening up the decision
making process), but I think that fundamentally it should aim to have a
budget that it can use to hire developers to work on particular areas
that need to be developed.

    I think this is a topic that is worth discussing at the upcoming
Mono Meeting: are there enough companies that would be willing to fund a
non-profit to develop open source software for this particular purpose?

    A few months ago, just when someone had brought up the idea about a
Mono Foundation, I happened to run into Greg Stein from Apache at a
conference.  He had a few comments: setting up a foundation is a lot of
work (I agree);  it might be best to reuse an existing foundation (I
agree as well);   The Apache Foundation *might* be a host for our
activities, but does not have a mechanism for paying/funding any
activities (which is what I would personally like to see happen). 

Miguel.