[MonoDevelop] Monodevelop brother

[Bernhard Spuida]

Hi Allan,

> Some final things about this code copyright business.  The only way to 
> really copyright your code is to not ship it.  These #Develop guys are 
> doing the same things to my company that that Microsoft does to other 
> vendors.  I find that very ironic since this whole open source bs is 
> anti Microsoft.

What exactly are we doing to your company in the Microsoft sense? It 
is simply that we do have somewhat firm belief in Open Source. I 
personally never saw what might be wrong with adhering to idealistic 
principles. We are fully aware of the commercial end of the universe 
as well, we just do not see us as a part of that.

> If I were you trying to write an IDE, use their code all you want as 
> reference but write your own product.  In other words, reference their 
> code to figure out how to do something, but write all of your own code. 
>   The code quality of that code could be improved quite a bit anyway.

Learning by inspiration is one of the greatest ways to learn - which 
is one of the reasons we decided to license #develop under the GPL.
Indeed code quality could be improved, code never is perfect, rather 
'adequate' at best :-) 

> And this is not to say their tool is not awesome.  Just pointing out 
> some ironies of this source code business.  I asked the #develop guys if=
 
> I could offer our bug tracking wares for free to help developers out. 
> But since we are not open source they were not interested.  This is what=
 
> Microsoft does when they leverage their operating systems.

So how exactly is this meant? By making a conscious decision against 
closed source inclusion in #develop distribution packages we want to 
ensure that our users can profit from learning from *all* of the 
distribution. This might perhaps be deplorable from a 'sell as much 
as possible' point of view, but it is in the interest of the Open 
Source community - and perhaps even more important - in the interest 
of getting Open Source popular in the Windows world. 
If your interest is in helping the (Open Source) developers 
community, you can always offer 'free for non-commercial use' 
packages of your application.
And by the way, there is a number of third-party addins for #develop 
that are available independently from our package.

> Kind of funny.

Same might be said about a possible rationale for shipping a closed 
source application with an Open Source package.

> Last but not least, sell your IDE and don't make it open source for 
> Linux. If you get it close to the VS.NET level, I would be one of your 
> customers in  a second.
> 
Chacun =E0 son gout,


                  Bernhard Spuida
                  #develop senior word wrangler

I'm sure a mathematician would claim that 0 and 1 are both very 
interesting 
numbers. :-) -- Larry Wall in <199707300650.XAA05515@wall.org>