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Dotgnu Coding Competition
Honestly writes "Apparently DotGNU seems to be offering more than the 'warm fuzzy feeling' to its contributors. Somebody has funded about $4500 worth of prizes for code contributions. The developers have confirmed that the $$$ is in FSF Hands (good hands, I suppose). Here is the split up of prizes. It's almost strange to earn money writing open source. Especially when you're not even
employed by dotgnu. Anyway all I can say is ,I like it. It's ideal for a grad student with lots of free time. But hardly anyone seems to have seen
the Newsforge posts (except maybe me)."
It's ideal for a grad student with lots of free time.
Never been to grad school, huh?
----
Squirrel
RMS wins, you know it's fixed ;-)
Ideal for grad students with lots of free time . Umm....what planet are you from?
"But hardly anyone seems to have seen the Newsforge posts (except maybe me)."
:/
Oh great! So much for the easy win for the few of us that did know about it.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
You have to wonder how many hidden calls there are? I'm sure at least on major one will be hidden making this all nice and hard
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
don't take them lightly.
dude, where do you go to grad school?
You're posting on Slashdot, just like you do during the "busy" week.
How does this differ from mono? It seems to me as the two projects are trying to achieve the same things. If that's the case, why have two projects at all? Why not merge the two efforts? I guess somebody here knows why.
I'm sure I'm not the only one with this question:
.NET literate enough to really distinguish the two. Anyone want to give a short explanation of the differences? Thanks.
What's the difference between gotGnu and Ximian's Mono project?
I've googled for some details, but I'm not
Who said Freedom was Fair?
here is a link to a sample code that should be "finally" supported?
p ne t/pnetlib/samples/FormsHello.cs?rev=HEAD&content-t %20ype=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
/. introduces
http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/dotgnu-
(remove the space %20) that
Each project is sure that their way is the only "sane" way to go about it. Each project looks down at the other with disdane, simply for being different.
It's the same reason that there are now ~300 MP3 player projects on SourceForge.
I read that title as Donut Coding Competition!
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
Rats! Bung!
As much as I love Open-Source/Free Software, it IS very very hard to make a living making it. I'm not talking about writing code for an employer, and then getting permission to release it; I'm talking about actually making your living DIRECTLY off of making, releasing and "selling" open source/free software, a la Red Hat (who just recently turned a profit for the first time). I'd love to hear some more stories from people who've actually made money by coding OSS/FS.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
What about this Malloc routine I've just written?
Do I get a prize?
Darl McBride
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
That message is signed with a pgp key. However, the key doesn't seem to be available on the public key servers, so how can we validate the message?
If anyone has DSA key 0x7525EC32, please speak up.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
It's almost strange to earn money writing open source.
No, it's not. Linus, RMS, AC, BP, among many others have been getting paid to write free software for years.
Part of the stigma associated with OSS is that since it's associated with "volunteers," it is considered hobby level. Lots of people get paid to work on OSS, and ever increasing large software companies (e.g. IBM and Apple) have staff members working exclusively on OSS.
Besides the chance of winning one of fifteen monetary prizes totalling US$ 4500
Though it is good start that there is some money, but what comes to my mind is why so little ... 15 prizes averaging $ 300 each
I wonder why doesn't some philanthropist wanting to donate to charity or some rich guy wanting to support Linux just give a couple of hundred thousand dollars, or may be a few millions, in prize money - so that it can support a critical mass of programmers that can devote a decent amount of time ..... rather than the tens of hours that are "economically feasible" now ....
I know ... linux is not about money and all .... but still ... why couldn't it be ... everyone does not have to pay - just those people wanting it very badly have to pay while the rest get a free ride so that society as a whole benefits ...
and seriously - this is not meant to be flamebait ...
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Interesting, I've the opposite problem. I'd be willing to spend some money, but would hate it if it ended up in the pockets of someone who just continued with what he was already doing. I mean, I want my money to get an extra mile. For example, I'd like to see OpenOffice for Mac OS X finished a little earlier. I'd be willing to spend a little money on that.
Bad boy.
Look anywhere and you'll see paypal donating links. Who needs a philanthropist? Lots of individuals can do this. I've donated to xiph and mozilla.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Sounds more like using reverse psychology to get people to work for slave wages.
Or perhaps I was just put off by the #irc and pnetlib contribution requirements....
If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
Look - we get them dirty FSF rats! By the bye, why do you think he said "good hands, I suppose"? Maybe we're all going to get a little jerk from da boys? Hand(coding)jobs for everyone! Yay!
That's DotGNU/GNU you insensitive clod!
So much for the warm fuzzy feelings.
Please help metamoderate.
That's better than the Dognut Counting Competition...
Please help metamoderate.
I call myself a "free software consultant", and I am making a considerable fraction of my income writing free software. I am paid by companies who use free software, and who want me to enhance it with new features. The other part of my income is teaching seminars in the J2EE field, and doing regular consulting work, usually with an emphasis on free software solutions. From my personal experience, I can say there are lots of opportunities if you really want to work in this field, and put the emphasis on free software.
Basically Mono's FAQ trashes DotGNU and Mono at every chance. Miguel and the Mono crew has had a smear campaign against DotGNU since day one.
DotGNU in the past has tried to cooperate and initiated talks in sharing resources, but this didn't go well with Mono.
The true difference between Portable.NET and Mono is Portable.NET has chosen different technical decisions.
#1: The compiler is written in C/C++ not C# itself, so it doesn't have the chicken or the egg problem. Mono's CVS is very difficult to get a handle of because of this. PNET's compiler is about 3x as fast as Mono's.
#2: The topic at hand, winforms.. PNET's winforms only dependancy is X, which means their winforms work on handhelds, osx, etc. Very portable. Mono's requires Wine, not very portable to say the least.
Thats a rough quick sum.
I love free software and open source, use them, advocate them, and even write some small time stuff and license it LGPL. During the day, I work for a company that develops and sells a software program.
Here is a quote from the FAQ of DotGNU's Vision for WebServices .
Now I thought the GPL would not prevent this sort of thing? Now I'm really confused.
I'm sure glad that GNU thinks they know what would be good for my employer's business and that my employer should charege more for their program (which is for schools).
I thought I had a good solid understanding of the GPL . I've taken the GPL quiz , read the GPL Faq before.
I thought the GPL only applied to copying and distribution of a program or derrived work. Not to running it privately on my own web site.
If I distribute my proprietary program, along side a DotGNU program / platform that executes it, I would not think that my program comes under the scope of the GPL.
If I do NOT distribute my proprietary program, but merely run it at my site, and merely sell it as a service, then I was definitely under the impression that the GPL did not apply since no distribution takes place.
Still, back to the case where I distribute my program, and a seperate DotGNU program to run it, then I would not think that my program comes under the scope of the GPL.
Maybe I had better just stay completely away from DotGNU. Stick with Apache and various Java tools instead.
Just a side note about the customer having their data he
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Does this mean that only those who already have had code accepted into the codebase can enter the competition? Or am I mixing up verb tenses (passive present perfect, passive future perfect) here?
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
I therefore don't understand your point that "I'd be willing to spend some money, but would hate it if it ended up in the pockets of someone who just continued with what he was already doing." -- I think that's the best way to spend your money, because it's gonna support the work of someone who is in it not just for the money. But sometimes, it does take money to pay the bills...
Seriously, I think I understand your point that you actually want your feature to be given priority. But you could make contracts to guarantee that, set deadlines, and what have you.
...there's a Ruby to .NET bridge over on RubyForge.
Not sure how much effort it would be to get it working with dotgnu as well... maybe it wouldn't be too bad since much of the connector code appears to be in lib/dotnet/bridge.rb. Lots of C# code in there, though.
The Army reading list
Anyone else reminded of the displays on the back wall of the game that said:
"Work Hard, Die Young, Win Valuable Prizes!"
I wouldn't support such a project. If you try to copy MS, you'll always be behind. Reverse engineering takes a lot of time and it's a moving target, since they can change .NET at will. Look at GNU Classpath (Java reimplementation): they're way behind.
In these cases I think it's better to create a project that offers the same general functionality, but in a distinctive, better way.
If only I wasn't so lazy...
"Screw causalilty!" -- Prof. Farnsworth
Maybe I had better just stay completely away from DotGNU. Stick with Apache and various Java tools instead.
.NET--the one thing all of them seem to agree on is that they want to entangle users in a web of intellectual property. Well, actually there is another thing that they seem to agree on: all of them want to run your code in a bloated runtime that's slow to start up. Mono seems to have the most straightforward license of the bunch, but even Mono is at risk of patent infringement claims from Microsoft.
The Apache license is fine, but Java doesn't look like a big win to me. While Sun keeps proclaiming that the platform is open, in reality, large parts of the platform only exist as Sun proprietary code. Even if someone managed to reimplement them, Sun controls the compatibility tests and they can shoot down any implementation they don't like.
At this point, I'd not get involved with any of Java, PNET, or
Just wait for the dust to settle and for Sun and Microsoft to come to their senses with their outrageous intellectual property claims. Until then, you have plenty of other options--there is nothing technically new in any of those platforms.
http://www.spectacle.org/0203/sims.html
I was involved in that argument. If I recall correctly, it was a Rhys Weatherly and some others demanding that the Mono be placed under the DotGNU steering committee and that everybody work on their project instead. Of course, at the time it was quite obvious that DotGNU was mostly ideologues who were obsessed with 'defeating Microsoft' through some embrace and extend tactics, whereas most of the Mono hackers were fairly pragmatic about the whole issue: 'This is pretty cool! I'd love to see an implementation of this in Linux!'. Most of the people who weren't turned off by the downright abrasiveness of Rhys were turned off by the zealous ideology.
As for bad-mouthing, the only thing the Mono FAQ says about Portable.NET as opposed to Mono is that it the runtime (and compiler) are much less tested. Ximian claims that by developing the compiler and most of the rest of Mono in C#, the whole toolchain has been given a much more rigourous workout than Portable.NET.
In fact, I'd say the badmouthing has been much more in the other direction: there used to be a page around on the DotGNU website (not sure if it's still there) badmouthing Mono. None of the claims had any substance. For example, it claimed that Mono was on shaky legal grounds with regards to hidden Microsoft patents, which may perhaps be true. However, Portable.NET/DotGNU isn't safe from those legal threats either. Further, while Mono was developed from the ECMA (and now ISO) specifications, Portable.NET was initially developed by reverse engineering Microsoft's .NET implementation (without any clean-room engineering), putting it at risk of copyright infringement claims as well as patent claims. This was also part of the reason why there was little interest from Mono in merging the class libraries.
I suspect things are probably more civil these days. Cooler heads usually prevail in the end.
As for your other claims....
#1: The compiler is written in C/C++ not C# itself, so it doesn't have the chicken or the egg problem. Mono's CVS is very difficult to get a handle of because of this. PNET's compiler is about 3x as fast as Mono's.
Mono's CVS is easy to handle. It is distributed with a partial prebuilt toolchain, that is then used to build the entire toolchain. It's all MSIL, so there are no platform portability issues. It is also standard practice to write a compiler in its own language.
#2: The topic at hand, winforms.. PNET's winforms only dependancy is X, which means their winforms work on handhelds, osx, etc. Very portable. Mono's requires Wine, not very portable to say the least.
WinForms contains a number of window-isms, which the Wine project have already implemented. Reimplementing winelib seems silly and a waste of energy. I can't imagine it'd be appreciably harder to port Mono's WinForms implementation across platforms had it been written from scratch than it would be to port winelib itself. And if winelib gets ported, people other than Mono users and developers can benefit from that work.
Anyway, just my $0.02.
I would say these are much more common (and more likely succeed) approaches than trying to directly sell things you wrote (not that that wasn't possible; it's just harder).
a beowolf cluster of competitors...
But hardly anyone seems to have seen the Newsforge posts (except maybe me)
Not anymore!
/idiot>
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
Okay helping newcomers get started, that's fine, but shouldn't we be judging people primarily on their ability to write code that's useful and easy to read, understand, and extend? I don't think it's reasonable to judge people on their social skills beyond a certain point. (People too abrasive to collaborate with, for example, are reasonably disqualified unless they single-handledly write the whole damn show.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Look at those paltry prizes. Even if I was the 1337est programmer on Earth, I still wouldn't quit my day job for Open Sores. Add another zero to the end and let's talk. Or three. Or six. $2000.000000! Now we're talking.
Port the SWT library to .net, use the same SWT code from Java.
The article says that the competition is to implement the System.Windows.Forms libraries. But I thought Miguel was doing some work to use Wine to implement this, since System.Windows.Forms (in true Microsoft style) is just a thin wrapper around the Win32 API.
.net stuff was meant to be portable and compatible and stuff?
Oh wait, that's Mono, not dotgnu. But why can't dotgnu do the same thing?
Or the other work that Mono is doing, a pure C# implementation of System.Windows.Forms using GTK#, why can't dotgnu use that? I thought this
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Yes, but just because you are a good programmer, doesn't make you a good writer/speaker.
As much as I love Open-Source/Free Software, it IS very very hard to make a living making it. I'm not talking about writing code for an employer, and then getting permission to release it; I'm talking about actually making your living DIRECTLY off of making, releasing and "selling" open source/free software, a la Red Hat (who just recently turned a profit for the first time). I'd love to hear some more stories from people who've actually made money by coding OSS/FS.
Practically all the core Linux and BSD contributors are paid full-time to hack on Free, open source code, sometimes with proprietary coding/design work also as a job duty, in many cases not.
This trend really started at the height of the Dot-bubble, and many thought it would end with it as well, but surprise, it didn't. There was a lot of job-changing to be sure, but nobody who could hack the kernel stayed without a patron for long. Reason: this stuff is strategic, and getting more so.
It's not just kernel work either. For example, being a member of the Samba team is pretty much a ticket to full employment. There are dozens of high profile projects in the same category. And finally, any FOSS credits on your resume are money in the bank.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Parrot will _own_ them both.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Here you go:
j d6 wWqT9/8ATBnk/+o pbTGcpMTqDqE53D/ 7WAAtteEqN7JpG2 2CGdOR3bB91TwMua hXl9lz4wCg8n6GS yHMV3Tnr3CFWZWlb If60/ew0TZm3Q2 /WD7PUonQg2qPb0DAg7vNjNCf0TPjtWlSBullQQ7hYniiyI0XQ 7fy6ffBedTdsdnf 33DYgsx0imnh/QSc rmqkFX72QI96Fzx m4xOkcMLxT6mSPp/ VhTb7D/5T2bgBWW hbzRznkFtQtEy8eK sEysxkuMIxL0c98 uGK9WkWxWsYT9Nd7 Q4Tm9yYmVydCBCW 5kZXIpIDxuYkBmcm VlZG9tLmJpej6Ix YCAQIeAQIXgAAKCR ChghW9dSXsMvar9 ex4OoX4BP81JgazH K6YepWJxa5AQ0Eg aNhHjs5oTxYdfA2y QqKFWb2yTqW7LXD yPeWb2tUXRs6f/Cz EmVHe8iB3b3pYqK Asjs5Nu7s2Y8+9bK YXAAURA/9nGQYJA NIDKJSJ+xNI//tHk TdA7/cTI/oxrlOA wnUSQq0FM+b6ZUD0 lW87EdKb71DUteP nUMIhGBBgRAgAGBQ I/QBHRAAoJEKGCO jkjOqLAJ9fbHcY5y TB7FFdXbUMlC9M
... my office telephone number is also easy to find, it's in the .sig of most of my postings on the DotGNU developers mailing list. The timezone is UTC+2, please don't call the private number in the middle of the night. Calling the office number at any time, day or night, is ok (there's an answering machine).
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Alas, this key is only self-signed so right now the fact that the announcement is GnuPG-signed doesn't help too much to ensure its authenticity.
If you have a GnuPG key which is well-connected to the web of trust, I'd appreciate if you could make a phone call to verify the fingerprint and then sign the key. There is only one family named "Bollow" in Switzerland, therefore it's easy to find my private telephone number e.g. at http://tel.search.ch
Greetings,
Norbert.
No, you weren't involved in any of the three attempts to establish cooperation
c ts/d otgnu/?cvsroot=www.gnu.org
with Mono.
The first attempt was made by the DotGNU coreteam and the
Free Software Foundation, privately, immediately after the existence of the
Mono project had become public knowledge (that was in early July 2001).
You must be referring to the second of these attepts, which was not initiated
by the DotGNU project but by a third party (Martin Coxall)... making Mono part
of DotGNU was his idea, not ours... both Miguel (the Mono project leader) and
I posted in the thread which resulted from this proposal, and I got upset about some
of Miguel's comments, but in retrospect I think it's very understandable that
the Mono folks were not interested in talking about cooperation in the context
of such a proposal.
In April 2002, we made a third attempt to establish cooperation with Mono.
This attempt was much more promising than the earlier two, and it has involved
offering a sizeable chunk of pnetlib I18N code to Mono under the X11 license,
which they have integrated into their class library.
DotGNU is still open to discussing any mutually beneficial ways of cooperation.
For example, some parts of the class library could be developed jointly, using
a neutral cvs server. We have proposed this to the Mono project multiple
times, so far it seems that the Mono folks are not interested in this kind of
cooperation. The I18N code which was integrated into the Mono libs forked
immediately, so that doesn't count as a mutually beneficial form of
cooperation.
Your claim about DotGNU Portable.NET being "at risk of copyright infringement
claims" is totally false. Our procedures have been carefully checked and
declared ok by a competent lawyer (Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal
history at Columbia Law School). I do know however what discussion you
probably remember. Here is how it went: I asked whether Mono has proper
procedures for reverse engineering (in hindsight I regret having asked
this question publicly, I now think it would have been much more appropriate
to ask this kind of question privately), and Miguel replied that the Mono
project doesn't have the resources for that, and he added a verbal attack
against the procedures used by Rhys in the early days of the Portable.NET
project. You really shouldn't be concerned about what Miguel wrote about
Portable.NET in that message. First of all, reverse engineering for purposes
of interoperability is always legal in the country where that work was done.
(EULA clauses that forbid it are legally null and void in that country.)
Secondly, the early versions of Portable.NET achieved interoperability in a
manner that (in the judgement of Eben Moglen) would not have violated the terms
of the anti-reverse-engineering clause even if that clause wasn't irrelevant
anyway. (We had not informed Miguel about the details. Why should we? He
never asked.) Thirdly, the code to which these concerns applied has long since
been rewritten for technical reasons anyway.
Nota bene, both projects, Mono and Portable.NET, want to be compatible with
much more than just with what is described in the ECMA specs. So there is
reason to be careful. I can assure you that I've been working hard behind the
scenes of the DotGNU project to make sure that we're as careful as we
reasonably can be.
I don't know what you mean with the claim "there used to be a page around on
the DotGNU website (not sure if it's still there) badmouthing Mono." I
maintain the DotGNU website and I'm sure that we have never had any such
page. The DotGNU website moved to the Savannah CVS system on July 10, 2001
and all versions of all website files since then can still be reviewed at
http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/proje
Since that website move was just one day after the initial public announcement
of the Mono project, if your claim was true, the evidence should be there. I
challenge you to check your claim against the available public record.
Greetings,
Norbert.
I think your right.
I posted over 57 bug reports to the project, yet they are discounted. Even if 99% fixed.
Rhys is discriminating against honest help, and I find that he is driving away help. Now they would rather buy help!?
In any case, now they are trying to use Intellectual property law against would be contributors that they have decided to ban.
I think that they have forgotten about the principles of free software.
mike
Introspection is the key to understanding