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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 ;-)
"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'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.
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.
It doesn't matter how many "hidden" (they're not hidden - use ildsasm) calls there are. You're making your own implementation.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
DotGNU is trying to implement System.Windows.Forms using only X instead of Wine or GTK#. This should result in greater portability. So they're writing all the gadgets from scratch, in C#. It's slower than using Wine but right now I can build PNET completely on OSX, and I can't still get Mono to work on OSX and even if I did it would only be for command-line and ASP stuff, no GUI available because I can't use Wine on OSX.
Go hug some trees.
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.