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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
"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.
The Mono FAQ has a section devoted to it.
Little do you know, but the real prize is RMS coming to your front door with the FSF Source Patrol van, carrying an oversized copy of the GPL.
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
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
What about this Malloc routine I've just written?
Do I get a prize?
Darl McBride
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
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
why have two projects at all?
Perhaps, because different projects might come up with different implementations that have strenths that the others might not.
Sometimes a parallel effort is needed in order that different approaches to the same problems get to be explored fully.
Because it is sometimes better to fork a project, not because one approach is "wrong" but because another is equally good.
Because it might be better to merge to separate efforts later when both have more mature codebases.
Because having two separate projects nmight enable the coders to more easily see alternative methods that neither effort would have thought of without the other.
Because there is more than one way to do it.
Read, L
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.
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.