Re: [DotGNU]DotGNU awareness article

[Peter Minten]

Gopal V wrote:

> DotGNU started out as an alternative for the Services part of .NET and
> has successively degraded to the implementation of ECMA standards . There
> were a lot of revolutionary ideas like SEE , VRS and a number of DotGNU-Auth
> systems ... But the developement in these seem to have slowed down in
> recent times ..

Yes, I've noticed that too. They don't generate a lot of postings on the central
mailing lists (dev, auth, arch) and thus don't get much attention. My humble
suggestion to change this would thus be: get all the discussion on these
projects centralized in dev, auth and arch.
 
> About Portable.Net , we have a freshmeat registration for you to keep track
> of releases . We've had a number of announcements by GNU and also have made
> headlines in most of the news sites ... Ever since Norbert Bollow has
> been "missing" , our PR wing has been practically dead. But I had in fact,
> organized 2 meet-a-thons each of 36 hour duration on IRC this year. And
> we (due to many factors) are totally out of the talks & lecture circuit.
> And we do not have the reputation and weight Ximian carries .... and
> we cannot afford to pay for working on this .... We can't hire . So
> people tend to take us less seriously when looking for a "solution"..
> 
> Any solutions to this ?

Make allies, make allies, make allies. Just look at what Mono is doing (right,
they have de Icaza so it's easy for them to team up with GNOME and related :-).
If we can make strategical alliances with other projects we can get more
attention. 

We need however to create a clear image that does not frighten others away like
the hard line of the GNU project can sometimes do (not that I'm objecting to
that stance of GNU, it's needed to achieve the goals of Free Software). I'm not
talking here about becoming open source however but about expressing our main
goal as keeping the internet open and not making software free. Though the
freedom of software is an important goal for this project the ultimate goal is
to keep MS and co from closing up the internet. 

It should also be clear that keeping the internet open fits perfectly within the
free software philosophy and is thus not a threat like the non-philosophical
open source concept. Putting out an image of 'trying to keep the internet open'
will make us more attractive for companies and projects that don't entirely
agree with the Free Software philosophy.

If we take on that image we could do the following: create a Open/Free (don't
know what the right term is here) Webservices Forum. In this forum all
interested in keeping the internet open could participate. The forum could
create the needed standardization of open webservices (open webservices being
defined as webservices that don't use any closed protocol and give the user the
rights stated in the DotGNU manifesto/faq/philosophy file). The forum would also
increase the visibility of DotGNU for companies.

Another idea I had was to organize an IRC debate about webservices where all the
players could make their stance. If we can get Sun and MS to join in that debate
(I guess they will since it's a good opportunity for some cheap PR :-) the
debate will attract a lot of media attention.  If they won't join, well we can
always have a debate between the free software / open source folks and put in
the slashdot announcement that MS and Sun were to chicken :-). If we do this we
need to get our best speaker out, anybody an idea who that is?

Greetings,

Peter