[DotGNU]Announcement - DotGNU Focus and Direction

[Rhys Weatherley]

Hi All!

Over the past few months, DotGNU has been slowly losing its focus.
We've become distracted from our core goal of providing a viable
alternative to Microsoft's .NET strategy.  It's time to rectify this.

However, providing an alternative doesn't mean that we have to precisely
clone what Microsoft or Ximian is doing.  There are aspects that we need
to be compatible with for interoperability purposes, but we have a great
deal of latitude to branch out in new and unexpected directions.

It's tempting to think that if we introduce more workgroups and
organisation that we'll be able to address the focus question.  But
first we need to address the community issues: bring more people into 
the project who share our Free Software goals.  Then we need to code,
code, and code some more.

Right now, there are people out there who aren't too shook on the idea
of ".NET for GNU/Linux".  We need to bring them in from the cold by
showing them that we aren't just doing that.  There are ways that we
can help them with their problems, and they can help us with ours.

For example, the Parrot VM is claimed to be universal, but they don't
have full-blown C# and C compilers capable of generating bytecode.
But we do.  There are plenty of other Free Software projects that
need support for distributed authentication and profiles.  Perhaps
address@hidden can help?

These are only a couple of examples about how we can reach out to
groups that ordinarily wouldn't be interested in what we are doing,
and maybe, just maybe, getting some help in return.

I encourage everyone to start thinking of and enacting ways that we can
broaden our support base by "thinking outside the .NET box" as it were.
And please, reach out to people that you know in other Free Software
projects and ask how we can help them and how they can help us.

Cheers,

Rhys.