Re: [DotGNU]Announcement - DotGNU Focus and Direction

[Barry Fitzgerald]

On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Rhys Weatherley wrote:

> Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 14:46:23 +1000
> From: Rhys Weatherley <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: [DotGNU]Announcement - DotGNU Focus and Direction
>
> 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.
>
> ...
>

One of the original visions that I had of DotGNU was that we would not
simply address the basic runtime-level issues of a development
environment.  .Net is more than simply a set of development tools, it's a
framework for creating distributed applications.  Of course, development
tools are a key part of that, but so are authentication services and
applications services (core applications).

But that, in and of itself, provides us with considerable room for
differentiation between Microsoft, Ximian, and other webservice
framework providers.

Let's not lose sight of what originally started the current trends in
webservices: XML-RPC.

Many programs that exist right now utilize XML-RPC to do their work.  Many
have produced their own implementations and others have provided common
libraries.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to contact any members of any projects
that use XML-RPC and other webservice technologies to determine where we
could assist each other.  Obviously, a strict emphasis should be placed on
the fact that we should give priority consideration to those projects who
have embraced copyleft.

If we can begin to get others who are creating webservice infrastructures
interested in our work, then we most certainly could end up helping each other.

For this project to reach full fruition, we must become the center of
webservice development in the Free Software world.  This is similar to the
way that glibc and gcc are the center of the C programming world in Free
Software.  We'll never have a monopoly on this and we don't have the
lead that they had, but if we can provide a value to these other projects
- by making their lives easier - then we'll do just fine.

        -Barry