[DotGNU]DotGNU policies

[Peter Minten]

Hi folks,

in order to prevent future conflicts about the course of DotGNU I propose the
following policies. I hope that if the policies are good the SC will make them
official. If that is the case then the policies cannot be changed without
permission from the SC (they are cast in stone until the SC pulls out the rock
drill).

* DotGNU shall be downward compatible with .NET

  Applications that run on .NET should run on DotGNU, the reverse does not need
to be true.

* All essential DotGNU code shall be accessible from any language provided it
can access functions written in C.

  Compatibility is our business. True compatibility does not mean assimilation
(compiling everything down to one bytecode) but integration (providing ways to
access stuff from one language from another). C is the standard, about all
languages can call C functions, thus C if it can be called using C functions
it's compatible about all languages. Note that this does not rule out the
possibility of writing essential stuff in C#, if it's possible to call that
(preferably without advanced knowledge of the inside of pnet) using C functions.

* All DotGNU webservices must be able to understand eachother.

  This boils down to using one API that works with multiple protocols (XML-RPC,
SOAP). It also means sending serialized objects is forbidden (unless webservices
written in any language can completely understand the objects).

Greetings,

Peter