RE: [Visionaries] I have a dream... a couple of them, actually...

[BCalco]

Norbert:

| 
| Yes, these are good points... in the context of DotGNU however I'm
| very reluctant to encourage starting projects that compete with any
| existing Free Software projects.  There are two main resons for this:
| 
| 1.  There's so much work that needs to be done which doesn't compete
|     with existing projects.  While it's nice to have multiple options
|     to do a task with Free Software, I think it's important to set
|     priorities on projects which provide functionality that isn't
|     readily availbale in Free Software yet.  For this reason, the
|     R# vision is clearly more interesting than the prospect of yet
|     another IDE project.  (Building an IDE is a *lot* of work.  If
|     there are too many such projects, most of them will not succeed
|     in attracting enough contributors.)

R# is indeed more interesting from an engineering perspective for me as
well. The idea of a language for .NET/.GNU that specializes in specifically
implementing business logic on the middle tier where web services live is
the "business case" so to speak for blending the constraint/logic
programming concepts from Oz with the syntax sugar of Ruby. That really is
what R# is (in my skull) all about - not just "get Ruby running on .GNU".

| 
| 2.  As a major goal of DotGNU is to facilitate system integration,
|     it's important for us to maintain good, cooperative relationships
|     with the maintainers of many other Free Software packages.  For
|     this reason I will generally not support the creation of new
|     DotGNU development projects that exist primarily to compete with
|     an existing Free Software project (which is not part of DotGNU).
| 
|     If you want to create a new Free Software project that seeks to
|     compete with an existing Free Software project, there's nothing
|     intrinsically wrong with that, but DotGNU is primarily interested
|     in cooperating with other Free Software projects and not in
|     competing with them.

Well my intent is not to compete per se but to synthesize - take an idea I
know works (like eclipse's plug in architecture) and apply new contructs to
it to see how far the idea can be taken in a different context. Being able
to write an IDE in and for .NET/.GNU that can replace Visual Studio (not so
much Eclipse, since that is firmly entrenched in the Java community, so much
so in fact that it is the basis of IBM's WebSphere development environment)
as the preferred IDE for .NET/.GNU for every conceivable project type - and
being able to prove it can work on MS's CLR as well as on Portable.NET -
that would be cool, and I don't frankly care if the eclipse folks perceive
it as some attempt at competition. It isn't.

.GNU *IS* competition in itself betcause the CLR IS competing with the Java
VM for mind (and market) share in the same domain, distributed enterprise
architecture.

So, technically, I'm not out for war with other free software projects. But
I don't see the harm in taking a few proven ideas as roadmaps and using them
to chart new waters. I like the Eclipse idea even if Java doesn't especially
turn me on; I'd like to replicate it, on steroids (so to speak), for .GNU,
is all.

But first, R#... ;)

- Bob

| 
| Greetings, Norbert.
| 
| -- 
| Founder & Steering Committee member of http://gnu.org/projects/dotgnu/
| Free Software Business Strategy Guide   --->  http://FreeStrategy.info
| Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet (near Zurich, Switzerland)
| Tel +41 1 972 20 59        Fax +41 1 972 20 69       http://norbert.ch
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