[DotGNU]Planned changes concerning dotgnu-libs

[Norbert Bollow]

Microsoft's move to claim that they're patenting .NET APIs means that
we need to actively discourage use of the affected APIs.  (Thanks to
S11 for pushing this issue.)  Here is the plan that seems to be
emerging from the irc discussions:


* DotGNU will distribute several tarballs with C# libraries, including
  the following three:

  1. A tarball containing pnetlib _and_ also dotgnu-libs.  The goal of
     dotgnu-libs is refined as follows:

       dotgnu-libs is intended to become a very portable, non-compatible
       replacement for the non-ECMA .NET class libs.  Care is taken
       especially in the APIs to avoid anything that could infringe a
       ".NET patent".

     I will propose William Pitcock (nenolod) as maintainer of
     dotgnu-libs.  dotgnu-libs will be LGPL-licensed, and copyright
     assignment to the FSF will be obligatory.

  2. A tarball with ".NET compatibility libs" (for which we should be
     able to mostly use Mono's higher-level class libs).

  3. A tarball with *many* useful libraries which are available for
     GNU systems, but which are not portable enough to allow inclusion
     into dotgnu-libs.  The plan is to use SWIG to automatically wrap
     these libraries for use from C# / IL.  (Full source code for the
     version of SWIG used for this code generation task will also be
     included in the tarball).


* The DotGNU project adopts a policy that DotGNU development projects
  must avoid to rely on the ".NET compatibility libs".


* The DotGNU project will try to encourage use of dotgnu-libs as a
  replacement for the ".NET compatibility libs"


Do we have consensus on these points?

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