I'm not sure I understand. I thought Mono was an 'open source' community project, that happened to have a corporate sponsor. Why would there be any confidential information? Shouldn't everything be disclosed to the community?
It was my impression that Mono is not 'owned' by Ximian, it is owned by the community of contributors as a whole? I would think that if any company were going to build on the product and implement their own unique optimizations and strategy (which is perfectly legitimate), that that work and discussion would be kept separate and internal to the company. I certainly would not want company trade secrets disclosed in a public forum if it were my company. Are the members of the hackers list compensated employees of Ximian? If so, then I would think they have every right to regulate the list membership. If not, then it seems to me it is not the appropriate forum to discuss corporate strategy. Unless one is being compensated and receiving consideration from a company for their work or contributions to an OSS project, I don't think that company has any right to restrict the persons involvement in any other project of their choice. The DotGNU project also caught my eye a few weeks ago when I first started looking into open source .NET platforms. They are taking a different path to a similar goal, but I'm not sure I understand why there would be a problem sharing notes, resources, etc. when there is commonality. Unless Ximian takes the entire project in house and hires all the programmers, I don't believe they have any right whatsoever to say 'well dotgnu is a competitor, and you can't work on that.' Baloney. Front some green, then you can attach non-compete strings and restrictions just like any other employment contract. ...my 2 cents. YMMV. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Adam Treat Sent: Saturday, November 23, 2002 7:48 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Miguel de Icaza; Nick Zigarovich Subject: [Mono-list] Mono and the community Nick and I were recently removed from the mono-hackers list because we've been helping/participating in the DotGNU/Portable.NET project. This was done because Miguel has confidential information about Mono that he does not want disclosed to the competition. I was under the impression that mono-hackers was created for technical discussions of the development of the Mono runtime, compilers and libraries, however Miguel stated that it is also intended as a place to discuss strategy and to announce Ximian partnerships/contracts with various groups. This is unfortunate in that it limits the amount of community participation in technical discussions. I would suggest the creation of a new list, perhaps hosted by sourceforge or another similar group affiliated with the community. This list would be open to all developers and important discussions relating to the technical details and plans for the runtime, classlibs, and compiler could be discussed there. Ximian could use mono-hackers (or it's predecessor: ximian-mono-list) to relate confidential information and technical discussions could still go on with the full participation of the community. Cheers, Adam _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
