[illumos-Developer] [illumos Mono Integration - Feature #210]

[James C. McPherson]

On 11/10/10 09:50 PM, Gary Driggs wrote:
> It sounds like the same flap over Debian awhile back. There is fear
> (uncertainty? doubt?) that Mono is a patent trap despite its
> licensing. But as others have pointed out[1], the same concerns have
> not held back the inclusion of other technologies with the same
> potential. This kind of frothing at the mouth zealotry seems to
> originate from the FSF hardcore acolytes that rarely wander far from
> their strict GPL monasteries. So I would wager that few of the folks
> commenting on your post actually subscribe to the lists but rather
> form a cadre of FSF flashmob zombies that come out of the woodwork
> whenever chicken little cries for their support. But that's just a
> random guess on my part as a sole observer of such things in the
> past.
>
> FWIW, I work for a small, proprietary software company that uses a
> lot of open source tech in its end product and infrastructure. But I
> come from a telco background that had strict requirements that all
> mission critical apps had to have a support contract. I'm digressing
> but what I'm getting at is that I'm a sysadmin that grew up with
> early Solaris 2.x at college while running 386BSD, nascent Linux
> distros, DOS/WfW, and AmigaOS on my personal machines -- the end
> result being that I see a place for all flavor of OS&  licensing
> models.
>
> My observation has been that Illumos' primary concern is centered
> around ABI compatibility with Solaris. So if you have any qualms over
> starting your Mono project, my opinion is that you should consider it
> from that angle before any others.

I think you're being quite unfair to the commenters on that
thread. As somebody who works in and on the consolidation
that Illumos forked from, I know from experience that adding
in new languages to that consolidation is strongly resisted.

The reason that perl is inside ON and Illumos is because it's
needed in order to build certain low-level userland utilities
that are part of that consolidation. prtdiag is one such example.

There are no such examples for Mono.

There is no C compiler source included in Illumos, or ON.
There is mdb/kmdb source, but there is no dbx source included
in Illumos or ON.


My bias (and I believe this matches Garrett's) is for Illumos
to remain the kernel and basic userland. Adding in Mono, or
Python, or Ruby or $insertRandomLanguageFavouriteHere adds extra
lines of code that are more properly kept elsewhere.

Python and Ruby come in via the SFW consolidation.

I suggest to you that having Mono included in a _distribution_
(ie, OpenIndiana, Nexenta, Schillix et al) is more appropriate
than forcing it into a consolidation which has a very well
defined raison d'etre.


  
James C. McPherson
--
Solaris kernel software engineer, system admin and troubleshooter
               http://www.jmcp.homeunix.com/blog
Find me on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/in/jamescmcpherson