Cody Russell

ECMA C# standards community promise

Only a few days ago Richard Stallman was speaking here at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit and the subject of Mono inevitably came up. There was heated debate between Richard and others in the community. His position seemed to be that Mono was an important tool for migrating foreign software to a free platform, but it should be discouraged for use in developing new free software, regardless of technical advantages, because he was unconvinced that we would be allowed to continue using it (that Microsoft would sue us and require us to stop using it, etc).

I had the opportunity to ask him a question about this, which was something roughly like, “Is there anything Microsoft could do or say that would resolve some of the uncertainty around this issue?” I was very happy that Richard’s response was “yes”, and he went on to say how Microsoft could be more clear in their position of allowing free implementations of C#.

Interestingly, news regarding the C# standards were released today that will hopefully clear up things for people who were not convinced before. Undoubtedly there will be haters who continue to hate, but I really will be interested to see what Richard’s position will be after this (not that his position will affect mine, but I’m still curious).