Dotgnu Coding Competition 132
Honestly writes "Apparently DotGNU seems to be offering more than the 'warm fuzzy feeling' to its contributors. Somebody has funded about $4500 worth of prizes for code contributions. The developers have confirmed that the $$$ is in FSF Hands (good hands, I suppose). Here is the split up of prizes. It's almost strange to earn money writing open source. Especially when you're not even
employed by dotgnu. Anyway all I can say is ,I like it. It's ideal for a grad student with lots of free time. But hardly anyone seems to have seen
the Newsforge posts (except maybe me)."
fp (Score:5, Funny)
Never been to grad school, huh?
Re:fp (Score:3, Informative)
No you're not. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:No you're not. (Score:2)
Re:fp (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:fp (Score:2, Funny)
Year 0: "I will be an agent of change."
Year 0.5: "Holy S@#&! Quals!"
Year 1.0: Finished recovering from Quals
Year 2.0: Hmm, no results.
Year 3.0: Still nothin'. Do prelim anyway.
Year 4.0: Realize that for project to succeed, 2 laws of thermodynamics must be violated.
Year 5.0: Finally convince advisor of above
Year 6.0: Surf web, drink coffee, contemplate navel. No longer bitter - now at peace.
Year 7.0: Realize you're almost 30 and still in school. Realize you still don't have a
Re:fp (Score:1)
If... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:If... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If... (Score:2)
Little do you know, but the real prize is RMS coming to your front door with the FSF Source Patrol van, carrying an oversized copy of the GPL.
That would be funny... especially if you lived in Norway or something. "Hi, this is Richard Stallman. I just spent 15 hours and $5,000 travelling across the world to give you this $300 check."
Seriously... the top prize is $2,000. A decent programmer makes that in a week. This contest is lame.
-a
Re:If... (Score:2, Funny)
No, several thousand Indians make that decent programmer's salary in a week.
Grad students, free time? (Score:1, Insightful)
Thanks for spoiling it! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh great! So much for the easy win for the few of us that did know about it.
System.Windows.Forms (Score:1, Interesting)
Rus
Re:System.Windows.Forms (Score:2, Informative)
Re:System.Windows.Forms (Score:2)
Re:System.Windows.Forms (Score:2)
OK, I'll bite. Name three.
Re:System.Windows.Forms (Score:3, Informative)
Re:System.Windows.Forms (Score:2)
Mind you, I would categorise these as bugs (i.e. things the windows app should do but doesnt), not features (quirky features that we have to replicate to get compatibility). I think that Portable.NET, or Mono, or whatever should certainly strive to be reasonably quirk-compliant but not bug compliant.
Re:Bribes... (Score:2)
don't take them lightly.
Don't take them at all has always been my motto.
What about Mono (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What about Mono (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about Mono (Score:2, Informative)
An advanced native-code compilation engine: Both just-in-time compilation (JIT) and pre-compilation of CIL bytecodes into native code are supported.
Portable.net uses an advanced unrolling interpreter which gives it up to 60% the speed of a real JIT and makes it much easier to port than the mono JIT. It only took a week to port the unroller to arm processors.
In the future Portable
Because (Score:2, Insightful)
It's the same reason that there are now ~300 MP3 player projects on SourceForge.
Re:What about Mono (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps, because different projects might come up with different implementations that have strenths that the others might not.
Sometimes a parallel effort is needed in order that different approaches to the same problems get to be explored fully.
Because it is sometimes better to fork a project, not because one approach is "wrong" but because another is equally good.
Because it might be better to merge to separate efforts later when both have more mature codebases.
Because having two separate projects nmight enable the coders to more easily see alternative methods that neither effort would have thought of without the other.
Because there is more than one way to do it.
Re:What about Mono (Score:1)
But why fork a project needlessly when combined efforts could produce a product that is ultimately more intuitive and polished than two rough apps that waste twice the time for twice the learning curve?
I apologize for the run-on sentence.
Re:What about Mono (Score:2)
Open Source is not a corporation, nor is it a (managed) Democracy. It is, howerver a volunteer effort where programmers are permitted to put thier efforts behind whicheber effort they see fit, for whatever reason.
But why fork a project needlessly when combined efforts could produce a product that is ultimately more intuitive and polished than two rough apps that waste twice the time for twice the learning curve?
It is more likely that a sin
sample of code (Score:1)
http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/dotgnu-
(remove the space %20) that
Dyslexia??? (Score:5, Funny)
That's better than.. (Score:2)
That's better than the Dognut Counting Competition...
Re: "It's almost strange to be earning money..." (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: "It's almost strange to be earning money..." (Score:1)
I'm sure there are lots of people who feel the same about this or the other feature or port. It would be great if there was an infrastructure where people could donate money and programmers could take up work that these people wanted, the results being released as free software. It would be a great way of making a living with the stuff that we like doing.
I therefore don't und
Re: "It's almost strange to be earning money..." (Score:1)
Re: "It's almost strange to be earning money..." (Score:2)
Practically all the core Linux and BSD c
What about this Malloc routine.. (Score:5, Funny)
Do I get a prize?
Darl McBride
pgp key? (Score:3, Interesting)
If anyone has DSA key 0x7525EC32, please speak up.
-molo
Re:pgp key? (Score:1)
Re:pgp key? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:pgp key? (Score:1, Funny)
yes I'm the real 0x7525EC32
all you other 0x7525EC32
are just 0xDEADBEEF
so won't the real 0x7525EC32
please..sign your public key..
please sign your..no, I think I lost the rhythm of this thing long ago.
Here is a copy of DSA key 0x7525EC32: (Score:1)
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux)
mQGiBD9AEc8RBAC0LUbRgcVpiR5GhIN3yxSHcFIgdnm4s8r j d6 wWqT9/8ATBnk/+
MzveHn6TDv1s3GU1eWdzJtMuWSJ3LJkUEo pbTGcpMTqDqE53D/ 7WAAtteEqN7JpG
j2MfjFhGmIp7mvOEK8tPCxwGtUESyJ+ZZ2 2CGdOR3bB91TwMua hXl9lz4wCg8n6G
eNzxN/pStiOPdmPzYhwuhrsEAJY7bS6YWS yHMV3Tnr3CFWZWlb If60/ew0TZm3Q2
SieyePuVXaAXvklErnPisBnMo+4HmNV9nf 33DYgsx0imnh/QSc rmqkFX72QI96Fz
ChdOA/9lXHoZHVCTmJnr18SVkxrwuh8V
Not so strange. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not. Linus, RMS, AC, BP, among many others have been getting paid to write free software for years.
Part of the stigma associated with OSS is that since it's associated with "volunteers," it is considered hobby level. Lots of people get paid to work on OSS, and ever increasing large software companies (e.g. IBM and Apple) have staff members working exclusively on OSS.
Re:Not so strange. (Score:2, Informative)
He's getting paid to write the kernel, paid by OSDL, more info here. [osdl.org]
Re:Not so strange. (Score:2)
I don't know one way or the other, but nowadays I bet RMS makes more money from speaking engagements than he does from contract work. Just a guess though.
$300 per prize - is it too little ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides the chance of winning one of fifteen monetary prizes totalling US$ 4500
Though it is good start that there is some money, but what comes to my mind is why so little ... 15 prizes averaging $ 300 each
I wonder why doesn't some philanthropist wanting to donate to charity or some rich guy wanting to support Linux just give a couple of hundred thousand dollars, or may be a few millions, in prize money - so that it can support a critical mass of programmers that can devote a decent amount of time ..... rather than the tens of hours that are "economically feasible" now ....
I know ... linux is not about money and all .... but still ... why couldn't it be ... everyone does not have to pay - just those people wanting it very badly have to pay while the rest get a free ride so that society as a whole benefits ...
and seriously - this is not meant to be flamebait ...
you donate... (Score:1)
Re:$300 per prize - is it too little ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now sure, some people would just do it for the hell of it. However, if they are expecting quality code, it probably isn't going to happen. Anyone with any talent is going to pass this over.
Quite lame.
Re:$300 per prize - is it too little ? (Score:2)
I estimate that for over half the world's population, it's over half a year's per-capita income. (Per capita GDP by country here [cia.gov]. )
While you are unlikely to do this purely for the money you live in a rich, industrialized country, for you, the resume item is easily worth the effort. And what the heck, even if you don't win, you are going to learn enough to make it worthw
Re:$300 per prize - is it too little ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:$300 per prize - is it too little ? (Score:2)
I wonder why doesn't some philanthropist wanting to donate to charity or some rich guy wanting to support Linux just give a couple of hundred thousand dollars, or may be a few millions, in prize money - so that it can support a critical mass of programmers that can devote a decent amount of time
It's common sense. Most people with $1 million to spare didn't get rich by giving their money away. Also, very few of them got rich by giving away their product for free.
-a
"Competition"? (Score:1, Redundant)
Or perhaps I was just put off by the #irc and pnetlib contribution requirements....
Re:DotGNU/GNU (Score:1, Offtopic)
DUDES. It's a JOKE. Oh well, serves me right for posting during labor day weekened, when the lusers are the only people around.
Oh wait...
PNET vs Mono (Score:4, Informative)
DotGNU in the past has tried to cooperate and initiated talks in sharing resources, but this didn't go well with Mono.
The true difference between Portable.NET and Mono is Portable.NET has chosen different technical decisions.
#1: The compiler is written in C/C++ not C# itself, so it doesn't have the chicken or the egg problem. Mono's CVS is very difficult to get a handle of because of this. PNET's compiler is about 3x as fast as Mono's.
#2: The topic at hand, winforms.. PNET's winforms only dependancy is X, which means their winforms work on handhelds, osx, etc. Very portable. Mono's requires Wine, not very portable to say the least.
Thats a rough quick sum.
Re:PNET vs Mono (Score:2)
Basically Mono's FAQ trashes DotGNU and Mono at every chance.
They trash their own software??? Harsh! :P
I beg to differ (Score:4, Informative)
I was involved in that argument. If I recall correctly, it was a Rhys Weatherly and some others demanding that the Mono be placed under the DotGNU steering committee and that everybody work on their project instead. Of course, at the time it was quite obvious that DotGNU was mostly ideologues who were obsessed with 'defeating Microsoft' through some embrace and extend tactics, whereas most of the Mono hackers were fairly pragmatic about the whole issue: 'This is pretty cool! I'd love to see an implementation of this in Linux!'. Most of the people who weren't turned off by the downright abrasiveness of Rhys were turned off by the zealous ideology.
As for bad-mouthing, the only thing the Mono FAQ says about Portable.NET as opposed to Mono is that it the runtime (and compiler) are much less tested. Ximian claims that by developing the compiler and most of the rest of Mono in C#, the whole toolchain has been given a much more rigourous workout than Portable.NET.
In fact, I'd say the badmouthing has been much more in the other direction: there used to be a page around on the DotGNU website (not sure if it's still there) badmouthing Mono. None of the claims had any substance. For example, it claimed that Mono was on shaky legal grounds with regards to hidden Microsoft patents, which may perhaps be true. However, Portable.NET/DotGNU isn't safe from those legal threats either. Further, while Mono was developed from the ECMA (and now ISO) specifications, Portable.NET was initially developed by reverse engineering Microsoft's .NET implementation (without any clean-room engineering), putting it at risk of copyright infringement claims as well as patent claims. This was also part of the reason why there was little interest from Mono in merging the class libraries.
I suspect things are probably more civil these days. Cooler heads usually prevail in the end.
As for your other claims....
#1: The compiler is written in C/C++ not C# itself, so it doesn't have the chicken or the egg problem. Mono's CVS is very difficult to get a handle of because of this. PNET's compiler is about 3x as fast as Mono's.
Mono's CVS is easy to handle. It is distributed with a partial prebuilt toolchain, that is then used to build the entire toolchain. It's all MSIL, so there are no platform portability issues. It is also standard practice to write a compiler in its own language.
#2: The topic at hand, winforms.. PNET's winforms only dependancy is X, which means their winforms work on handhelds, osx, etc. Very portable. Mono's requires Wine, not very portable to say the least.
WinForms contains a number of window-isms, which the Wine project have already implemented. Reimplementing winelib seems silly and a waste of energy. I can't imagine it'd be appreciably harder to port Mono's WinForms implementation across platforms had it been written from scratch than it would be to port winelib itself. And if winelib gets ported, people other than Mono users and developers can benefit from that work.
Anyway, just my $0.02.
Re:I beg to differ (Score:3, Insightful)
WinForms contains a number of window-isms, which the Wine project have already implemented. Reimplementing winelib seems silly and a waste of energy. I can't imagine it'd be appreciably harder to port Mono's WinForms implementation across platforms had it been written from scratch than it would be to port winelib itself. And if winelib gets ported, people other than Mono users and developers can benefit from that work.
WTF!? WinForms is based on windows controls but that doesn't mean you need an impleme
No, you weren't involved (Score:4, Interesting)
with Mono.
The first attempt was made by the DotGNU coreteam and the
Free Software Foundation, privately, immediately after the existence of the
Mono project had become public knowledge (that was in early July 2001).
You must be referring to the second of these attepts, which was not initiated
by the DotGNU project but by a third party (Martin Coxall)... making Mono part
of DotGNU was his idea, not ours... both Miguel (the Mono project leader) and
I posted in the thread which resulted from this proposal, and I got upset about some
of Miguel's comments, but in retrospect I think it's very understandable that
the Mono folks were not interested in talking about cooperation in the context
of such a proposal.
In April 2002, we made a third attempt to establish cooperation with Mono.
This attempt was much more promising than the earlier two, and it has involved
offering a sizeable chunk of pnetlib I18N code to Mono under the X11 license,
which they have integrated into their class library.
DotGNU is still open to discussing any mutually beneficial ways of cooperation.
For example, some parts of the class library could be developed jointly, using
a neutral cvs server. We have proposed this to the Mono project multiple
times, so far it seems that the Mono folks are not interested in this kind of
cooperation. The I18N code which was integrated into the Mono libs forked
immediately, so that doesn't count as a mutually beneficial form of
cooperation.
Your claim about DotGNU Portable.NET being "at risk of copyright infringement
claims" is totally false. Our procedures have been carefully checked and
declared ok by a competent lawyer (Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal
history at Columbia Law School). I do know however what discussion you
probably remember. Here is how it went: I asked whether Mono has proper
procedures for reverse engineering (in hindsight I regret having asked
this question publicly, I now think it would have been much more appropriate
to ask this kind of question privately), and Miguel replied that the Mono
project doesn't have the resources for that, and he added a verbal attack
against the procedures used by Rhys in the early days of the Portable.NET
project. You really shouldn't be concerned about what Miguel wrote about
Portable.NET in that message. First of all, reverse engineering for purposes
of interoperability is always legal in the country where that work was done.
(EULA clauses that forbid it are legally null and void in that country.)
Secondly, the early versions of Portable.NET achieved interoperability in a
manner that (in the judgement of Eben Moglen) would not have violated the terms
of the anti-reverse-engineering clause even if that clause wasn't irrelevant
anyway. (We had not informed Miguel about the details. Why should we? He
never asked.) Thirdly, the code to which these concerns applied has long since
been rewritten for technical reasons anyway.
Nota bene, both projects, Mono and Portable.NET, want to be compatible with
much more than just with what is described in the ECMA specs. So there is
reason to be careful. I can assure you that I've been working hard behind the
scenes of the DotGNU project to make sure that we're as careful as we
reasonably can be.
I don't know what you mean with the claim "there used to be a page around on
the DotGNU website (not sure if it's still there) badmouthing Mono." I
maintain the DotGNU website and I'm sure that we have never had any such
page. The DotGNU website moved to the Savannah CVS system on July 10, 2001
and all versions of all website files since then can still be reviewed at
http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/proje
Since that website move was just one day after the initial public announcement
of the Mono project, if your claim was true, the evidence should be there. I
challenge you to check your claim against the available public record.
Greetings,
Norbert.
Re:No, you weren't involved (Score:3, Informative)
Phase 1: DotGNU and Mono announced on the same day by the FSF. Mono to work on the framework, DotGNU to do the more undefined parts of
At this point cooperation was not possible, because it turned out the DotGNU team wanted to invent a new virtual machine that supported Java and
Then we were asked something like `you will work with us better th
License? (Score:4, Interesting)
I love free software and open source, use them, advocate them, and even write some small time stuff and license it LGPL. During the day, I work for a company that develops and sells a software program.
Here is a quote from the FAQ of DotGNU's Vision for WebServices [dotgnu.org] .
Now I thought the GPL would not prevent this sort of thing? Now I'm really confused.
I'm sure glad that GNU thinks they know what would be good for my employer's business and that my employer should charege more for their program (which is for schools).
I thought I had a good solid understanding of the GPL [gnu.org]. I've taken the GPL quiz [gnu.org] , read the GPL Faq [gnu.org] before.
I thought the GPL only applied to copying and distribution of a program or derrived work. Not to running it privately on my own web site.
If I distribute my proprietary program, along side a DotGNU program / platform that executes it, I would not think that my program comes under the scope of the GPL.
If I do NOT distribute my proprietary program, but merely run it at my site, and merely sell it as a service, then I was definitely under the impression that the GPL did not apply since no distribution takes place.
Still, back to the case where I distribute my program, and a seperate DotGNU program to run it, then I would not think that my program comes under the scope of the GPL.
Maybe I had better just stay completely away from DotGNU. Stick with Apache and various Java tools instead.
Just a side note about the customer having their data he
Re:License? (Score:2)
stay away from all of them for now (Score:4, Interesting)
The Apache license is fine, but Java doesn't look like a big win to me. While Sun keeps proclaiming that the platform is open, in reality, large parts of the platform only exist as Sun proprietary code. Even if someone managed to reimplement them, Sun controls the compatibility tests and they can shoot down any implementation they don't like.
At this point, I'd not get involved with any of Java, PNET, or
Just wait for the dust to settle and for Sun and Microsoft to come to their senses with their outrageous intellectual property claims. Until then, you have plenty of other options--there is nothing technically new in any of those platforms.
Re:stay away from all of them for now (Score:3, Interesting)
Obviously, because I study the licenses before even proposing development, I would be considering such things.
Open source implementations of Java are on the horizon. Today, commercial Java runtimes are available from multiple vendors, so you are not likely to have one single vendor treat you badly.
It is not impossible that Sun coul
Re:stay away from all of them for now (Score:2)
It is unclear, however, whether those violate Sun intellectual property. If you check the USPTO web site, you'll see that Sun has numerous patents on key Java technologies, including the basic type verification algorithm.
Furthermore, even when you just download the documentation from Sun's web site, you accept a license that prohibits you from distributing any implementation of the code that has not passed Sun's conformance tests, and it imposes oth
Only for the incrowd? (Score:1)
Does this mean that only those who already have had code accepted into the codebase can enter the competition? Or am I mixing up verb tenses (passive present perfect, passive future perfect) here?
Re:Only for the incrowd? (Score:1, Informative)
If you are hacking on System.Windows.Forms at least one of your code contributions needs to get accepted into the official pnetlib so that you are considered as a participant.
The contest - of course - isn't restricted to people who already contributed something.
Speaking of dotgnu/.NET.... (Score:2)
Not sure how much effort it would be to get it working with dotgnu as well... maybe it wouldn't be too bad since much of the connector code appears to be in lib/dotnet/bridge.rb. Lots of C# code in there, though.
Standard comment #346 (Score:2, Insightful)
In these cases I think it's better to create a project that offers the same general functionality, but in a distinctive, better way.
If only I wasn't so lazy...
Re:Standard comment #346 (Score:1)
Java was designed to be portable.
winforms is not.
Allthough Swing is not ported much of the
"usual" 1.2 API is. For example Eclipse
now runs compiled with gcj.
Re:Standard comment #346 (Score:1)
Re:Standard comment #346 (Score:1)
The /. effect (Score:1)
Not anymore!
/idiot>
Popularity Contest (Score:2)
Okay helping newcomers get started, that's fine, but shouldn't we be judging people primarily on their ability to write code that's useful and easy to read, understand, and extend? I don
Re:Pfffff (Score:1)
Wine? (Score:2)
Oh wait, that's Mono, not dotgnu. But why can't dotgnu do the same thing?
Or the other work that Mono is doing, a pure C# implementation of System.Windows.Forms using GTK#, why can't dotgnu use that? I thought this
Re:Wine? (Score:2, Informative)
MonoDotGNUcleosis? (Score:2)
Re:DotGNU Control Freaks (Score:1)
I posted over 57 bug reports to the project, yet they are discounted. Even if 99% fixed.
Rhys is discriminating against honest help, and I find that he is driving away help. Now they would rather buy help!?
In any case, now they are trying to use Intellectual property law against would be contributors that they have decided to ban.
I think that they have forgotten about the principles of free software.
mike