[Kde-bindings] some info needed

[Arno Rehn]

On Tuesday 22 June 2010 01:22:55 Richard Dale wrote:
> On Monday, June 21, 2010 07:58:51 pm Arno Rehn wrote:
> > Currently I don't have much ambitions to carry on working on
> > Qyoto/Kimono, since not many people are using it and it's a closed
> > platform after all. I'm CC'ing the kdebindings ML, so other people can
> > help as well.
> 
> I think that would be a great shame. I'm sorry I've done nothing to help
> out with Qyotoassemblygen, and feel that I should have done more. In
> combination with using the Smoke runtime, it is the most innovative C#
> bindings project out there.
It's certainly not that I haven't had enough enough help and/or support from 
your side. I agree that SMOKE is the most advanced C++ bindings technology out 
there and we really have top-quality C# bindings.

> We should certainly get projects like Qyotoassemblygen and smokegen onto
> git instead of in kdebindings. I think the fact we are stuff in
> kdebindings using svn is beginning to damage the bindings projects.
qyotoassemblygen is already on gitorious.

> Why do
> we put so much effort into  KDE based bindings when 90% of people only
> want to use the Qt-only ones? I don't know.
> 
> I agree we've had zero success with getting anyone to use the Kimono KDE C#
> bindings, although I think there has been some interest in the Qyoto side.
> Maybe we haven't put enough effort into hyping and blogging about what we
> have, or telling the Mono community about it. i still feel there is a lot
> of potential in the project when other C# bindings seem quite popular. For
> instance, like on the iPhone and I wonder if there might be a place for a
> libdui/MeeGo Touch development environment.
It's just that I come to think that C# bindings will have no success in the 
F/OSS community. There are a few people who don't care whether .NET is a 
closed platform and therefore develop and use .NET software even on Linux and 
other open OSes. However, the number of these people seems to be extremely 
low.

Mono/.NET applications will never be treated as 1st class citizens (not even 
2nd class, I'd say) in any of the larger projects, like GNOME or KDE, simply 
because .NET is a closed platform. Microsoft could make every promise they 
want for not sueing people, but as long as they don't open up the platform, 
.NET will never be accepted in the F/OSS world.
And they even have a point here: As long as there are efforts to support .NET 
on other OSes, including Linux and OS X, all the closed Microsoft stuff will 
spread and push the open alternatives aside.
A very popular case currently is Silverlight. It's bad enough that there is 
Flash, which is also a closed platform, but now even Silverlight apps start to 
flood the internet. And that decreases chances again for HTML5.

Well, back to topic: Yes, there are quite a few people being interested in 
Qyoto on Windows and OS X, but honestly that are not the communities that I 
care most about. I mostly focus on the main KDE platform, which is Linux, and 
hopefully soon also MeeGo. If it's working there and has some users, then I 
won't mind porting it to other platforms. But I don't feel like maintaining a 
project whose userbase is completely outside of my main working platform.

-- 
Arno Rehn
arno at arnorehn.de