Boston, MA — (press release excerpt) — The Free Software Foundation announced today the launch of two Free Software projects, DotGNU and GNU Mono, that will replace Microsoft's .NET system. The DotGNU and Mono projects will cooperate to build a full Free Software solution.

DotGNU will be led by David Sugar, who current maintains Bayonne, the GNU telephony system. Sugar, who co-founded OST, a service company for GNU Bayonne, was also recently named the CTO of FreeDevelopers, a democratic community-based company started by Tony Stanco. Many developers of DotGNU are associated with FreeDevelopers, but work on DotGNU is centered at Savannah, the GNU developer collaboration site.

GNU Mono will be led by Miguel de Icaza, who has already led GNU's GNOME desktop environment to great successes. de Icaza is president of the GNOME Foundation and CTO of Ximian, a Free Software company based in Boston. Work on GNU Mono will be centered at Ximian.

Richard M. Stallman, founder of the GNU project and president of the Free Software Foundation, said: “With Mono and DotGNU, we hope to provide a good alternative to all of .NET, one that will respect your freedom, and your privacy. You will be able to use the facilities of Mono and DotGNU either with, or without, the Internet, and using servers of your choice.”

Sugar noted that DotGNU will avoid the centralization of services threatened by .NET, saying: “We see no technological reason to have services hosted and deployed from a single service provider. DotGNU will scale so that anyone can develop and deploy network services, whether they be an individual, large corporation or small business. Distributed authentication can assure users' freedom and privacy, as well as the privacy and integrity for commercial organizations.”

A key component of .NET is its C# language and Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) for programming language interoperability. “Unfortunately, while C# and CLI have been submitted to the ECMA and W3C standards bodies, the limitations of the 'shared source' license impede the development and deployment of commercial applications on other platforms,” said de Icaza.

These two GNU efforts will ensure that both commercial and non-commercial users will have equal freedom to innovate with these new technologies.

Stallman added: “GNU Mono and DotGNU will enable you to run your C# programs on the free GNU/Linux operating system using exclusively free software. With DotGNU and Mono, you will be able to use C# if you wish, without surrendering your freedom to study, share, change, and generally control all the software that you use.”

 
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