I agree with you Roberto. There is no *technical* reason. But as the head of a consulting shop who has lost to (WHEREIS).NET and Zope (who doesn't even eat their own dogfood) I've learned that the technical argument is limited when it comes to acceptance. So I am completely admitting that I am making a marketing argument here.
I'm not sure that maintaining such a port would be so unreasonable, either. It may be difficult to find good Free Software people in the MS world who understand what a Free community is, but I imagine there would be many many people adopting such a system.
I must admit also that Philip convinced me of this point at the last social. There is absolutely no reason to be religious about the language we use. I agree with him that OpenACS' strongest point is a really great data model (although hundreds of thousands of lines of working code is nice too :)) which is pretty agnostic to what the underlying DB is. I don't have experience with VB, but I've heard great things about C# from smart people.
I think a Java version of the ACS is great. I think the Tcl version is better as an open source system because it's not as scary to learn (see http://developer.arsdigita.com/acs-java/doc/api to understand why I think this) but I look forward to its availability. I spoke with Dennis Gregoravic and a couple other guys at the OpenACS social who told me some cool things about it and how aD is developing it.
I'm really not asking the community to expend any energy on a MS ACS. I DO NOT WANT THAT TO HAPPEN AT ALL!!!! But I next time a customer comes to us begging that we build their system in Windows I would be inclined to listen to them. It would cost them 2-3x more than if they used Linux, but if they have the money who am I to argue?
talli
