Forum .LRN Q&A: Response to dotLRN on .NET

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5: Response to dotLRN on .NET (response to 1)
Posted by Alfred Essa on 08/18/02 02:10 AM
In framing the discussion around .NET, let me state some principles to which I am absolutely committed and which I cannot compromise as long as I am CIO at MIT Sloan.

I want to state this as a matter of public record:

  1. dotLRN must be made available under an opensource license;
  2. dotLRN must run on an opensource stack (operating system, web/application server, database);

dotLRN on OpenACS fulfills both criteria. As we all know, .NET does not. As long as I am CIO at Sloan, we will not migrate SloanSpace and our users to .NET unless both 1) and 2) are true in practice, not just in theory. For me, 1) and 2) are necessary conditions and not sufficient. We might be successful with a dotLRN implementation on .NET which is made available under an opensource license and runs on an opensource stack (Linux, Apache, and Postgres), but we still might feel uncomfortable and unconvinced with Microsoft terms of license for .NET class libraries, etc.

If I violate (1) or (2), I will resign from Sloan and pay for Neophytos plane fare to come and accept my resignation.