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

I think my first reaction to the .NET idea was the same as most everyone else's - shock, then a mental recitation of all the pitfalls of doing business with Microsoft. We all know this is a minefield, and those of us who have worked on cooperative projects with Microsoft in the past know all too well how badly it can go.

That said, I do think there are some things which dotLRN could benefit from: becoming "web services enabled", and running properly on Windows are both on that list. The former would be relatively easy to do today, but the latter is not. AOLserver is no longer supported on Windows, so at the very least, a solid Windows version of dotLRN needs to either support it's own version of AOLserver, or work with Apache. Neither of these are trivial undertakings and IMHO it would be appropriate to use Microsoft's money to achieve them, as long as the proper precautions are taken. So these are some good things which might possibly come out of the iCampus grant. (ok, one might question why running on Windows matters, but folks like Michael have made it clear that they have clients who won't use dotLRN unless it does, even though the thought makes most of us cringe)

None of us knows yet whether an actual port of dotLRN to .NET will happen, since no decisions have been made. But it is clearly the most "scary" scenario here, and as such I think it is worth discussing. If it happens, there are a few possible outcomes:

• the .NET version runs with Mono and kicks butt, subsequently taking over the world
• the .NET version runs with Mono and is slow; only MS shops with pointy-haired bosses want to use it
• the .NET version runs with Mono initially, but MS pulls some kind of licensing trick and forces everyone with Mono apps to run them with licensed .NET tools instead; in that case, only MS shops who don't care about this will use it

Ironically, the most problematic outcome is actually the first; if it runs well and MS behaves themselves, then we run into all sorts of thorny questions like "what happens to the Tcl version". But I think this outcome is actually quite unlikely. I expect it would be somewhat slower than the Tcl version (though perhaps not dramatically slower) and that in the end, MS would not behave themselves. So the main thing to be gained from the exercise would be more good reasons, with data to back them up, as to why the project does *not* use .NET.

I think the main thing to keep in mind here is that Al's primary goal is to see dotLRN be adopted as widely as possible. He's not going to achieve that if Microsoft is perceived as owning the project, or if performance is poor, or if the community around dotLRN is divided into two warring groups. So you don't have to believe that he has the community's best interests at heart in order to trust him - his own self interest also dictates that this process be handled carefully and that the outcome is something that the existing community can accept.