Anne Thomas Manes is proposing Jakarta for Mono. Her objective, which I agree with is:

a pretty decent, totally open, multi-platform application environment with no IP-encumbrances from either Microsoft or Sun.

Her proposal:

So this is my idea: we start a set of open source projects that essentially duplicate Jakarta (and other Java projects) for Mono. We start with a servlet-like system for C# (Sharplets?). It needs to be sufficiently different from the Java Servlet API - because servlets are Sun proprietary technology. But then we build on the Sharplets foundation: things like Struts, Cocoon, Log4C#, C#Unit, etc.

Fortunately, nobody stood around waiting for someone to have this idea, and a number of busy developers have already started porting Jakarta projects. Here are some that are already done.

• Ant
• Lucene
• Velocity
• Log4J

There's also a port of JUnit.

So the next step, rather than the first step, is to do something like servlets.

However, I think that Jakarta for Mono is a bad idea. Here's what I mean. Jakarta is not the only source of good open source Java stuff. If we are going to build a multi-platform application environment, let's also learn from the mistakes that have been made along the way. Let's take WebWork or Tapestry instead of Struts. Let's take Velocity over JSP. And let's definitely not take EJB. This is bigger than Jakarta. Much bigger.

As I pointed out in February, there's a lot of open source stuff out there that is better than what the platform vendors have done. A new, not-dependent on Microsoft CLI should take advantage of every lesson that Java and .NET people have learned about building managed systems. The only piece that really matters is the CLI. Would it be nice to be compatible with .NET? Sure. Is Microsoft going to allow it? Who knows? We don't need Microsoft's permission to build something based on all the lessons we've learned since 1996. And we don't need to be compatible with them because we're not compatible now. This is about open source going forward. If Mono is about keeping up with .Net, then its about as interesting as the ASF trying to keep up with J2EE -- not very.

The one troubling piece is the licensing. It may be hard to attract people to write and use code developed on Mono because of the GPL. This may turn out to be more of a problem than Microsoft. If people don't have any option to make money writing Mono apps, then things could get tough. And yes, we should be thinking about Mono desktop apps (If you don't know what Nat Friedman did with dashboard, go find out -- mind the dates in July). Mono is on Windows, Linux, and (soon) MacOS X. There's a group working on SWT bindings to Mono, and Eclipse has already shown that you can do cross platform GUI apps on those three platforms.

Noel Bergman wrote in to say that he'd like to see Mono relicensed to the ASF. I don't know if that's really that important or not. The license may be, but the ASF may not be. Hey, I'm an ASF member too, and I'd love to see Mono come to the ASF. But it's not a prerequisite for success.

Simon Phipps commented with a post titled An Open Spirit:

What we learn from each of these forays into openness is that it doesn't matter how sound the vehicle being used to express the apparent 'openness' is (ECMA for C#, Open Group for DCOM, partenr community for NT), what ultimately matters is the open spirit of the originator. If their intent and method is essentially open, the process bugs get fixed along the way and more and more becomes open.

Unfortunately, for Simon, he's throwing rocks in a glass house. Sun is the company that said they would standardize Java in ECMA and then backed out. Sun is the company that the ASF has had to beat repeatedly in order to fix the "process bugs". We still don't have an open source JVM. Until that changes, Java is not open. When people have to pay money to get certification, that's not open.

The open source community as a whole needs to start going forward because we are running out of good stuff to copy. In order to do that, we need the entire stack to be open. Let me give you one example: There's a lot of buzz going on right now about "dynamic languages". People are starting to realize that there might be some useful stuff in these languages. The problem is that they perform poorly on the JVM (and the CLI). Sun is not interested in solving this problem. Microsoft is. And even if Microsoft isn't or doesn't, it doesn't matter, because the problem can be solved by modifications to Mono.

Let's give up the dream of .NET compatiblity. And J2EE compatibility. Let's take the CLI and chart our own course.