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Re:MS Is Making Fools Out Of The Open Source World by daemonburrito · 2009-07-09 17:03 · Score: 2, Informative · on Mono Outpaces Java In Linux Desktop Development

There is no patent mess.

You were saying that before the "Community Promise". Funny, right?

And yes, the "community promise" doesn't make your statement true. The "Promise" only covers ECMA 334 and 335 (C# language and CLI), as you're well aware.

Astute readers will point out that Mono contains much more than the ECMA standards, and they will be correct.

- Miguel

Indeed, Mono is officially being split in half. But you already knew that.

Re:Good by Vahokif · 2009-07-09 10:25 · Score: 1 · on Mono Outpaces Java In Linux Desktop Development

it's had a good decade and a half of hardening in real-world situations (top businesses etc.)
.NET builds on Java's experiences as well, and according to Miguel they did a better job of addressing Java's main criticisms than Java itself.

gcc even has a java (the language) compiler now (OK for about 5 years) that generates native machine code (what everyone used to whinge about)
Mono has that too.

and there are independent implementations of the Java libraries (e.g. GNU Classpath).
Mono IS an independent implementation, along with DotGNU.

Mono needs to die a death.
No, it doesn't. Please stop talking out of your ass.

Re:No Really Definite Confirmation of This Yet by dzfoo · 2009-07-07 04:22 · Score: 1 · on Microsoft Puts C# and the CLI Under "Community Promise"

You don't get it. ".NET" is much more than just C# and CLI, it is the platform comprised of Winforms, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, and other frameworks. Using those does not allow for patent-hassle-free, cross-platform development as Mono purports to offer.

Then the focus of Mono should be specified as "an open source implementation of C# and CLI", not .NET. However, this is not reflected, as far as I can tell, in the main and FAQ pages of the project, which still claim prominently "Open Source" next to ".NET Compatibility". As it stands, the message from the project seems to be schizophrenic: On the one hand it wants to announce itself as a cross-platform implementation of .NET and attract developers to this point, and on the other hand it wants to make itself known as an Open Source project, which is safe from patent issues.

Both signals are not compatible, since the ancillary libraries and frameworks of the .NET platform are proprietary from Microsoft and not part of the Community Promise license. The fact that Miguel de Icaza is now talking about physically separating both the core and the rest is telling of the situation heretofore:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Jul-06.html

In the next few months we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions. One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others.

-dZ.

the sweet feces of Bryan Lunduke and the LHB blog by rs232 · 2009-05-17 00:13 · Score: 1 · on Gartner Tells Businesses to Forget About Vista

Some people seem to find the BoycottNovell website interesting, Bryan Lunduke for one and the Linux Haters blog, which is recommended by none other than Miguel de Icaza

"I was getting a little worried that I wouldn't have something appropriate to close of K-pride week with, but then sweet feces rained down from heaven"

Ogg for Silverlight, not instead of Silverlight by benwaggoner · 2009-05-08 06:13 · Score: 1 · on Theora Ahead of H.264 In Objective PSNR Quality

Well, Moonlight's new preview release includes support for Silveright's Raw AV Pipeline:

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/First-Moonlight-20-Preview-Out-ndash-with-Smooth-Streaming/

The Raw AV pipeline would allow Ogg demuxing with Vorbis and Theora decoding to happen inside managed code in Silverlight/Moonlight.

So users who had either installed wouldn't need to install Ogg to get playback. The web site could just detect the plugin and embed a Silverlight player that includes the decoders.

Hmmm. Looks like someone's even working on one for Vorbis at least:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Mar-24-1.html

Miguel de Icaza recommends the Linux Hater blog by rs232 · 2009-05-03 06:16 · Score: 1 · on Basic Linux Boot On Open Graphics Card

"the mindset is dangerously close to the rationalization used recently by a KDE spokesperson and lampooned by the Linux Hater Blog " Miguel de Icaza on 15 Jul 2008

"As usual, the Linux Hater Blog has some great commentary. Some of his feedback on KDE 4.0 applies to our own decision making. Worth a read " Miguel de Icaza on 14 Jul 2008

This is the kind of commentator he recommends people read:

"I was getting a little worried that I wouldn't have something appropriate to close of K-pride week with, but then sweet feces rained down from heaven"

Miguel de Icaza recommends the Linux Hater blog by rs232 · 2009-05-03 06:16 · Score: 1 · on Basic Linux Boot On Open Graphics Card

"the mindset is dangerously close to the rationalization used recently by a KDE spokesperson and lampooned by the Linux Hater Blog " Miguel de Icaza on 15 Jul 2008

"As usual, the Linux Hater Blog has some great commentary. Some of his feedback on KDE 4.0 applies to our own decision making. Worth a read " Miguel de Icaza on 14 Jul 2008

This is the kind of commentator he recommends people read:

"I was getting a little worried that I wouldn't have something appropriate to close of K-pride week with, but then sweet feces rained down from heaven"

Re:Why make the leap in the first place? by bonefry · 2009-04-08 01:43 · Score: 1 · on Major League Baseball Dumps Silverlight For Flash

> Except right now, it only supports WMV, WMA and MP3

Of course, but that doesn't say much about the actual codecs used. Flash uses FLV, so? Is that less proprietary?

Silverlight 3 has "extensible media support", which means you can use Ogg Vorbis/Theora formats if you'd like. A Mono implementation of Ogg Vorbis is already available for testing.

See here:
http://silverlight.net/themes/silverlight/getstarted/sl3beta.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1#whatsnew
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Mar-24-1.html

Re:Free stuff on top of paid by cdrudge · 2009-04-02 09:41 · Score: 1 · on Microsoft Open Sources ASP.NET MVC

So what if it's a commercial product. The world is ran on commercial products. Not everything has to be developed by individuals, non-commercial organizations, or non-profit foundations. A good portion of Linux was developed, sponsored by, or somehow made possible (either directly or indirectly) by companies with commercial products. Just because it's commercial doesn't mean it can't be open sourced or made freely available. The .NET framework is freely (as in without additional cost) to Windows users which still has a fairly decent installation base in the modern world. There are also free products to develop in VB, C#, ASP.Net, etc.

But to answer your question as to why... Because they can. Because others may be able to take what they've done and make it better. Because they thought that others might find it useful. Because maybe they "saw the light" and realized that keeping it closed wasn't necessarily beneficial to their goals. Because they hope that opening may increase adoption or allow more compatibility with other systems. Because they didn't necessarily need a reason.

Miguel de Icaza seems to be happy about it. You don't necessarily have to be happy about it, but at least it gives people choices and options which is never a bad thing.

Re:UI needs work. by Xtravar · 2009-03-18 05:16 · Score: 1 · on Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional 2nd Ed

There's Paint.NET for mono. I haven't tried it yet, but I should since I just avoid image editing altogether in Linux because I hate dealing with GIMP.

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/May-15-1.html

Re:Macs, moonlight. by BasharTeg · 2009-03-04 03:49 · Score: 0, Troll · on Portugal's Vortalgate — No Microsoft, No Bidding

Oh you mean like web standards that are published far faster than any of the browsers can implement? Like IE8 passes Acid2 perfectly and is CSS 2.1 compliant, but now everyone humps on Acid3 and CSS 3?

What do you want to bet that when IE 8.5 or IE9 releases, they'll have Acid4 out? And Firefox/Oprah will have 90% compliance, and IE will have 50% compliance, and everyone will go nuts about how IE doesn't have the newest web standards.

And if you actually look at Microsoft's efforts on Silverlight, they released it for Mac OSX with plugins for Firefox and Safari, and they are working directly with the Moonlight team to provide technical assistance with the implementation. They have done the right thing all the way through on Silverlight.

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Sep-05.html

Re:Kdawson by miguel · 2009-03-04 03:30 · Score: 2, Informative · on Portugal's Vortalgate — No Microsoft, No Bidding

Moonlight only exists because MS have disclosed most of the implementation details to them, it still lags a long way behind the MS implementation and isn't 100% compatible anyway.

Moonlight exists because we were able to put a prototype together in 21 days (you can read about our hack-a-thon here: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jun-21.html).

Microsoft has since helped us by providing licensed codecs that can be used by Linux users; Providing us with Silverlight specs for a full open source impleentation (Although 100% of it is available on the web at msdn.microsoft.com) and they provided us with test suites to ensure that Moonlight passes every single Silverlight test suite that Microsoft uses internally.

No two implementations will be 100% compatible. In fact even fixing a bug means that version a and version a.0.0.0.1 with the bug fixed are not "100% compatible", so there is not much point in arguing about 100% compatibility in the first case, it is easy to prove that this will never be the case. But in that regard, no piece of software will ever be (not the kernel, not the browsers, not anything that ever gets bug fixed as a platform).

But we can get very close to the indented behavior as articulated in the test suites "This is what it is supposed to do as far as -we- humans could guarantee". There will certainly be bugs, but we do not have a problem fixing those, and the Microsoft engineers have been very helpful in answering any questions we might have.

Re:Nope by daemonburrito · 2009-03-02 05:48 · Score: 1 · on Analyzing Microsoft's Linux Lawsuit

Funny you should mention that.

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/Nov-04.html/

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/09/16/HNopenoffice_1.html/

Witness Miguel gush about how Microsoft allowed Sun to ship Mono with Solaris... (yuck)

Microsoft is, in fact, out to get Linux. Miguel is either credulous or corrupted, and Mono is poison.

Re:But the political reasons... by FishWithAHammer · 2009-02-05 12:13 · Score: 1, Insightful · on The Case For Supporting and Using Mono

For your former point--what exactly does this do that Java doesn't? The Java runtimes update, too. Microsoft's update faster, but what of it? They're free to download and freely documented. You have to spend some time learning more, but only if you actually want to use it. LINQ (which I don't really use, I'm not a fan of it) is there, but it does nothing that cannot be done just as easily the "old way". The .NET guys don't deprecate stuff in favor of the new hotness in these sorts of cases; the old ways still stay fine. You can even use the .NET 1.0 non-generic types if you really want to. And unlike Java, you don't have ArrayList and ArrayList, with no under-the-hood difference (seriously, the type checking in Java is complete balls when it comes to generics).

As for mobile platforms--depends on the platform. The iPhone (and the XBox 360, which is obviously not a mobile platform but has similar rules) doesn't let software run other software, so Mono recently rolled out static compilation. The Mono static compilation system either currently does or is in the process of (I'm out of the loop, I worked for them for GSoC and haven't kept in touch much since) importing code from Linker to strip out the excess library cruft in those images.

On other mobile platforms such as WinMobile, Microsoft has the .NET Compact Framework. It's slimmed down mostly by removing Windows-specific libraries like WinForms, which takes up the largest amount of space. The "core" libraries like System.* (not the subtrees, but the language itself), System.Core (which includes LINQ), System.Web, System.Net, etc. are all really quite small. (You won't fit it on a 4MB Flash ROM, but if you're trying to do that you already screwed up when picking your tool set. Nobody's saying Mono's the solution for everything!) You're not going to have the upper-level libraries like WinForms on your toaster, but having them would be silly. Similarly, XNA (.NET on the 360) doesn't have WinForms, but does have libraries specific to the interfacing with the XBox 360 when running there and DirectX when running on Windows; you can use standard .NET libraries that are not included in the XNA redist when developing on Windows, but in years of working with the framework I've never found myself accidentially doing that or wishing I could get away with it. It just doesn't come up.

You make good points, but they're pretty much not problems, as far as I (and most other .NET/Mono devs, it seems) can see.

Re:c-derived languages? by FishWithAHammer · 2009-01-23 12:20 · Score: 1 · on Survey Says C Dominated New '08 Open-Source Projects

For all practical purposes doing C# development is hitching yourself to the Microsoft wagon.

Not true anymore. There's plenty of evidence to the contrary. Hell, look at Miguel's own blog for examples.

Their patent posturing alone is enough that it should scare anybody away from C#.

Worst-case--and that really is worst-case, because I don't think that Microsoft will ever push the patents issue--they aren't going to sue me, so I don't really care.

Additionally, who wants to lend their brain to a Microsoft technology of any kind? It's like filling it with images of goatse.

The worst kind of nonsense: stupid nonsense.

Set aside your bitching about OMG PATENTS (here's a hint: IBM postures about patents too, the fact that they've given a license to open source doesn't make them any better about it except they aren't targeting you) for a moment and actually look at the products for a second.

DirectX is almost inarguably superior to OpenGL/OpenAL/whatever in Linux and OS X Foundation. .NET has its problems, but it's on par or better than Java in terms of ease of use.

IIS is as performant or better than Apache under pretty common circumstances.

SharePoint sucks from a techie point of view, but is pretty awesome from a business development point of view.

Microsoft has its problems, of course. But why I continue to use their stuff is that they do one thing that most of the open source world doesn't: they actually look at how people use products and then they tailor their solutions to the way people actually work. That alone is enough reason for me to use their technologies where appropriate--because while they won't be perfect (and aren't even good, in some areas--ASP.NET is an abortion, though the MVC libraries make it more tolerable), they'll usually be built with an eye toward not fighting the technology and getting work done.

Live Streaming through Moonlight by ecliptik · 2009-01-20 03:22 · Score: 2, Informative · on The Web Braces For Inauguration Traffic

Miguel de Icaza posted a note this morning saying that after working with MS last night they now have a Moonlight add-on for 32/64-bit and PowerPC Firefox to stream the inauguration live from the official pic2009.org site. The install was quick, although the stream seems to stop and stutter frequently.

Inauguration WILL have Linux and PPC Mac support by benwaggoner · 2009-01-19 20:32 · Score: 1 · on MS Silverlight To Stream Obama Inauguration Events

Good news everyone. After burning some midnight oil, we (Microsoft) and Novell have pulled together a Silverlight 1.0 compatible verison of the inauguration player that's compatible with both Moonlight Beta 1 and Silvelight 1.0 on PowerPC Macs.

Miguel's Blog: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Jan-20.html
My Blog: http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/The-Obama-Inauguration-coming-to-Linux-and-PowerPC-Macs-Plus-compression-details/

The updated player should be up around 6 am EST if you want to validate your installs.

http://pic2009.org/

Re:Firefox FTW by TiberSeptm · 2008-11-03 02:18 · Score: 1 · on Netflix Extends "Watch Instantly" To Mac Users

I also probably should have emphasized that I was doing it on a windows machine. If only MS would release silverlight for linux like they say they plan to. Silverlight for Linux Announced MS and Novell Collaberation

Re:It's an awesome blog by Ed+Avis · 2008-07-21 00:16 · Score: 1 · on Linux Needs More Haters

Paint.NET? That's on Windows, isn't it? It's a shame that people have to reboot into Windows to run a useful free application like that.

If only there were, I don't know... some kind of compatibility environment so you could run apps like Paint.NET on Linux using only free software? In an ideal world there might even be a port of Paint.NET done by some hard-working free software developer.

It's an awesome blog by Digana · 2008-07-20 04:39 · Score: 5, Insightful · on Linux Needs More Haters

LinuxHater's blog is aweseome, and I say this as someone who deeply loves Linux and GNU and all that is based on them. His criticisms are very well thought-out, not just stupid name calling, but clear, effective, technical, and explicit complaints about everything that is wrong with free software. He coats it with sardonic and bitter vitriol, yet beneath that tough exterior, there are the complaints of someone who has evidently spent a lot of time poking around the system, down to its gritty internals, and has found everything that could be improved about it.

Even Miguel de Icaza loves LinuxHater's blog. I recommend that any free software enthusiast spend some good time reading the blog. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wonder how you can make it all better.

Re:I will not by Ilgaz · 2008-06-19 02:43 · Score: 2, Interesting · on OpenSUSE 11.0 Released

While you joke, I checked the Novell CTO's blog about what he would say about new SUSE.

"Hanging out at Microsoft
I will be at Microsoft on Thursday and Friday, and only have meetings on Thursday afternoon.

I would love to meet other hackers. If you want to meet, discuss, talk, drop me an email:

Posted by Miguel de Icaza on 18 Jun 2008"

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Jun-18.html

What is it called if something is so sad that you can't even risk joking about it?

Re:What's MSFTs Point? by Jugalator · 2008-06-02 09:55 · Score: 2, Interesting · on Microsoft Linking Silverlight, Ruby on Rails

It works on Safari on Mac OS, and might be useful to have when the Linux support is done too. Heck, it's early even for use on Windows. Things only get moderately interesting for me once Silverlight 2 is done, and it isn't yet for any platform.

Re:Just use MythTV. by willyhill · 2008-05-27 05:18 · Score: 1 · on A Bare-Bones Linux+Mono+GUI Distro?

The answer is you can't

Why?

the purpose is better filled with MythTV

I would agree if it wasn't for the fact that you yourself have said in the past it's a nightmare to get running correctly.

Vista's DRM makes media a headache

Agenda much?

no way M$ will share enough information

Ah, the "M$ will kill Mono" meme. I'm not sure what good it would do if I even try to address that. People who are smarter than me have tried and gotten nothing but ridicule and abuse from people like you.

Re:Good way to turn a positive thing negative by freakyfreak2 · 2008-03-11 07:06 · Score: 1 · on iPhone SDK Rules Block Skype, Firefox, Java ...

I should have searched, Mono runs on the Iphone/Ipod Touch now. Sweet http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Mar-10.html

Re:Miguel by Anonymous Coward · 2008-03-07 21:46 · Score: -1 · on De Icaza Regrets Novell/Microsoft Pact

Yup, the same Miguel who recently wrote in his blog:
"Sure, using a proprietary OS had its benefits: more consistency, more QA, more applications, lots of support, latest video drivers".
Miguel, next time you're up there in Redmond, ask your friends to show you something that's called Vista, will ya?

Re:Ah. I see. by Lugae · 2008-03-07 09:21 · Score: 1 · on De Icaza Regrets Novell/Microsoft Pact

I'd forgive him if he had anything to do with the decision. While he seems to have initially thought that collaboration would have been a good thing, he didn't have anything to do with the terms of the deal and found out less than a week before the public announcement. Asking for collaboration isn't really the same thing is a cross-patent licensing agreement, which is what happened, and which he didn't have anything to do with.

Read Miguel's blog by Anonymous Coward · 2008-02-03 10:07 · Score: 1, Interesting · on Desktop Environment for Proprietary Applications?

Secondly, GNOME is *NOT* adopting Microsoft technologies. Miguel != SuSE != GNOME. OOXML, Mono are not essential technologies, and can be removed quite simply That sounds comforting, but little tidbits like this one from Miguel's blog are what's keeping people on their toes.

"Mono right now shines as a platform for developing desktop applications, and we want to make sure that the developer experience there is great. Once we have conquered that space, we can organically reach into other spaces, but lets first get the first generation of Mono-based GNOME applications rock solid and shipping." - Miguel de Icaza

The focus on the "developer experience", the conquering, the reaching into other spaces... creeps me out, you?
Do you think Miguel is most concerned with the technology itself or it's penetration? Why?

Re:Who is the target audience? by kripkenstein · 2008-01-31 22:54 · Score: 2, Informative · on Microsoft Launches IT Superhero Comic

Your argument assumes Moonlight competes with Silverlight, but is appears false.: Microsoft engineers have collaborated with those from Novell to improve Moonlight, and Microsoft has officially recognized Moonlight. Such a thing would of course never happen with Wine or Google Docs, because those in fact are competition.

Ray Tracing in one LINQ statement by guignome · 2008-01-18 03:44 · Score: 1 · on Ray Tracing for Gaming Explored

I discovered raytracing by looking at that http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Nov-16.html . It's a fun way to quickly see how raytracing works :-)

Re:Silverlight? by EvilRyry · 2008-01-07 03:27 · Score: 5, Insightful · on The Final CES Keynote From Bill Gates

As siblings have mentioned, Moonlight will likely always be a few steps behind silverlight. Also, there's no guarantee the spec will remain open in the future (see SMB, IE for Mac/UNIX for more info).

More importantly, Moonlight will never be truly Free. Take a look at the audio/video formats it supports. VC-1... sure great for video, also have the option of WMV which I have a feeling will be quite popular. Audio - WMA or MP3. From Miguel de Icaza's web log

Microsoft will make the codecs for video and audio available to users of Moonlight from their web site. The codecs will be binary codecs, and they will only be licensed for use with Moonlight on a web browser

Sure these formats have been/will be reverse engineered, but with DRM out there in the world it will make decoding DRMed media with open source codecs illegal! So much for free!

This doesn't make Flash any better, I'm just saying that people who proclaim that Silverlight is great because it will have a real open source implementation aren't telling or don't know the whole story.

Re:Silverlight? by morgan_greywolf · 2008-01-07 01:38 · Score: 5, Informative · on The Final CES Keynote From Bill Gates

Microsoft has made the spec relatively open and it's being implemented by Miguel de Icaza & Co. as part of the Mono project.

Re:I think I can answer that one... by D4MO · 2007-11-14 22:58 · Score: 1 · on Predicting The Google Phone

There will be support for other lanugages. Google created their own open source VM called Dalvik:

"So, Android uses the syntax of the Java platform (the Java "language", if you wish, which is enough to make java programmers feel at home and IDEs to support the editing smoothly) and the java SE class library but not the Java bytecode or the Java virtual machine to execute it on the phone (and, note, Android's implementation of the Java SE class library is, indeed, Apache Harmony's!)" http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/110/

I expect to see a c# compiler (http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Nov-13-1.html) and others in due course.

Re:About Silverlight? by mitchskin · 2007-11-02 08:32 · Score: 1 · on MS, Mozilla Clashing Over JavaScript Update

Silverlight is not about competing with Javascript at all.

Yeah, right. Silverlight is a lot of things to a lot of people, but saying that it doesn't compete with Javascript/DHTML is silly. Both are ways of making web apps more interactive. The Chess speed demo from Mix 07 is one example of Microsoft explicitly comparing Silverlight to Javascript on speed. And speed (through, among other things, a type system) is one of the main additions in ES4.

Silverlight is about competing with adobe flash, which by the way is way ahead of microsoft at the moment for the robust web app space, so why did you choose to bash Microsoft and not adobe? Never mind, we know the answer.

The answer is because Adobe is helping with ES4 and Microsoft is spreading FUD about it.

They have no objections to something new, just dont break the old.

Ecmascript 4 doesn't break the old; it's completely compatible with (a superset of) Ecmascript 3. The Microsoft people haven't given a single example of an incompatibility; what they're saying is literally FUD.

Re:Paint.net is Java-trapped by Koyaanisqatsi · 2007-10-03 23:29 · Score: 1 · on GIMP 2 for Photographers

I was intrigued by your comments so I went checking ...

It appears the port is more or less done. YMMV, I'm not a linux/mono guy and haven't checked in depth

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/May-15-1.html

Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger by Anonymous Coward · 2007-09-19 11:54 · Score: 1, Insightful · on GNOME 2.20 Released

It's not like Tomboy is some vital application you could never live without. It's a note taking application; it's basically Apple's "Stickies" in GNOME format. Don't install it and tell your OS vendor not to ship it (and to ship Tracker by default instead of Beagle).

And the Qt/KDE guys are working on Mono bindings as well: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Sep-18.html So there goes that notion.

OOXML. by miguel · 2007-09-10 13:00 · Score: 4, Informative · on de lcaza calls OOXML a "Superb Standard"

Folks,

I made that comment on my blog because that reflects my personal opinion. You really need to obsess over something else.

And before someone brings up the Microsoft connection, you should know that Novell official policy is to actively endorse ODF and that Novell's position on OOXML is neutral. My employer does not engage in any advocacy for or against OOXML (but folks in engineering work on OOXML support for OO.org).

My opinions are my own, they do not represents the views of my employer.

Now, speaking purely personally.

I consider OOXML to be a pretty good standard all things considered, as I said back in January or February I did not agree with a lot of the criticism that was aimed at OOXML. The quality of the critique was not very high, and it so far has consisted of throwing as much mud as possible and waiting to see what sticks, and what sticks repeat it a thousand times.

If these critiques were aimed at Linux or open source, we would be justly up in arms about the criticism being sloppy and having very little to stand on. I went into some detail back in January:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jan-30.html

Some of my opinions are based on the work that I did in Gnumeric many years ago.

Before there was any agreements between Microsoft and Novell, I was part of ECMA and when Microsoft initiated the OOXML specification process, it was me that got Novell's OpenOffice.org hackers to attend the meetings. At the time my goal was to extract as much information as possible from Microsoft because of the history we had with Gnumeric.

Michael Meeks and Jody Goldberg were some of the guys that went and attended the ECMA meetings. From all the issues that were presented to ECMA, Novell was the second issue raiser (behind Microsoft's own QA of the spec), and it was all largely thanks to Jody's diligent review of the spec. From all the issues raised to date, on the latest status report only one issue had not been addressed (118 or 180, I can not recall anymore). Am personally proud that Jody and Michael made Microsoft add ~650 pages or so to the spec that documented the formulas (one of the things we struggled a lot with in the Gnumeric days). And all of this happened before the Novell/Microsoft agreement. Our interest at the time was: lets get the most information we can get out of this spec to be able to interop.

So from that standpoint, I think that the folks at ECMA have done a pretty good job of addressing the issues raised by those that were implementing it.

The specification can be criticized on various levels, from critical issues, to mild issues, and in a way the distributed effort to stop OOXML helped debug the spec and raise the issues that need to be clarified.

There is certainly a number of critical issues that must be addressed, and it seems from every comment that Brian makes on his blog, that ECMA and Microsoft are committed to resolving those issues. I would not have noticed them, so in that regard the anti-OOXML camp has done a great job in terms of finding problems in the spec.

But the majority of the criticism falls in other categories:

mild, but conflated by a pedantic outrage over it ranging from OH MY GOD THEY USE A BITFIELD THAT IS JUST SO-NOT-XML (am using caps to encapsulate the outrage in an actual discussion when an acquaintance of mine lost it)

misinformed (Stephane Rodriguez shotting himself in the foot and asking "why does it bleed?", his document is making the rounds, and I have debunked it here: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=279895&cid=20363627 and someone else on CodeProject or in Slashdot had to explain to him with sticks and balls his mistakes).

misrepresentation, like people claim that you must obtain a license from Microsoft to implement OOXML, that is simply not

Have To Defend MS Here by logicnazi · 2007-08-18 07:30 · Score: 3, Insightful · on Microsoft's New Permissive License Meets Opposition

I don't like MS much but I have to say I'm on their side in this matter. They are submitting licensees for approval not asking OSI to support or approve of their broader business model. OSI needs to present itself as an impartial organization that will render fair objective verdicts about whether a license counts as open source whoever submits that license.

Besides, I think it creates all the wrong incentives when we give MS shit for improving its relation with open source. Admittedly maybe I'm a bit influenced here by this post by Miguel de Icaza's blog but I do get the sense that MS is being treated worse just because they are MS. Of course it's only natural for people in the open source community to want to get back at MS when they can given how MS is treating them but in the long run I think giving them grief over their attempts to open source stuff just contributes to the perception in MS that open source software is a fanatical rabid anti-capitalist movement not reasonable people making software they can work with and make compromises to.

Re:musicmatch? by morgan_greywolf · 2007-07-09 00:24 · Score: 2, Informative · on Yahoo Downgrades MusicMatch Jukebox

I was thinking the same thing about

http://banshee-project.org/index.php/Main_Page

, which is actually now available for Windows as well, according to Miguel de Icaza's blog. Very nice, very slick with a iTunes/Rhythmbox-style interface (without the instabilities of Rythmbox), and it's available from the Ubuntu repos.

Re:The MS teams by Bloody+Templar · 2007-06-25 08:38 · Score: 2, Insightful · on Mono Coders Hack Linux Silverlight in 21 Days

Nope. Miguel de Icaza mentioned explicitly in his blog that his team received guidance from Scott Guthrie and others in Microsoft.

Re:You'll need a ten foot pole... by mattr · 2007-05-04 02:02 · Score: 1 · on Miguel Plans Silverlight on Mono & Linux by Years End

Source: http://tirania.org/blog/ under the Predictions heading.

"Silverlight for Linux. And if there is no announcement, we should try to get someone drunk enough to get them to do it." There was no announcement of Silverlight for Linux, but I was still kind of joking. But I did get drunk with senior Microsoft employees. One point.