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Netscape Co-Founder Wants IE To Stay With Windows
Wister285 writes: "In a rather intersting turn of events, Netscape co-founder Jim Clark said that he would rather see Microsoft's Internet Explorer stay with the Windows software, should the company be broken up as planned, despite Microsoft's promised appeals. He says that the Microsoft-Other-Software-Company could use the software in a more harmful manner than Microsoft-Windows-Company would. Makes sense... Microsoft-Other Software-Company has a larger grasp on the market (which would most likely be all OSs)." The difficulty with directed outcomes raises its ugly little head again. Where's Harry [that's "Hari" -- mea culpa. timothy] Seldon when you need him?
In a way yes, in a way no. There is nothing illigal about MS bundeling there browser with windows. There is on the other hand a lot illigal about MS barring there OEM's from bundeling Netscape (or some other compeating technology) in addition/place of it. This is the point that many people seem to be missing. Saying that its illigal for Ms to simply to bundle there browser is akin to saying it illigal for them to include notepad for solitare simply because there are other third party clones compeating with those products too. Its the fact that Microsoft flat out threatened and barred there OEM's from distributing NS that is what made it an illigal product tie.
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"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
-John Gilmore
And this is where the problems begin. Already due to Netscape's horrible implementation of W3C standards IE is favored by web developers all over (the horrible browser object model doesn't help much). Already some sites are becoming MSIE specific because developers do not want to maintain one site for IE and a less rich site for Netscape. Heck!!! I'm into Open Source and a browser agnostic but yet when the time came for some friends and I to design (coding starts in the fall) a secure messageboard/instant messaging service accesible over the web for use by a local company for our final project we ended up deciding that all the cool stuff would be in the IE version while we'd just make sure that the page displayed with no hijinks for Netscape. This decision is actually better than what most companies are doing or plan to do in the future. This is what scares me and Jim Clark, what happens when users need to use IE to use MS Office, or when developers can only develop for MSIE with Visual Studio? Considering that MSIE is the predominant browser on the platforms on which it exists it doesn't take much imagination to MSFT Applications Company becoming a new kind of cross-platform monopoly. This is why Jim Clark is scared and wants IE to stay with Windows.
In its zeal to tear apart the Windows OS, the government has managed to miss almost all of the monopolistic "ties" that give MS its power.
Separating Office from Windows is good, and it's probably the most important pair. But all of the various clients and servers are still in the same company (rather than leaving the servers with the OS,) which allows MS to push incompatible protocols; Java and Visual Studio are still together, leaving no incentive to keep Visual J++ standard; I'm sure there are other examples. It's only the poor OS division which is left without much monopolistic leverage.
IE is actually a tricky case, because MS has two potential angles on it: It can tie it to IIS, or it can tie it to content on MSNBC or MSN. I suppose separating IE from both IIS and "MS content" would work, but any way you do it, one company is going to end up with an odd combination of properties.
(And no, splitting MS into more companies is not the solution. The government can't just go messing around with the economy at will... They have an obligation to do only what is absolutely necessary to "fix" the problem. I'm not even convinced that splitting MS at all is appropriate, let alone splitting it more than two ways. Anyway, if the government did split MS three ways, we already know that they'd leave IE and content in the same company, which doesn't accomplish anything.)
MSK
My impressions is, that this whole deal with splitting up Microsoft, is going to makke microsoft better and stronger in the long run.
Today, their API is a horrible mess of inconcistent calls to inconsistent subsystems, where someone with real knowledge about what's happening in the deeper layers of the OS might have a chance of actually implementing something usable. But for the rest of us, it's black magic.
If Microsoft is forced to open up for more of their specs, eventually forced (my market) to implement and design a usable API, that will not only benefit the 2. Microsoft (the applications department) but also the rest of us.
My guess is, that in two years from now, Microsoft will either have an API that is sufficently similar to POSIX, or they will be in the same position on the desktop as Netware find themselve on the server market today.
Ok, Microsoft API designers (and their managers) aren't the smartes people on earth, obviously (to anyone who've looked at Win32 at least). But they may not be _that_ stupid after all. Win2K has mountponts, maybe the next Win3K5 (or whatever) will have a select() call that works on pipes (generally), sockets, and file descriptors. Maybe they will have a CreateProcess() call that takes less than 10 arguments, it could even be a fork(). Maybe, just maybe, they will learn.
If this happens, we could have a WindowsXXXX platform which would actually be of real use to people who need more than one computer in a network. This could position Windows among the other '70s technology platforms that are in use today, *BSD, Linux, etc. This would be a giant breakthrough for the platform from the '80s that chose to never learn from history otherwise.
Cheers, to whatever the future brings. I personally doubt we'll see the boneheads suddenly starting to learn, but then again, you never know.
The browser determines the content that is used on the net. It the browser supports PNG then webpage designers will start using PNG. When you start talking about video and third party plugins thats a different story. If MSFT has a monopoly in browser share and their browser only supports MSFT media player (whatever their video is called) natively, then they will slowly erase Real, Quicktime and any other competitors from the market. Same goes for anything currently supported by plugins that they can build into the browser. Lets have the user software separated from the platform (OS + browser) as much as possible to support competition and user choice.
no sig.
More importantly, part of the browser's significance is the way it has to work in tandem with the server side code. If everyone stuck to published standards (yeah right), this wouldn't be an issue. But as it is, with browsers being deliberately & accidentally incompatible in important ways, the people working on the server end of thigns cannot ignore what is out there on the client end. If 80% or whatever of the market is using IE, and IE wants your html to look a certain way, then that's the way you're going to design your pages. If IE goes a step further and says it can only recognize pages delivered from IIS and nothing from, say, Apache, then servers will have to start configuring their software to keep the clients happy. One thing can lead to another and we find ourselves in a situation where a company has leveraged its position in one market in order to take over things in another one.
That is exactly the sort of behavior that this trial was all about, and if allowed to go unchecked it's the sort of behavior that will have a very nasty effect on things in the future. It is important, if you look at how everything fits together here.
I for one still think they got off easy -- if it had been up to me, I'd just say to shut the bastards down, none of this lameass breakup nonsense. American law gives corporations the status of "artificial persons", with all the protections afforded to real people. Horseshit! Corporations, if left unchecked, are much *more* powerful & protected than real people, and we don't need braindead laws like this to make things easier for them. If I had my way, we'd make examples out of a few corporations to show them that the people are still in charge in a democracy like this. Start with Phillip Morris & Microsoft, find out where their corporate charter is held, and sign a petition to have it revoked. Hey presto and with a stroke of a pen they cease to exist. There is legal precedent for this, though not within the last 100 years. I'd like to see it happen again, and I think this trial would have been a perfect test case.
But then, maybe my bias against the sleazy bastards is a bit obvious here, and I doubt I would have been given the cae even if I were a judge. Oh well, I can dream, can't I? :)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Actually, so long as IIS is separated from NT, we're probably safe. Right now, IIS is `free' (i.e. bundled) with NT. This means any company with NT servers automatically has an NT+IIS WWW server on their hands - so why would they want to use another WWW server like Apache? They've already got one!
If NT cannot come with IIS, however, it's a different kettle of fish: the company will have all those NT servers, but without a WWW server. They look around, and see two options: IIS and Apache. One has three times the market share, and a much better reputation, and it comes with source so you can modify it if you need. The other has been out there for years, but hasn't made much progress in terms of market share; the standards compliance is a bit iffy, and it dies you down to one OS. Oh, and there's no source code: you have problems, you're SOL.
*Splat*. IIS loses. Microsoft Apps are stuck having to comply with open standards, on a level playing field. No hidden APIs to help them, no bundling to push IE out there to all the Windows users - suddenly, Real, Quicktime etc. can get a foot in the door.
Meanwhile, MS OS (M SOS?) decides they do want to bundle a browser, video player etc., but they aren't allowed to get it from MS Apps. Where do they go? Well, Netscape have a nice new browser which should be perfect... :-)
"no matter how you look at it msie and it's integration into windows is clearly a threat to netscape. however, it clearly poses more of a threat if it is not distributed with out windows. i guess the true question here is, why can't mircosoft simply put out a good clean tested browser."
.doc file backward incompatibility. There are acceptable converters for OFF97 for anything less than a book or complex cross-app projects (and in my experience, Off97 is little better than OFF95 for writing books) Unfortunately, Office file formats are not covered by the DOJ decree. One can only hope that this is among the information shared between MS-OS and MS-AP. MS-OS would then have the right to release them -- and might, to encourage new Windows apps [See my most optimistic projection on why MS-OS and MS-AP may be at each pther's throats early on]
I like NetscapeCo and I'm fairly irritated by MS, but I can't give Jim Clark this point. MS-IE is an app, not an OS or even a NOS (Network Operating System) as Clark implies when he says "The browser is to Internet services what the operating system is to (PC) applications."
That's not to say that there aren't risks from MSIE in MS-AP, but that those actual risks have no place in the DOJ action. The DOJ was concerned with unfair business practice, not competition by the MSIE software itself. Specifically, the OS integration you mention applies mostly to Windows OSs (which have enough problems as it is)
I'm more worried about "Embrace and extend", which will not end with the divestitute. It's difficult to fight any predominant software (and of course, Netscape itself was guilty of E+E in the days when it was the predominant browser), but MS has a history of bad security choices. Users want features and convenience; they usually pay lip service to security. We'd be foolish to pretend that most Linux installations are as tight as they should be -- and even OpenBSD installs often have unnecessary holes poked in them for convenience (even though OpenBSD users are more concerned with security from Day One)
MS script/macro/integration breaches threaten user data -- and data compromise alone is more dangerous than machine compromise ('theft of PU cycles and resources') alone
MA-AP may have a tough time giving up these poor practices, since it's staffed by the same people as before. The default settings on MSIE are heavily weighed to the Application's convenience, rather than user security. When I last saw MSIE-5, even their "high security" setting was more permissive than I considered acceptable for 'Normal' security
I've long fought the installion of any version of Office beyond Office 95. (I suppose this has cost MS a lot of business, but I've never had a single complaint from a user about lost capability - only about MS's deliberate
Alas, we'll never see Off95 for Linux (BSD, BeOS, etc.) Ideally, I'd hope MS-AP might see the market advantage in creating a safe OFF2003 by going back to the feature set of OFF95 and reviewing the revision tree since. Certainly the feature set of their previous major cross-platform port (Mac) always lagged behind the current version of the Win version. We could be uncharitable and assume this was a effort to hinder the Mac, but perhaps it also contained a realistic assessment of the time-to-market for porting a full "bells and whistles" version vs. a substantial workable subset.
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
But look at the KDE browser. That's come a lot further a lot faster than the Mozilla project.
That statement really bothers me, because while the KDE browser is just that, a web browser, you have to understand that Mozilla is as much as application framework as it is a web browser. The ability to parse HTML is just one part of what the Mozilla project is all about.
Did you know that every part of Mozilla's UI and dialogs are written in an XML doc type called XUL? By doing this, the Netscape guys no longer have to deal with half a dozen UI toolkits for each platform. As you can imagine, this is no small task.
Konqueror has come along faster, but there are different design goals: Browser vs. complex cross platform app framework (wrapped around a browser).
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"And is the Tao in the DOS for a personal computer?"
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Yes, I also think that Elian should stay with his father.
Oh well. It will be years before we find out if Microsoft really will be broken up. All of this speculation will do nothing but put the already suffering tech-stocks in even more of a tizzy.
Who thinks that any Microsoft spinoff has a chance of practicing any shady business activities after all of this? The DoJ doesn't assume that after action is taken, everything is peachy. You still have the same people running the companies. They'll have their eye on Microsoft for at least another decade.
I'm part of a tiny group with these intersecting characteristics: Unix fanatic, doesn't like Microsoft products, but doesn't think they should be broken up. I think they should be punished for using their monopoly status to bully others, but I don't think their monopoly status should be taken from them forcefully. I don't think that large US corporations should have the worry of getting so large that the government breaks them up. You gain a monopoly through hard work. Microsoft was only able to bully others once they gained a monopoly. Before then, they didn't have the clout to do be a bully. Afterwards, they used their status to make sure they stayed where they were. I think that they should be punished (fines/business restrictions/et cetera) and watched very carefully. I also think that afterwards, there should be a giant wave of civil suits with generous punitive damages claimed.
I don't think the OS should be seperated from the apps. Microsoft has valid points. The integration of the two has helped them to really improve how things work. You know why IIS runs fast as hell? Because the engineers had the OS source and could make whatever optimizations you want. When you write software for one OS, which you have complete knowledge of, and will only be executing on one arcitecture, a lot of problems Magically disappear. Why should we begrudge them for doing this?
I'm also tired of those that diss Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and others for [up until recently] only selling Windows PCs. Is Microsoft behind this? They have a minor role. More important is the demand of the comsumers. Windows has no competitors there. Why? The only other company that produces a viable newbie OS is Apple, and they are intent on keeping the OS with the hardware. What other OS could compete, even if Microsoft weren't a dinosaur?
Microsoft could have had competitors in this market. Sun, HP, or (snicker) SGI could have sold stripped-down versions of their respective OSes (SunOS, HP-UX, and IRIX) with CDE as a GUI and done quite well. (CDE, for you Linuxers, is the Motif-friendly windowing system that has been common on commercial Unix and DEC systems for years.) All of these companies are large enough to provide appropriate driver support. Or imagine if Sun, HP, and SGI could have allied themselves to create a UNIX-based consumer-level OS. They'd have excellent driver support for networking, printing, and graphics, and enough market share to get whatever else they needed. Plus, if implemented correctly (i.e. not stripped down too much), the power and stability of UNIX.
CDE does have the ability to be a consumer GUI! How many of you knew that Sun boxen are used internally by Sun as PCs? Yep, a friend of mine who did Sun marketing reminded me of this. He, being a marketer, was not very techinical. (A sweeping yet sadly true statement.) I say, "What did you think of the Solaris GUI? Easy to use?" He says, "No problem." To elaborate on his cluelessness, he didn't know it was CDE in combination with dtwm**. That the user didn't even know what it was called, and yet was able to use it as a desktop OS for four years, with no UNIX training, proves that the Windows-esque isolation of the user from the CLUE can be done in UNIX. But it never caught on in the "real world", and couldn't have, because up until last year commercial level UNIX was very expensive, and didn't run on x86 hardware. But this is the subject of another rant.
That's another thing: architecture. You complain that Compaq won't sell you a PC with Linux. I'll complain, why can't I get a PC with a RISC chip?*** ;-)
Ah well, I'm just daydreaming and babbling again. And I could do this for hours, ranting about why I love UNIX, and how I don't think NT is a bad product, but should be marketed as a desktop OS, and blah blah blah, mouth running like I'm Signal 11. Wow, this Microsoft stuff will do that to you. We'll be seeing books and movies and studies and After-School Specials ("Don't let your kids become Microsoft Programmers!") and Made-For-TV Movies ("Bill Gates, Give Me Back my Baby!") for twenty years afterwards.
Reminds me: did anyone watch that cable movie (on TNT?) that was about the lives of Jobs and Gates? I heard about that, but not being much of a TV viewer, I never watched it. Is it available on video? It sounded vaguely interesting.
** Since SunOS 5.7, that is. OW is still in option, but honestly, why? CDE is beautiful for the power-user as well as the newbie. If you want a cleaner desktop, use AfterStep. OW offers ZERO benefits, other than being preinstalled. :-)
*** The closest you'll get is a Sun Ultra 5, which will cost you about US$3200, including 17" monitor. The box has an UltraSPARC IIi, and is pretty cool considering how much you'd have to pay to get a similar system from HP or SGI. The cheapest HP workstations will include full SCSI and a bunch of other stuff I honestly don't need, and start around $7k. Note that while HP now sells Linux workstations, they're x86. Sort of a waste.
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I like to watch.
Does anyone bother to look at the software installed on their unix computer anymore? With all the fucking griping about Mozilla and netscape/unix it's starting to get old.
***MANUAL FOR UNIX WEB-BROWSING***
Go to terminal. Type in 'lynx'. WOW.
Go to terminal. Install 'links'. ULTRA-WOW!
Go to terminal. Install 'w3m'. WOW!
Go to application-launcher. Type in 'netscape'. WOW!
Go to application-launcher. Type in 'kfm --window'. EXTREME WOW.
Go to terminal. Download and unpack appropriate Mozilla build. Type 'mozilla'. WOW.
Go to terminal. Locate a java browser, or Amaya, or Opera beta, or any of TWENTY UMPTEEN other projects. Install. WOW.
***POINTS***
Web browsing options for unix are plentiful for those who take ten seconds of effort to slap them on the machine, even if nothing is as exceptional as Internet Explorer.
'kfm' is the most brutally underrated quick/fast/dirty web browser ever created. Everyone has KDE, hence kfm, on their linux/bsd desktops, yet hardly anyone fucking realizes what it can do.
'links' is the most brutally underexposed text browser ever. Lynx is a fucking dump next to it. And yes, it does color and frames and tables and layout and that shit. Press 'Esc' to turn on color.
The GTKHTML and Konqueror projects are fucking wonderful.
DontBlow.com is an absolute good.
I saw a Charlie Rose (yes I watch PBS regularly!)
where he had the DOJ, MS lawyer, and some
colmnists the other day.
Seems like the DOJ is almost counting on the
browser being powerful in the way that
is mentioned in the article. I think the DOJ
wants those two MS companies to be at each
other's throats.
What about letting the software company keep
IE, but Windows company gets IIS? That way
they can't leverage IIS and IE together?
I don't like the idea of IE+Windows together
for the short term though.
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
Congratulations, you've joined the ranks of people who are so obsessed with going against the social grain that you are just as conformist as the people you criticise.
/. mainstream and moderate it down to 0 as Overrated or Flamebait. But a posting of "Linus kicks Bills sorry ass yadda yadda yadda" gets a 5, for being Informative.
Nobody here wants the government getting involved in the Internet. Yet everybody wants the government involved in the software industry. (That makes sense. Since obviously the Internet doesn't use software.)
I think a better way to put it is that no one wants a big, powerful entity to control the internet OR software. If it's the government, then I oppose the government. If it's Microsoft and the government can help, than I would side with the lesser of two evils.
Everybody here values this forum's free speech, yet you take any well reasoned and factual comment which disagrees with
You know, it's become fashionable to claim this, as if people who do are more enlightened than the rest of us. But frankly I can't see examples of it. Dissenting opinions are moderated up ALL THE TIME, and thoughtless Linux advocacy is almost always modded down. I challenge you to cite some specific wrongly moderated messages if you're going to get on your high horse and claim that we're all guilty of tunnel vision.
Fuck moderation points, I'm just getting warmed up!
I love this reverse psychology game, where you try and make the moderators believe that if they don't mod you up that they're bigoted or something.
OPEN SOURCE! OPEN SOURCE! I won't run Windows because it's not open source! But let me haul ass to CompUSA to buy my closed-source copy of Diablo II and WordPerfect 2000.
Few people claim that there's no place for commercial, closed-source software. It's just preferable when there's an open-source alternative.
There's no fragmentation in the Linux world!! Nooo!!! But don't run that program, because it requires Xfree 32.2353, but it only comes standard with Red Hat 8.3. [....]
Show me who claims Linux is perfect. I'll show you who doesn't get taken seriously.
But in the meantime, I sit here on my debian box and apt-get almost ANY open source software package and watch it download and install all deps and everything. Show me an equivalent in the windows world.
Hey assholes, how about fixing the damn bug that crashes Netscape every ten minutes?
That's not realy possible. Because Netscape isn't open source. Oh, the irony...
Who else can I piss off? A big FUCK YOU goes out to all of you penguin fuckers who cum when you see Linux ported to fucking digital watches.
I think you're missing the point. When you get together with your buddies and write an full operating system complete with thousands of software packages, which only by virtue of its merit (there sure as hell isn't any marketing) manages to rival the market share and mind share that Linux has, then you can sit around and criticize the open source community. But until then, you're full of hot air. A rebel without a cause, I think they say...