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Microsoft/Mainsoft Porting to Linux - Follow-up
Lee Gomes and I had been writing about the Mainsoft/Microsoft porting to Linux rumours. Now Mainsoft has put out a Media advisory
disavowing the Office rumour. Wininformat also has an article talking about Microsoft's denial of things, which adds another dimension to things. Paul Thurrott, the author of the Wininformant piece, askes a good question in as to why Mainsoft needs a copy of the WinNT source code if it's only porting IE.
The only way out of this dilemma is to do exactly what they are going to do: make a very poor quality port - which is full of bugs and crashes X at every opportunity. Microsoft can then argue: "Look, we Tried, we Really, Really Tried, but Linux Is Such A Poor Platform (R) that this pile of rotting dingo's kidneys is the best that even a Great Innovative Company (R) like Microsoft can do."
Any questions as to how well the Linux port of IE is going to work? Oh yes, also expect the port to mysteriously affect the stability of the core operating system - surely you'll have to be root to install it. Of course that is so obviously sabotage that even Microsoft might not do it, but legally I don't think they have any choice; IE HAS to be part of the core OS - just like they argued in court.
Anyone who doesn't think Microsoft would do such bad faith things - has never studied the history of the company; ask the people who wrote DR DOS. The difference is that instead of leaving an email evidence trail of their bad faith they will be smarter this time. Expect the port to be done by the closest thing to a thousand monkeys with typewriters that Microsoft can find. Nothing like being able to point to the incompetence of Mainsoft to protect yourself, is there Microsoft?
"Why, if we Use Plausible Lies (R) this time we'll be OK; then all the people who throw around the quote about 'never attributing to malice what stupidity can explain' will buy what we are doing. Oh, THAT'S how to be evil - why didn't we think of that before; make it look like incompetence and the morons who look no deeper than the surface won't suspect a thing."
US Voters: FYI: Ralph Nader's campaign has taken a much stronger stance against Microsoft than the other two main candidates. Visit his website for more details.
Most Mac OS X apps call functions in the Carbon API, which is based on the old "Toolbox" API from Mac OS 1 through 9. Most Windows apps call functions in the Win32 API, a cheap knockoff of Toolbox. The difference is that Apple is opening its kernel's BSD APIs, whereas Microsoft has no public document demonstrating its VMS-like calls.
Yes, the internals of NT look like VMS. And if you move each letter in VMS one letter forward, you get WNT.
adopt a bird<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Microsoft is going for a Carbonized port of Office to OS X - i.e. the updated Mac API. They're talking about a Cocoa version (the snazzy new API's in OS X) sometime afterwards. They are going this way ebcause they can support OS 9 and X with the same codebase whereas a Cocoa version would only run on OS X.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
RTFA. Mainsoft uses "MainWin" which essentially is Winelib but "official" and always statically linked (so the Wine folks don't tap into it).
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Most notably, the developers did a lot of work on the SOAP specs. See Frontier and SOAP or the search results page.
There are also lots of links to Perl, Python or what have you implementations of SOAP. I think some of those folks would count as being in the Linux world.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Having used Excel since version 2.3 on the Mac, and FoxPro since FoxBase (also on the Mac), I've never really had much use for anything in Office short of the Excel spreadsheet functions. Notepad is fine for typing things.
There really is no compelling reason to wait for IE, or Office for Linux. Star Office isn't the greatest, but, it gets the job done.
It would probably be a step backward to have Access run under Linux, since there are already many far superior ways to develop web applications natively. You have a browser, a web server and a database server. All free, and, all work stably. If someone tries to start using Access under Linux to replicate these tasks, we'll just be diverting talent away from where they're pushing Linux forward so quickly, now.
I say let this rumor about Micro$oft porting their apps to Linux die. It keeps coming up, and, once it reaches enough people and becomes a discussion, MickeySoft rears it's ugly PR gavel and stamps it down again. Always they ironically confirm they're porting to Solaris, and/or HP-UX. It's technically trivial to port an HP-UX application to Linux. I know, because I have. So why not Linux?
Again.... who cares. Leave it alone.
Linux rocks!!! www.dedserius.com
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
Well, the past is the past, free has turned into the norm. Their only competition on any other OS, aside from Opera and QuickTime Pro, is free as in beer software.
And remember, Netscape started it. That's how they catapolted themselves into the 80%+ marketshare they once had. And don't go into poor Opera stories:
I'm sure iPlanet could sell more product if IIS and Apache weren't free.
And CDE could sell more if not for KDE and Gnome.
Solaris wouldn't have to be $75 if not for Linux and FreeBSD.
That's the competition that the DoJ is after, where Microsoft is not in a position to cripple other platforms by controlling the supply of software and services to those other platforms - just remember the Office/Apple saga from some years back.
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"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Well, how does WINE fit in this whole picture?? Wouldn't it be nice if Mainsoft just fixed up wine for us.. =)
Office has its own problems. Bloatware. Features which reduce productivity rather than increase it (i.e. auto spell check as you type.). The file formats change with every version preventing compatibility with older versions.
Lets face it office apps have NOT changed much in the last five years. Intergrating MP3's, movies, etc... into documents will only be usefull when I can print them and still watch or listen to them.
HTML or another Web standard, provided we continue development, will replace these proprietary solutions. The format will be able to represent any such document which can be created by any office app. Web authoring has/will become the new office software. Finally after all these years we are able to share regardless of the os we choose.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
I, for one, will NOT used web-based apps for my work. My work is MY WORK, it isn't top secret or illegal or anything else, but it is MINE. I will not do my wordprocessing, or any other work, on the web where it is (potentially) ANYONE'S work who can obtain access. It is simply about privacy and total control over my own work, and total control over what I release to other eyes or choose NOT to release.
As a matter of principal, my work is done, and ever shall be done, on MY personal computer without any potential prying eyes taking a gander before I decide (IF I decide) to publish/release the final product. I frickin' HATE web-based crap. I want MY work, MY software, MY time to be absolutely MINE. It is not a shared resource, it is not anyone else's business but my own, it belongs to me. Hence, I require a desktop-based, single client (though with web CAPABILITY) apps to do my graphics, writing, game-playing, whatever, work.
I do not want to HAVE to count on NEVER running into network outages, server crashes, etc, in order to get work done. The net is NOT so reliable that you (or anyone else) can count on it to always be able to get your work done when it relies upon the net.
There have been many times when the net has been unavailable to me at work, for a variety of reasons. Hence, that avenue of information collection is cutoff. There have been many times when the local network has gone down (maintenance, crashes) which prevents access to shared files, servers, etc. If I am relying on this crap to get my publishing work done... No. Thank. You. In EVERY case of the net being unavailable, my personal system has ALWAYS been available. I have ALWAYS been able to write up data, create graphs and graphics, read docs that I have LOCALLY downloaded. If I were relying on a web-based app to do all this, every time the net slowed down due to traffic or was otherwise unavialable, my perfectly serviceable PC/laptop would become merely a desktop heating system. I would get to twiddle my thumbs waiting for the system to come back so I could work on my documents.
There will always be a good use for client/desktop-based productivity apps (and games). The web is not reliable enough or private enough to count on it for everything; and why should one HAVE to cough up a lung to pay for access to the web, say, on an airliner or at an airport to do anything productive when you could do it perfectly fine if the app resides on your own disconnected system?
Web-based apps have a place but it isn't the end-all, be-all, universal fix.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
I'll have to add this to my "News from the Linux frontlines" serial post.
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
If Ms can make all other browsers irrelavent IIS can serve extented proprietary HTTP from IIS to IE and kill Apache. Then Linux is back to being a toy instead of webservers. Then IE will not continue to be developed on Linux due to "a lack of intrest". Thank God for embedded devices to keep IE honest, Mozilla cannot do it alone.
From what I've read so far, if the win32 API is documented in MSDN, they in fact DON'T need the source. This assumes (perhaps stupidly) that the ENTIRE API is documented on those shiny little platters Mainsoft pays a bunch of money for.
No, I don't do win32 programming (and I hardly use win* as an end-user). Yes, I may have some facts missing... But I'm calling it as I see it. Now, if the entire win32 API isn't documented in MSDN, then they most likely need source!
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Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
These folks would like to disagree with you for Windows 98.
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Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
Theer was nothing in my post that indicated I advocated web based apps...I like PC's because they are "Personal" computers.
I was just commenting on MS's strategic direction thats all, and it ain't about porting to various apps.
Steve
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Actually, a much better analogy would have been the CD players in every '98 Cadillac. They were a standard feature -- you couldn't buy a Cadillac without getting one, and their presence discouraged people from buying a different player from a manufacturer other than Delco (at the time a GM division).
An even better one is OS/2 including Web Explorer even before Windows 95 was first released. (Still has the best damn session history of any browser ever released.)
Now, the obvious conterclaim is that Cadillac didn't have a car monopoly, and neither did OS/2. Furthermore, neither GM nor IBM signed a consent decree to refrain from bundling products...
Steven E. Ehrbar
Why is it that this is such a huge issue? Microsoft has already shown IE for MacOS X, and will also have Office. They have effectively been ported to BSD (with the Carbon/Aqua stuff on top, of course), but one must wonder how hard it would be to go from that to Linux binaries. Why the huff and puff?
Bryan R.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Please people, think.
10. Clippy is pure evil
9. Much faster in linux, crashes in half the time
8. bassackwards() function in excell
7. Outlook 2000 is part of a communist plot against humanity
6. Why do you need a bloated Word 2000 when you already can use the very slim EMACS
5. Dont want blue screen of death ported to Linux
4. Forcing me to boot into Windows to use Office feels more opressing (I like to complain)
3. Powerpoint sounds like a gay porno
2. The voices comming from my windows key on my keyboard will only get louder
1. I WANT LINUX TO BE DIFFERENT FROM WINDOWS!!
my other penis is a vagina
Bet they use WINE. Now that will make me smile. :-)
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
I don't know. Maybe M$ can figure out a way to fun Office from within IE and then your OS platform won't matter too much. This would be like stealing Netscape's old idea to kill M$ by making the web browser a platform for running other applications.
Well can I trade in my copy of windows for something to play ASF files in linux? Perhaps not.
Hence the Mac version of IE. No, wait a minute. That can't be right.
Andy Armstrong
It is my understanding that the M$ software for Mac is developed by a fairly autonomous group. Whatever the situation, they have recently released some great 'very Mac' software in IE and Outlook Express, although they did wierdly reinvent some things for OE. Sadly, IE 5 for Mac is miles ahead of Netscape/Mozilla, and iCab isn't quite there yet.
Perhaps they should port the MacOS or MacOSX version of the apps to Linux instead of the Windows versions if they are going to do that. Perhaps by releasing what might be different programs with the same name, Microsoft is bluring the distinctions that they tried to set up when they claimed that IE and Windows were inseperable.
My point is that MS can make good software, if you judge software by the expectations of the majority of the users of the targeted platform.
Well, I think that it is more that Microsoft is very good at setting expectations of people to a very low level. They deliver very flashy software, which is different than what I'd call 'good'. They've also been very successful at defining the criteria by which things are judged so that flash and feature bloat are valued above things being stable and with features that are well thought out.
What does this mean for Linux if/when Office and IE are ported? How would Office for Linux have to be different than Office for Win and Office for Mac to truly be a Linux application worth using?
I'm not the right person to ask that. I have no interest in using Office or IE in any case until Microsoft can clean up their act. I think as far as their applications, they need to spend more time making what is there work right and sensibly rather than just cramming more stuff in.
From the outside, the coolest and most admirable thing about the Linux community is Open Source and everything implied by that. I don't think MS could release a real Linux app, if this is held to be fundamental to truly be considered as a Linux app.
I would tend to agree with most of that. Microsoft will probably never really be able to be compatible with the the Open Source/Free Software world. Then again, I used to think the same thing about IBM. If Microsoft wants to play outside of their world, they need to think about reinventing themselves like IBM has, and learn to be better about being a respectable and ethical company.
IE and Windows are integrated and can't function separately.
That is why there is a Mac version of IE... And a Solaris version... Well, if you look closely at the Solaris version, they include a large chunk of Windows with it as DLLs. This is, from what I've heard fairly typical of things ported with MainSoft's MainWin toolkit. However, I don't believe that Mainsoft has a porting kit for MacOS, so that still doesn't explain the Mac version of IE...
For example, the standard explorer shell extensions for adding icons to the tray (notify icons) don't use any 'hidden' APIs
That's not what I was refering to. The SH* functions are more and more used as 'normal' win32 functions. If you don't know better and reading the MSDN, you'd understand these ARE win32 functions, which they ain't. (I made that mistake).
I wasn't refering to the 'shell' extensions like 'command prompt here' stuff when you right click in explorer. I was referring to stuff like the webpage formatting of a dir in win2k explorer. Not something you can just add.
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Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
MS has already ported IE. They've talked about porting MediaPlayer. Both are yet more examples of anticompetitive "dumping" practices.
What? One of the main spectres in the anti-trust case was that Microsoft intended to lock it's customers in to their platform. Now, when they actually have ported some of their apps to other platforms, it's anti-competitive dumping?
HUH?
Anyways, what's really entertaining is that, okay the mac version of IE is a completely separate app, built from a completely different source code base, but here's IE for Solaris and HP-UX. Built from the Windows version of IE. Which microsoft said was so deeply integreated into the operating system it was impossible to figure out where IE ends and Windows begins. Yet, somehow, they manage to draw the line pretty distinctly, despite the "impossibility" of the task.
Funny, yes. Anticompetitive dumping? No. Not when all their competition is free (Netscape, Real, Quicktime). It's not like Sun will ever sign a deal with Microsoft to exclusively distribute their products.
For a short time they'ed be safe. But after a successful migration, management might go "hey, you know we're saving millions of dollars per year now that we're on Linux and don't have to pay to deploy our OSes. And you know, this Linux seems pretty good, we don't hear many complaints. Why don't we check out staroffice or koffice and see if those would pose acceptable substitutes for MS Office? It'd save us another fortune, you know?"
With no MS OSes or MS suites deployed, companies wouldn't need MS development tools, and more dramatically, they wouldn't need MS BackOffice or Win2000 servers.
Ouch.
No. Microsoft is in no way going to encourage people to check out other operating systems, because then those people might go "overboard" and check out other office suites, development suites, RDBMS, groupware products, etc...
Best to keep the all locked into Windows where Microsofts products run better than the rest...
Ahh, but wouldn't it simply be easier to port the existing Macintosh version (aka the "sans anti-trust monopoly integration API" version) to Linux? It's a different code base, and only shares its name with the Win32 IE.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Except for one thing: The app company could look at the linux community and see their rage and anger towards them and their products and determine that there really wouldn't be much of a market for their products. They could also look and see that their only competition is free, and decide that it'd be awefully hard to compete with free (witness IE vs. Netscape) and decide that it'd be best to save their resources for other things, like maybe .NET or some other StarPortal type knock-off.
Wrong.
One of the reasons Microsoft has integrated in such a fashion is to 'control the Web.'
Another reason is to integrate HTML/Web Technologies into their system (system meaning 'their way of doing things.').
Something interesting to think about--- I downloaded and installed Star Office 5.2 the other day. I installed it on my Windows 2000 machine (which has Office 2000 and IE 5 on it). I decided to check out 'browing the web' with StarOffice. Guess what popped up when I entered a defective URL?? The standard 'Action Canceled' message, informing me that 'Internet Explorer was unable to link to the Web page you requested. The page might be temporarily unavailable.'
So in order to Browse the Web, Star Office uses IE?? (Netscape is also installed on this machine, so it shouldn't have had to use IE).
This is exactly right - my employer uses it to port an expensive low-volume piece of software to Solaris and maybe Linux in the future. Though we use our own portability layer for other bits of software that are deployed on more than 5 or so hosts per customer...
Paul Thurrott et al need to learn to RTFW - it's obvious from Mainsoft's site that it is largely a product company, and the version number of MainWin is 3.x, so it's been around for a while, long before this rumour. In fact the Linux version of MainWin is relatively recent.
Heh, try this:
[edoardo@nautilus edoardo]$ lynx -dump -head http://www.mainsoft.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 17:47:41 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.9 (Unix)
Last-Modified: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 17:45:46 GMT
ETag: "1b070-3d2c-399d764a"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 15660
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
It's quite a surprise! I thought Paul Thurrott's wininformant said Apache runs only on college dorm servers ;-)
IIS is not losing to Apache where it matters
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
It would be smart for Microsoft to port IE to Linux and give up on protecting their OS monopoly. With the new software development model, the browser is the more relevant tool.
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NO CARRIER
Uhh, I'm fine with xmms.
signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
Same deal with Windows Media Player. WiMP for linux means it's already on more OSes than Quicktime, and if they can do a better job than RealPlayer, then WiMP becomes the standard too. MS rules universe.
Now don't get me started on Outlook Express.
In short, they're giving them away free already, so having them embrace and extend to linux/unix can be beneficial. No way in hell they'll be porting Office though.
Thank God.
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
There were once very rare rumours of Microsoft was open sourcing part of itself. Nobody ever really believed them, the end result was Microsoft, after claiming they considered it, declined for reason x,y,z. i.e. they thought about it, but "found" too many problems in open source.
.doc's in emails when the .doc's just contain just text anyway so people with emacs/notepad can read them?
Now are we going to hear, Microsoft conisdered this, but due to the x,y,z short commings in developing programs for linux they're now not going to?
That being said Office for linux wouldn't be a bad thing aslong as Gnome's office was at a stage where it could compete first.
A better alternative being, people stop sending god damn
It's turtles all the way down.
Basicaly, its simple. They do not need to port MS Office to UNIX. By having IE available on UNIX they are making it possible to have people use their upcoming .NET product on UNIX. .NET is great for M$ because they dont have to worry about the platform. Only the browser.
If Micrsoft were to port Office to Linux, or allow someone else to do it, they would be shooting themselves in the foot at point-blank range with a bazooka.
Office on Linux would give many more businesses the confidence to run Linux and potentially cost Microsoft most of their OS sales over time. IE on Linux on the other hand makes sense if they intend to really wipe netscape off the face of the earth. Of course it would depend on the stability of the port.
Might be a good thing if they were to follow COrel's example and use Wine, more code contributions to Wine would be a very good thing for those of use who don't have $99 floating around to throw into a copy of VMware.
Bzzzzzt..."AAAAaaaaarrrgh!!!" Thud.
I wasn't refering to the 'shell' extensions like 'command prompt here' stuff when you right click in explorer. I was referring to stuff like the webpage formatting of a dir in win2k explorer. Not something you can just add.
Webpage formatting of a fir in Win2k is the same thing. Why in gods name do you think this needs 'hidden apis'. Any idiot can do 'webpage formatting' of any dir. Explorer is a SHELL. It's a user level process than believe it or not can call win32 functions to list files and folders, and then dynamically generate a DHTML view of the files in C:\WINNT.
Nothing magic. Geez.
Why spend 10 years reverse engineering Win32 (like WINE) when you can just license the source?
They may have pulled it by now (all I could find at http://download.microsoft.com were updates), but obviously someone had ported the stuff before (probably MainSoft).
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
So have I. What I haven't done is support it. If I put my devil's advocate hat on, I see a lot of distributions of Linux, each with subtly incompatible sets of libraries (has libc5 died by now?)
I can see anyones reluctance to support Linux (as opposed to making a port available without support).
Then again, if there's one company around that should have gotten used to supporting conflicting libraries it's Microsoft. It still baffles the mind that they let the CTL3D.DLL get out of whack so badly for so many releases, not to mention MFC42.DLL or MSVC40.DLL. One would expect that they'd at least make the latest and greatest version available for easy download and make sure they'd all be downward compatible, but no: they trust on their software developing customers to do the right thing here. Ordinal 6421 not found in MFC42.DLL.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Because MS doesn't want people using its software to drive people onto unix it charges a high premium. If you use Mainsoft to port your app you will have to pay a per-copy royalty that pretty much equals the price of a windows licence! As such it is generally only used to port very expensive, low volume products normally.
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Solaris IE 5 exists and is quite functional.
I use it on a Sparc 5/128mb RAM.
Use of strings on the binaries indicates lots of references to Mainsoft
Works fine on 2.6 / 7 but not 8
Paul Thurrott, the author of the Wininformant piece, askes a good question in as to why Mainsoft needs a copy of the WinNT source code if it's only porting IE.
Firstly this IE is integrated into NT is tiring. NT doesn't need IE to run. IE needs NT to run. However, Microsoft has all the right in the world to inculde IE as an integral part of NT. (remember, windows explorer/file manager isn't integrated - but it's essential to windows). Just like car seats aren't integrated - car still runs without seats. But its an essential part of the car.
Mainsoft has licensed the source to windows NT not just for IE. The source to NT is important cause IE uses windows APIs. The fastest way to get windows apps to run on unix is to license the source for windows from microsoft. This is something Mainsoft has been doing since before linux became important.
M$ has made it clear in the past that IE is in fact part of the operating system. It must be so integral to Windows(in whatever flavor) that the entire OS needs to be ported.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
They are porting IE, Outlook and so forth to the Unix platform. It just so happens that at this time this includes only Solaris and HP/UX.
I imagine the tools they are using could just as easily be used to target the ports to Linux, and in fact I would be suprised if some enterprising developer at Mainsoft doesn't spend a late night at work doing just that, just for the sheer novelty of running IE under Linux. Of course he would have to destroy his work or face severe legal retribution.
I guess all I am saying is that even though Mainsoft is not doing a Linux port, they are doing 99% of the work required for a Linux port. So it could still happen.
-josh
please correct the misspelling, it's a pain, I know... *sigh*
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
However, Microsoft has all the right in the world to inculde IE as an integral part of NT. (remember, windows explorer/file manager isn't integrated - but it's essential to windows). Just like car seats aren't integrated - car still runs without seats. But its an essential part of the car.
I've never seen a car without seats, but I have seen Windows NT running before IE was even invented.
Seemed fine to me, I guess nothing "essential" was missing after all...
-thomas
"And like that
Strikes me that the rumour above could just be that MS are developing Office for MacOSX. Under Darwin not Carbon. No big deal - unless you Linux guys have a problem with BSD... Slainte Trull
-- NSY - SY OOT - Doric signs on local shop doors.
Is porting really the answer?
Is having Microsoft applications in Linux really what will give Linux the push to rule the world?
I don't think so.
One of my favorite things about Linux is its diversity from Windows. Extremely tedious tasks in Windows take a few lines of a shell script in Linux; I can see almost all of the source code to my applications and can configure my working environment to the hilt.
So I truly wonder why there's even a desire to bring Windows applications onto Linux.
Shouldn't we be more concerned with making the native Linux applications better? It seems to me that it would be much easier to improve on something already written for the Linux platform than trying to fit an ugly square peg in a beautiful round hole.
I used to think I wanted IE for Linux. Now, after seeing M17, I want a kick-ass Mozilla. And it seems like it's almost here.
Is bringing Office to Linux really going to bring the hordes of Office users over to Linux? Or if StarOffice or its like was as intuitive to use as Office and Office users could pick it up quickly, I think they wouldn't care if they were running Windows or Linux or whatever.
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Mainsoft is not affiliated with Microsoft in any way
That depends on your definition of 'affiliated'. Mainsoft and Microsoft clearly have a fairly tight business relationship and I'm sure that includes quite a bit of contractual obligation (probably mostly obligations of Mainsoft towards Microsoft). I haven't, however seen anything that would say if Mainsoft or Microsoft had any financial stake in each other. Microsoft at least is a large, public company, so if they owned part of Mainsoft it would probably have to be a matter of public record. I don't know about the other way around, although I seriously doubt that a smaller company like Mainsoft could even own enough Microsoft common stock to be at all significant.
Gee, there's a quote from everyone's favorite software company that I seem to recall right around now... doesn't it go something like "Windows and IE are inseperable", or something like that?
Or maybe I've been watching too many court cases lately, but I just can't seem to shake this image of some software company insisting this to defend themselves in court...
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Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
Do you mean like how they ported office and IE to macos? Funny.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Last time I checked the emacs rpm was bigger than xfree86, thats pretty damn sad.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
-Peter
Mainsoft has licensed the source to windows NT not just for IE. The source to NT is important cause IE uses windows APIs.
Whats the point of having an API? To provide services in a way that allows one to write/port an application without having to worry about the inner workings of the OS/DLL, as long as the interface specification is followed, right? So, why should they need the source code?
The only reason I can think of is that the interface specificaton does not correspond 100% to NTs functionality. This may be due to malice (providing an advantage to those who have acces to the source) or a poor job (either the implementation doesnt do what it si supposed to or the interface is not well documented). I really believe it is a little of each in this case.
That said, I have serious doubts about the quality of Mainsoft-ported software. I have never used any of their products, Im talking from a design point of view. Ill quote Kernighan/Pike on this:
Among the issues to be worked out in a design are (...) Information hiding: what information is visible and what is private? An interface must provide straightforward access to the components while hiding the details of the implementation so they can be changed without affecting users. [K/P, The practice of programming, p.85]
So, having the source to NT may be the fastest way to port MS-Windows to unix, but that is a symptom that something is very wrong somewhere along the line.
I wouldn't consider that a particularly good question; the question was
to which the answer is very simple: Mainsoft is not a company that is "simply porting old versions of IE and WMP to other operating systems".
Mainsoft is a company whose product is a library to implement the Win32 API atop other operating systems. The "MainWin: How It Works page on Mainsoft's Web site says
(Note that Windows NT isn't just a kernel, it's a complete OS and window system/GUI; the stuff being rehosted is presumably large amounts of userland code.)
I'm also not sure why Thurrott thought the fact that Mainsoft had access to NT source code was some Deep Dark Secret that his informant had revealed to him, as per his comment
given that there's a press release on Mainsoft's site, linked to by an item on Mainsoft's home page , that says
(I'm also not sure why he speaks of "old versions" of IE and WMP being ported; another item on Mainsoft's Web site says
which would seem to imply that the version of IE 5 that was ported to UNIX was about as far from "old" as one could imagine; no, they may not have ported IE 5.5 yet, but, at the time they ported IE 5.0, it was as new as you can get.)
Methinks Thurrott should, before he speaks further on this topic, spend an hour or so browsing the Mainsoft Web site, at least if his goal is journalistic accuracy rather than journalistic excitement (you can often write far more exciting stories if you're not constrained by such boring mundane restrictions as a requirement to have what you say correspond, to some extent, to reality).
I downloaded mainsoft's converted ms solitare program and it uses a whopping 33% of memeory!
33% of how much memory?
1001011000
Funny how all this business of porting to Solaris and HP-UX breaks out just as the Gnome foundation gets established, with Sun and HP promising to use Gnome by default. By the time Mainsoft gets finished with their ports of IE and Outlook, maybe Mozilla and Evolution will be ready ... they're looking pretty good on my box right now.
Microsoft's marketing engine vs Sun's and HP's default setups, to say nothing of the actual technologies. Should be a fun race to watch.
I hope to god they don't use that wine BS.
Corel fucked up when they made that damned thing.
it won't even fucking run.
yep that is why ie for the mac kicks butt. It is far snappier, uses less memory, and is less intrusive than the windows counterpart. Office for the mac, however, is as bloated as ever.
I dislike the idea of using MS products as well, but I'm approaching this from a different direction...
Currently, Netscape is the only game in town when it comes to feature-rich browsers on Linux (sorry, Nautilus and Konqueror people; you'll get there some day, but today it's still Netscape). The problem is Netscape browsers on Linux SUCK. I mean, of all the pieces of software on a typical Linux distribution (free, open sourced, or otherwise), Netscape browsers infuriate me the most. They are crap, plain and simple. One could argue that web browsers are some of the most important software packages on any modern networked system, though. It sucks having the central app on a typical Linux system be a turd.
The problem? NO COMPETITION. Mozilla doesn't even offer the features that Netscape's browsers do. If something commercial grade came along and gave Netscape a run for its money, you'd see dramatic improvements very quickly. As it stands, Netscape/AOL can put out crap browsers for Linux and not sweat over it much because what the hell else are you going to use??
Netscape needs SERIOUS competition. The open sourced browsers are not coming along fast enough. Mozilla shows promise, but more for Gecko than for the browser itself (will we EVER get a stable version of Mozilla???). If IE will provide the competition, so be it. I'm tired of waiting for Netscape to get its ducks in line.
My boss says, never believe anything until a member of the government officially denies it.
Taking that a little further, now that Microsoft has officially denied the rumours, I know they must be true ..
http://www.mainsoft.com/press/pr-Med iaAdv.html vs. http://ars.userfriendly.org/carto ons/?id=20000801
Oh man, I hope this guy is too young to know what a dumb terminal is.
For all the brain power that resides in Redmond under the banner of Microsoft, you'd think they would be a little smarter. Let's be realistic; does anyone really believe that porting their apps over to a different operating system can do anything other than make them money? I find it highly doubtfull that anyone not already using Linux would jump ship from Windows *just* because of an Office Suite. It's far more likely that an Office port would result in their taking market share away from whatever "free" office-type apps already exist.
And then of course comes the *other* stupidity they always engage in- denying things which are confirmed facts. Ok- so they could make it truth by cancelling the project but what point is there to that line of thought? Instead of denying this kind of thing they should be broadcasting to the world - it would be perceived as a lack of fear concerning Linux. Almost like saying "We are so confident that Windows is better that we're going to *own* the Linux Suite-space as well!"..
Not necessarily. I know a lot of people who would want Office for Linux. Staroffice might work well, but after using MS Office for so long, people might swap OSs but they won't use any other Office like software.
Win32 is the layer on top of the NT core and win9x core libs. Normally apps talk to win32, instead of all the api's beneath it (you know, the so called 'secret api's). IE uses win32 to do stuff but also ADDS stuff to win32 (namely the shell extensions, SH* functions). This means it uses layers below win32, layers build with the normally hidden api's.
If you want to port IE to another platform, you have to know what the functions do that are used by IE. The win32 functions are documented in the MSDN, but the NT / win9x core api calls aint. So you need the sourcecode.
The browser will work fine without the shell extensions, it's just the shell extensions that make it has to use the lower level api calls. And because IE is part of the Shell of NT/win9x/win2000, it's called 'part of the OS', but NT runs great without it. But if you want to use the SH* extensionfunctions in your code, you NEED IE installed. (the SH* functions create nice dirtree's for example in controls)
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
IE is integrated into the OS. Naturally, if you wanted to see it's source, you would be looking at the OS. Has no one read the Anti-Trust case filings?
My guess is that MSFT must have IE ported to as many "platforms" as possible because IE is meant to become a platform of it's own, used to "rent" downloaded Windows(read:IE (read:.NET)) - applications and components. Think of IE as a C# Virtual Machine with an integrated internet dashboard, and a .NET steering wheel. whatever.
Just the road NS wants to take with Java.
Innovation, right?
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* Sigh *
Mainsoft is not affiliated with Microsoft in any way, shape or form. Mainsoft is doing the port, Mainsoft will get the profit. Microsoft gets licensing for allowing it. Simple. But Mainsoft is doing it.
MSFT used Mainsoft's tools to port IE to the flavors of Unix it already runs on, e.g. Solaris. So this isn't really big news. MS has already ported IE. They've talked about porting MediaPlayer. Both are yet more examples of anticompetitive "dumping" practices.
-Peter
US Voters: The GOP has criticized Clinton, Reno, and Klein for taking on Microsoft in court. The Democratic party had iMacs and PalmPilots at their convention. Who's more likely to support real competition in the software marketplace?
Ie is the worst browser i have every used and Netscape it almost as bad. they are both 20mb plus to download slow to start, slow to load pages and slow in old machines. opera (http://www.opera.com) and arachne (http://browser.arachne.cz) are great browsers. under 2mb downloads, fast to start and fast to load pages. opera for windows is fine but opera for linux is still in alpha. arachne for dos is fine but arachne for linux is still in beta. when these two great browsers reach final release for linux there will be real choice and fast, small, reliable browsing. by the did i say ie is crap
The writing is on the wall folks.....Office is moving towards an Internet application and away from a desktop application. It will all be about XML and SOAP and Web Services.
The client, whether its a Mac, *nix, Windows etc...won't matter. As long as the client can talk SOAP.
Is anyone in the Linux world looking at SOAP?
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Isn't it obvious? Microsoft's competition with Linux has forced them to take the extreme measures of porting Outlook (Express) to Linux. Of course, this was inspired by the recent UF comic. Why else would it be just a few weeks later.
Anm
It is my understanding that the M$ software for Mac is developed by a fairly autonomous group. Whatever the situation, they have recently released some great 'very Mac' software in IE and Outlook Express, although they did wierdly reinvent some things for OE. Sadly, IE 5 for Mac is miles ahead of Netscape/Mozilla, and iCab isn't quite there yet.
My point is that MS can make good software, if you judge software by the expectations of the majority of the users of the targeted platform. What does this mean for Linux if/when Office and IE are ported? How would Office for Linux have to be different than Office for Win and Office for Mac to truly be a Linux application worth using?
From the outside, the coolest and most admirable thing about the Linux community is Open Source and everything implied by that. I don't think MS could release a real Linux app, if this is held to be fundamental to truly be considered as a Linux app.
Ok, so I worked for a company that was actually using Mainwin for a while. We had a suite of EDA tools for Windows that needed to be ported to Unix. I was the engineer who was in charge of doing the port of the first product. As such, I am quite familiar with the ins and outs of Mainwin, at least as of 9 months ago, and as it applies to the Solaris platform.
The deal with Mainwin is that they've essentially taken the NT source and re-written the "bottom" half -- i.e. the hardware access and low-level interfaces. Then, they compiled the entire NT kernel on top of this layer of cruft.
In order to compile anything on top of the Mainwin libraries, you are dynamically linking to a fairly substantial portion of the NT kernel. Hence, the NT code license.
With this constraint, Mainwin has two major problems:
So, in short:
In short, no big surprises.
And then of course comes the *other* stupidity they always engage in- denying things which are confirmed facts.
... confirmed "facts"? By whom? I take it you didn't read Mainsoft's original press release too closely, did you? There was absolutely no confirmation in their that they were porting any Microsoft applications to Linux. Oh, sure, Mainsoft's win32 layer has a Linux target, but that doesn't mean Microsoft is going to port to anything more than Solaris and HP-UX, as they've done before.
Uh
Of course, if you can present the sources you used to "confirm" this "fact", perhaps it might lend a bit of credibility to your arguments.
With all this press I am hearing people saying that they would switch to MS Office in a second. Becuase is such a highly capable product. Feature rich, and a industry cross platform standard. Sorry RMS/GNU, peoples overiding reason for using Linux isn't that is Open Source. It is because it is cheap, and it works well!!!!!!! MS Office, may not be cheap. But hey, it works well doesn't it!!!!
Cheers,
WFE
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M$ Office has a lot more in terms of brand recognition than Star Office will have for the forseeable future. I don't think M$ see Star Office as much to worry about. While you make a valid point I believe Linux is the only OS that M$ hasn't already ported Office to, that is likely to be a danger to M$ in the desktop stakes. Many, many Windows users don't like Windows, but are afraid to move away from it, because of the perceived lack of familiar software. Office on Linux will kill Windows in time.
Bzzzzzt..."AAAAaaaaarrrgh!!!" Thud.
MS won't license you the sourcecode if you're going to use that sourcecode to create a competitive product to MS' own stuff. WINE is a competitive product, because it makes win9x or any other win32 compatible client OS unnecessary.
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
If Micrsoft were to port Office to Linux, or allow someone else to do it, they would be shooting themselves in the foot at point-blank range with a bazooka.
That's what some said about Office for Mac.
It doesn't seem to have hurt Microsoft. If anything, it made them a crapload of money off people who would probably have bought Macs anyway.
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Why when I post my experiance I have to be told I'm full of shit. You are rignt Word is so great that it makes Microsoft blush. How clever of them. So where can I get the paper that plays movies?
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Lucky you
KDE The Real Desktop
Dude, Shut-up, ;-)
Microsoft isn't supposed to think about that part of the deal, it would "Benefit" them, wink wink, to port office to Linux
I can see it now. Mere days after Microsoft IE/Office for linux are released, there will be product reviews on performance and features comparing the same products on the two OSes.
Amazingly, the Windows version of IE/Office will have more features, be more "stable" and be pushed as an "alternative" to IE/Office on linux. This will be echoed in all mainstream tech magazines and online product reviews. Moody will fodder for weeks.
Speak truth to power.
It may be that the reason why Mainsoft has a copy of the Winnt source code is to assist them in porting Office. Sure, everbody is denying it. Maybe Microsoft has hired mainsoft only to port IE and MediaPlayer, but they might have still given them the source to NT and Office and unofficially stated "If you can get this ported, we will make it very much worth your while." After all, with the impending opening of StarOffice, Microsoft has to be feeling a crunch to get Office out cross-platform so that they can stop SUN cold.
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