O'Reilly Sez Ask Craig Mundie

There's a news article up at O'Reilly that hypes their upcoming Open Source Convention and also sets up a forum to submit questions to potentially be asked to Mundie when he gives a keynote at the convention. Should be an interesting, perhaps vitriol-filled morning there.

Comments

Mr Mundie

[4of12]

Sir:

Much controversy has surrounded Microsoft's Shared Source initiative, particularly given the differences between the licensing terms that apply to MS Shared Source and the licensing terms that apply according to the GNU Public License.

Hypothetically, suppose I am a programmer with MS Shared Source in front of me on one hand, and a different GPL source in front of me on the other hand.

Suppose, further, that in both cases I have a brilliant idea, an idea that will substantially increase the feature set, reduce bugs, and increase performance.

For both application programs, each under its own license, describe exactly

1. the costs (money, time, opportunity)
2. the benefits (same)

that would pertain to each of three important parties

1. myself, the programmer
2. Microsoft corporation
3. everyone else (public users, other companies, other programmers, etc.)

both in the short term and in the long term if I were to improve the code for the respective application program.

I would most appreciate a ranking of those costs and benefits.

What .NET is...

[Carnage4Life]

What, exactly, is .Net?

Developer View:
.NET is the next generation of Microsoft's component technologies (COM, COM+, DCOM) which incorporates lessons learned from Java. COM is a technology that allows you to interact with components written in different languages transparently and is descended from OLE (Object Linking and Embedding which is the technology that was developed to allow being able to drag an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document) and . The languages that support COM are the Visual Studio languages as well as Object Pascal (Delphi). COM has its own binary format and while works almost transparently from Javascript, VB, and VBScript is a bitch to work with from C++. DCOM is the same as COM but it adds being able to do RPC (remote method invokation for the Java heads) from components irrespective of what language they are written in, kinda like CORBA without the ORBs.

.NET simplifies this by having a Common Language Runtime which is analogous to the Java JVM. COMable languages simply compile to the CLR format instead of to assembly code or a weird binary format. So this should lead to the best of both worlds by giving you all the functionality you have come to expect from the Java platform with the added benefit of using languages other than Java (C++, C#, VB, Javascript, VBScript, Perl and a few others) and transparently interact with objects written in these languages. Because all .NET languages have access to the CLR they can utilize it to extend themselves, e.g. Visual C++ has "managed extensions" that allows for garbage collection via the CLR.

The major goal is then to use this technology to build XML based web services.

Marketting View:
Microsoft .NET is Microsoft's XML Web services platform. This is the next generation of Internet computing, using XML to communicate among loosely coupled XML Web services that are collaborating to perform a particular task. Microsoft's .NET strategy delivers a software platform to build new .NET experiences, a programming model and tools to build and integrate XML Web services, and a set of programmable Web interfaces.

PS: Please do not take this as some official MSFT response, I'm merely an intern and in fact this is a reprint of a post I made before I got to Redmond.

--

Innovation

[Salsaman]

Microsoft is always talking about 'innovation' in their products. Can you name five M$ innovations which were not copied or stolen from rival products ?

Question: what about the BSD License

[Lechter]

OK I can see why you mighn't like the GPL, since it doesn't do corporations any good, but why don't you try releasing software, or using software under the BSD license, much as Apple did with Mac OS X? Perhaps that would allow programmers to have a deeper understanding of the workings of your software.

This Is Not A /. Interview!

[update()]

All you people submitting questions -- this isn't a Slashdot interview! Ask them here!

Every time there's a headline here with the words "interview" or "ask" people start frantically posting questions. I confess I've been guilty of that a couple of times myself... ;-)

(Original subject: First "This Is Not A /. Interview!" Post! Apparently that trips the lameness filter.)

Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.

Craig Mundie

[Dancin_Santa]

1) Do you pronounce "Monday" and "Mundie" the same, or do you emphasize the "day" in "Monday"?

2) Before you came to Microsoft, what special talents did you possess?

3) If I were to grep the Windows source code, how many "We'd be totally fucked if our customers knew we did this" comments would I find?

4) Are you wearing a hairpiece?

5) What's your /. ID, or do you troll anonymously?

6) When Bill or Steve makes a joke, does everyone laugh? Is it a fearful laughter?

7) How much Linux code is actually in Windows? Haha, just joking. Windows would be a lot stabler if it had any.

8) If you were a Hostess snack cake, which one would you be and why?

9) Why are manhole covers round?

10) Have you thought about suing tobacco companies and making a quick billion or two?

Dancin Santa