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Reverse Engineering .NET - Good, Bad or Inevitable?
legLess asks: "The Register has an interesting article about reverse-engineering Microsoft's .NET. Apparently ESR, Bruce Perens and Miguel de Icaza have all dropped hints that the project's already underway. The Register has this to say, though, which I think is worth discussing:
...In fact it's a risky strategy for the Open Sorcerers. If .NET isn't reverse engineered, it will surely remain a Microsoft-only platform, as even the best funded efforts to port Microsoft technology to non-Windows platforms in the past have remained at best, a niche option. But if a good implementation is produced, it has the effect of legitimizing the platform, and making much more attractive to conservative, non-committed corporate buyers. Which is certainly the last thing the Beast's foes want to see."
Yes, if we could get .NET working on non-Microsoft platforms, it would be a good thing, but I don't think that the Redmond Redwood will roll over and let this happen without a fight. How difficult would it be to port .NET, if Microsoft is free to add, extend and modify the underlying protocol to break any third-party implementation that may rear its head?
Jamie adds: XNS is worth keeping an eye on. This is a nonprofit, (promised) open source infrastructure to allow individuals to save private data which corporations can only access if they agree to (legally enforceable) point-and-click contracts. In short, it's the groundwork for an open version of .NET focused on privacy, and more. But they're making progress slowly if at all. They have a good team heading it up, and I really want to see them succeed at something besides writing whitepapers, but their mailing lists have slowly gone cold and they still haven't released any source.
Wine has been underway since before Win95, IIRC and, while pretty good, is no where near a replacement for Windows yet. I don't know how sophisticated .NET is; I also imagine there's less undocumented behavior. Still, if they're remotely comparable, we should expect to see a .NET replacement in wide use (i.e., I'd make my linux programs dependant on it) any time soon.
with redhat buying into subscribtion base service as it's cashcow, and now open source programmers being interested in .NET, could it be that for once microsoft's aggressive strategy of subscribtion software is actually the future of computing? sure it would definity help companies make profits off linux. But just a few months ago i attended a lecture where Maddog Halls himself told us to fight the .NET platform because subscribtion software is no different than paying for the same code over and over again.
so is this the only way to help open source make a profit? force upgrade and make people pay for bug patches... is there a better way of making money off open source software?
So ok, here's an idea:
Stop chasing M$'s tail!
Why in hell would you want to ligitimize this horrendous beast? Kill it! Kill it now before it turns into the monster it's destined to become.
BTW, anyone think of the significance of the name Hailstorm? Last I checked, a hailstorm rained death and destruction onto everything in it's path. You really want to help bring this thing to life?
Part of my job involves working with reverse-engineered Microsoft technologies. This has given me a bit of insight about their design.
The approach I witness is the slathering on of framework after framework, API after API, protocol after protocol, language after language, each adding little or no value but building costs of entry.
After a while of this, such a stack of protocols is so huge and sloppy that it becomes unprofitable for competitors to try to duplicate it. This is probably the "breaking point" they look for; after it, Microsoft has won its individuality.
There is a cost to this strategy, though: Microsoft must expend resources on technologies which deliver little or no value to its customers. This technique relies on Microsoft being slightly more bloody-minded and stubborn than any of its competitors, so that once potential competitors are deterred, it can turn its remaining attention to actually creating value.
This strategy is tailored to fighting competitors who have stockholders and slightly shorter attention spans, though. Whether it will work against open-minded hobbyists isn't clear. They may prove to have enough resources, persistence, and numbers to outlast even the most stubborn "cruft war."
Note that reverse-engineering Microsoft technology is possible (though it requires a clothespin on the nose). There's nothing magic about it. It's just crufty enough to deter profit-seeking competitors, and that level of cruftiness is quite finite (though high).
I'm quite happy to know these things. This may actually be a solution to the commons problem some perverse strategist at Microsoft came up with in '93 or so.
This is one thing I don't think Microsoft would be too vigilant in stopping.
.NET to be a NETWORK platform. They saw how netBeui didn't scale and now even the internal microsoft network runs over TCP/IP -- hell Novell now uses it.
You have to remember that they want
For Microsoft to create a real standard they can't be opposed to multi-platform support.
-davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Posted by polar_bear:
.NET infrastructure will require access to Passport or Microsoft servers at some stage, and you can expect M$ to block non-M$ implementations - at least any coded under GPL or similar licenses.
.NET is supposed to do, but that isn't compatible. IBM and other companies would likely get behind it, as would other companies who are starting to realize that the Redmond behemoth tries to own everything it comes in contact with.
More than likely big chunks of the
Frankly, I'd rather see the Free Software and Open Source community innovate and beat them to the punch with something that does what
...and never did. This time it was a different piece of equipment. Fun fun. Please reply with your acronymns for OSDN below.
We can always reverse engineer it. But as always with the products of Microsoft, they can start revisions a step ahead of us, and what we have will always be a generation behind. We need more effective solutions. We need to take over the initiative.
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
Actually this is precisely why Microsoft wants to sell software as a service. Microsoft has finally realized that they are to the point where they can't coax users into upgrading by promising them a version of Windows without the major flaws. So instead the want to charge their users by the month whether they release new software or not.
Selling software as a product really isn't a very good fit, and has led to many of the abuses that we are currently subjected to. Of course, Microsoft's proprietary software would even be worse when sold as a service. Microsof would probably still not be too terribly interested in fixing bugs. I am sure that they would rather spend their time making sure they used their position to worm their way into every financial transaction.
Starting with your username, I would think. :-)
Jah love mon!
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Actually, the design plain sucks. Install a few applications on your computer. Now create a backup of your registry, reinstall Windows, replace the new registry file with your backup and run your applications. Will this work as you intended?
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Now, Microsoft gives out this closed source piece of software, under their own license which states you are not allowed to reverse engineer it.
.NET libraries are (going to be) submitted to standards organizations. That said Microsoft.
Doing so will violate that license. Saying that reverse enginering software, even if the license it comes with states it's not allowed, is OK, is stupid, to say the least.
At least, things like C# and the
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
i am attending microsoft tech ed europe at the moment and had some thoughts about this yesterday which i wrote about in my weblog. the ideas are just a rough sketch what i was thinking about, so please be gentle and judge them by content, not by the form or the clarity of expression.. :)
.net juggernaut. declaring
support for soap, as ibm, sun, oracle and others have done, is not going
to cut it. what is needed is a credible architecture that can compete
feature by feature with .net. although all the components like apache
(web server), soap for apache, jabber (xml messenging), kdevelop (ide),
postgres sql (database), ldap (directory) exist in the open source
community, they are not part of an overall architecture. it would
be a major undertaking to get the developers of the respective components
to talk to each other and agree on common interfaces.
.net platform.
it also became quite evident that we have seen nothing yet in terms
of the web services architecture. many key pieces are missing, like
meta data to enable the retrieval and processing of semantics from
data (to support agent technology for instance), the questions of
payment for web services and global, fine-grained security matrices (who
has access to which of my data). web services are loosely coupled
but they have no mechanism to guard against api changes or to facilitate
negotiations on usage terms for web services.
over the course of these presentations it became very clear that microsoft has unleashed something much larger than it can ever hope to handle like it has in the past when it introduced the concept of web services. web services have all the ingridients of a disruptive technology. they place simplicity where complexity and opaque systems have reigned for so long.
their complete reliance on xml for all aspects has brought them some critisism from some quarters that they are not being efficient and that xml adds nothing that was not there before. i was wondering along these lines as well. however when i saw how the concept of web services has evolved in one year i started to notice similarities to the classic and incredibly successful osi model. web services start where osi ends, but they share the concept of piling indepent services on top of each other. this has been a very powerful architecture in networking systems, especially tcp/ip. since xml is such a simple representation of data it has been very easy to extend web services with additional layers and make them increasingly powerful. i believe that the benefits from a large scale adoption of xml will be reaped with ever more layers stacked on each other, with ever increasing power. although web services are an active area for the w3c, it remains doubtful how the industry will counter microsofts
the old unix argument about never setting policy looks quite silly when you realize what productivity gains microsoft will be leveraging with their
It and a bunch of other OSDN sites went down about 2:45 pm EDT, at least for me. I, too, thought it might have been hordes of MSNBC readers slashdotting Slashdot.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Our Server's Dead Now
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Reverse Engineer Exchange? Do you want an Exchange Server that runs on *n*x? Or do you want clients that run on *n*x? If it is the latter you currently have 2 options - a) use the Outlook Web Access (requires Exchange 2000 Server) or b) wait until MS Office for OSX comes out and play with that, a better chance of reverse engineering that than a windows port.
If you want an exchange server to run on *n*x then anyone can tell you - its not going to happen. Microsoft makes a ton of money off of selling Exchange running on WinNT/2K.
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aphex
I Steal Music!
Miguel de Icaza, the oreillynet article, and the register are talking about the
The slashdot editors and some posters have confused this with the Hailstorm services (passport, the storing of information, etc.).
Ignoring the issue of Hailstorm, lets consider the arguments for cloning
- A common bytecode for all languages allows all languages to call each other without overhead (thats right, none of the problems of ORBit, Bonobo, XPCOM, etc.)
- Will allow Linux to be a drop in replacement for Microsoft servers. Wow...
- Managed execution is the future. Garbage collection is nice, sandboxing of untrusted code is nice, etc. A common managed execution enviroment has huge benifits, and we don't have anything close to this. Best open source has now is one managed execution enviroment for Perl, one for Python, twelve for Java, one for PHP, etc.
The open source community doesn't have the resources the develop something like this from scratch. Just copying the design of Microsoft is a lot easier (like we did for our office suits). But suppose we could - what would we get? A solution incompatable with the dominate solution. Yeah, that is really a compelling reason to re-invent everything.If we balk at the idea of cloning it, we will be guilty of a major NIH complex. (NIH = not invented here).
Lastly, a lot of poster are suggesting Microsoft will just change the standard and break our open source version. Two things in response. First, Microsoft is in the process of making
So lets start cloning already.
Ben
I'm inclined to ignore .net, concentrate on continuing to refine the alternatives, particularly java and connectivity tools. If we play .net, we'll get fight an impossible battle against ever-changing standards.
Believe with me, my saplings.
http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html
- Sam Ruby
For a couple *BILLION* I'd let Bill fuck me every day of the week and twice on sundays......
;)
Most people PAY HIM to be fucked over every day, by buying his software. Except for those pirates who get a "free ride of Bill"... Very amusing imagery.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
You assume that .NET will be better than MS's current (shitty) offerings, and therefore solve the problems. I'll be quite surprised if this is the case. Remember, the windows registry was supposed to "solve" the problem of having all those .ini files everywhere.
.NET, when they can leave them in (or shuffle them around a bit) and then make even more money on .NET's successor? Microsoft has literally no incentive to provide near-perfect software, because then there's a much smaller upgrade incentive (for users). They're quite happy to keep fucking over their users until the end of (their) time, all the while providing ever more "upgrades" of dubious quality - typically only just enough quality to get people to adopt it.
Why solve the problems with
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Bravo, I have a friend who is in charge of evaluating the .NET product line and seeing how web services will play into their organization. One of the things he wanted to make sure of was that *nix servers would be able to use the web services they develop so he asked me for help, he wrote a bunch of WebServices on the Win2K and I wrote a bunch of '.NET' clients.
.NET client.
.NET 'web service' on linux and get a Win2K client to connect to it, again break out SOAP::Lite.
.NET is XML/SOAP, as you said.
Go get the SOAP::Lite perl module and you can now instantly write a
Now don't think it is as easy as writing a Win2k client, not at first, mainly because Win2kWin2k can treat the data received from a webservice as an object where as in SOAP::Lite client you have to do a little XML Parsing.
Next step was to write a
Not there aren't some things that could be made easier or nicer (and the SL library had a little bit of work left, but is quite functional)
Ahh well, I think it is all being blown out of proportion.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
The only fly in the ointment would be any dependency on the Passport/Hailstorm authentication, but when people get frustrated with that and turn to J2EE, everyone-but-Microsoft wins. :-)
Unfortunately, as they have demonstrated with samba, MS has no qualms with making minor changes so that the version which worked with the last release of their protocols doesn't work with the new version. It may take only a few of these sorts of modifications to .NET before people start thinking that, regardless of how well-implemented the open version is.
Fat chance -- it took Microsoft 10 years to write Exchange and it shows in the "design". I doubt their protocol is even documented fully internally. It would probably be a hellava lot easier to write a Outlook plug-in to your back-end of choice.
Not to mention that nobody's even reverse-engineered Microsoft-err-Open Group RPC yet. Need to do that before you can even start with the application stuff like Exchange.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Just want to say that I fully agree with your points, especially the one about most software being either internal or vertical market.
.NET) are so important.
You are correct that this market will probably never embrace open soure, at least not in the GNU sense (although the GPL seems rooted in an older era of more vertical computing). However, as you point out, there's an enormous amount of infrastructure these products ride on, and *that* is where Open Source can make the greatest impact, and that is why open platforms (such as a potential reverse engineered
I don't see OSS ever producing a Photoshop or a MS Word unless someone like Sun or IBM comes in and pays for it. I do see them continuing to produce a lot of fine infrastructure - Linux, Samba, Apache, Postgres and so on. The companies providing the vertical solutions become the benifactors and they can pass the savings on directly to their customers.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Microsoft is going the standards route because they are the underdog in this fight and they know there's some divisions in the Java camp over Sun's approach to standards. Standards or no, the Java development process is probably more open. An ECMA rubber-stamp is just that, a marketing feature point.
.NET is platform independant and standardized, in the real world it will heavily rely on COM and proprietary Microsoft components. Having a portable or a reverse engineered runtime doesn't do one a bit of good if you can't run applications that use ASP.NET objects or ADO.NET database access. (You'll note that these bits are open to competing vendors in the Sun world.)
Furthermore, while in the abstract
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
There is no .net client you drooling piece of monkey shit. There is the CLR which runs the IL bytecode produces by the Visual Studio .Net compilers. A CLR can easily be written for any Unix as well as a copy of the .NET specific libraries. How is this any fucking different from Unix anyhow? I could write a small network based system based on [insert name of RPC protocol here] and charge money for it, entirely Unix native. Shit man this is mainframe processing. You rent resource time on a remote system. What the fuck are you spouting about ownership of the desktop, most people who used computers in the 70's and 80's didn't even own the computer they used.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Win32 and IE specific features? Name one fucking Win32 or IE specific feature in wither IE or Win32. Give me one fucking example of a function in the MFC that could not be replicated. You must have been a prenatal accident. There is no fucking .NET, it is not a fucking product. It is the name Microsoft is giving to an extremely large number of protocol and architecture schema they're incorporating into their future operating systems.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
yea and put them all in a seperate directory like \ini then put all the programs in \prog and system config stuff in \sprog lets put dlls in \dll then create another directory called \install in here we can have other applications install them selves. we can have \install\prog for the exe files and \install\ini for the config files.
While we are at it we should make a directory access to the device maanger call it \devman and keep real time updated information about the system in plain text human readable files.
Wow I might start my own Operating System. this is going to be great.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
yea thats me all right to late for everything I just found out someone stole my idea and made something called Linux. it is almost exaclty like what My plan was all they did was rename things.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Since it will clearly become a DMCA violation.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
It has been called an "Open Source alternative to .NET", although it is by no means a clone. Rather, it focuses on extending existing UNIX features and programs to the Internet, where they haven't been before.
Perhaps we don't need a clone, just as Linux is not a clone of Windows. And it's a good thing it is not.
Here are some articles and mentions of Piper:
On Slashdot
Linux Software Encyclopedia
Linux Weekly News
Gnome Gnotices (It's interesting to note that the article first posted there referred to Piper as an alternative to .Net. The moderator later changed that. Paranoid minds, such as mine, wonder about this and the future intentions of GNOME with respect to .Net.)
O'Reilly P2P website
SunWorld Online
And some other online magazines/forums:
Infolets
Tecnologia
Hispa MP3
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This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
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This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
HAL9000
Before answering the question, it's important to understand the question.
.NET is ?
So my question about the question is:
Does anyone actually know what
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Bill Gates Is My Evil Twin.
What was the piece of equipment? C'mon, we're all dying to know...
Up until not that long ago, Microsoft produced the desktop OS and the office apps, and that was basically it. Then with NT, Microsoft entered the server space with a vengeance, and now you have large corporations that find that they have effectively bet their company from end to end on Microsoft software. This worries many of them, especially with Microsoft's increasingly self-serving, anti-customer antics.
It's not difficult to make a case to a CIO that betting the company's IT strategy on products and tools that are based on standards implemented by multiple vendors, is safer than a system implemented by a single vendor with an iffy record on standards. With Microsoft being the single vendor, the risk is not so much that it'll go out of business, but rather that customers will be pushed in directions they don't want to go, without any alternative choices.
Even at the level of non-technical managers, questions are being raised lately by the mainstream press coverage of Microsoft's various take-over-the-world strategies. Microsoft has generated its own self-damaging FUD, which has started to trickle down into places which, before long, could start having a real effect.
Viable alternatives to Microsoft solutions are becoming more and more attractive in the business environment. .NET may not be adopted quite as blindly as many expect.
I would argue that the greatest trick Bill Gates pulled was managing to succeed in using the same trick repeatedly to build a corporate empire.
A quote:
That is everyone's favorite Hitchhiker, the late Douglas Adams. He wass speaking about Windows 95 (New! Improved! Almost as good as a Mac!). You are not the only one to realize that Microsoft has pulled this trick, but it must be made clear that they have done so before, and will most likely try it again.
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But then again, I could be wrong.
Allright. Lets sit back and think about the problem. You can use any computer in the world as your computer. Do we really want to do this? When I buy a car, thats my car. I don't want my neighbors using it, or anyone else for that matter. My data is my property, not my neighborhood's property. Sure, i'll lend it out on occasion if one of my friends needs it, but 99.9% of the time, I control it.
I don't see how personal data (or computers in general) differ in this regard. They both share the basic premise of ownership. Human beings do function cooperatively in groups, but the larger the group, the less cohesive its cooperation tends to be. We dont take a car to the market, we take our car to the market. Sure, its an interesting idea--You grab whatever mode of transportation is closest and take it to whatever destination you have in mind...But people just plain don't work that way. If I wanted a network computer, i'd set up an NFS server and boot off of it transparently. Networking issues aside, its a novel idea. But it violates our inborn concept of ownership and "rights of use"..
Time to think of a better idea, methinks.
Bowie J. Poag
What the heck does "world+dog" mean?
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
The more native code you use in the frameworks the less trusted the code will be, and less portable.
It is possible to write "real code" in C#.
[Saint Stephen]
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The Register article assumes that .NET's legitimacy rests on the availability of an open implementation to compete with Microsoft's. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of of .NET's perceived legitimacy will in the eyes of CIOs, IT managers, etc. These people will be swayed by its performance in its initial MS incarnation; reviews in manager-oriented publications; availability of software based on .NET; etc. They will not care whether there's a free implementation available.
Remember, SAMBA did not make Windows file sharing so widely-used!
Ryan
C# is a very elegant language. Quite frankly, with my origins in C++, I have seen no language to date that appeals to me more than C#. I would love for this language to be available in the open source world.
If a penguin dies in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, what sound does it make?
You completely miss the point as .NET is not entirely what you seem to think it is. Seem my previous post for more information, or better yet, do some reading on it first.
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If a penguin dies in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, what sound does it make?
To me,
So keep this in mind when you bash
If a penguin dies in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, what sound does it make?
Sun Tzu gives good advice, but you have to be careful following it. Grok the whole text before you take small quotes out of context.
Attacking core deployed MS services is akin to besieging walled cities. If it is possible to stop them before they fully deploy .NET that would be like balking their plans. But MS is still the big army and when fighting a superior (numerically anyhow) enemy, it is smart to pick your fights.
In an open source context this doesn't mean secrecy, I believe it means keep all kinds of small projects open and underway and whatever project makes good headway against Microsoft should become "the spot where we intend to fight".
I think it's important to not ignore .NET, and like Sun Tzu says: "Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays." Don't ignore .NET until it becomes entrenched. But don't let them choose the fight. Don't rush in and make a broken, inferior .NET implementation or people will think only MS can do .NET properly.
(thank you Project Gutenberg)
So let me get this straight. Microsoft puts out C# to kill Java and .NET to kill JINI and the Linux community is going to jump on board?
.NET, developed alongside IBM and others. But I'm not sure embracing C# is the best way to "stick it to Microsoft"...
I can understand jumping on board for SOAP, which is a fairly basic element of
-StaticLimit
It's important to note that Rhys' project is concentrating on building a light-weight interpreter for embedded systems, and has no real goal of constructing a full featured runtime for Unix. Really, he is most interested in selling compiler technology.
.NET to work on the JVM.
In a message to his mailing list yesterday he once again stressed his dedication to his compiler technology and even mentioned that, in order to diversify his company's offerings, he is likely to focus more on re-compiling
I was working on an alternative project with the goal of using Intel's ORP to build a fully featured runtime, but due to lack of support I've all but dropped the project. One of my earlier project statements (which was posted to Rhys' mailing list) can be found at:
What I'm Planning: Alternative Project w/ Slightly Different Goals (was: Suggestions) [ http://lists.saurik.net/message.xsp?id=62 ]
You can expect to see some new (or old?) purchased, globally enforceable legislation that will prevent interoperable implementations of .NET. Not that MS .NET will be allowed to interoperate with older versions of itself from one mandatory monthly upgrade cycle to the next.
Why should Microsoft pay someone to port .net when the community will do it for free and get a much higher quality port than Microsoft would if they did it themselves.
.Net. Microsoft cannot allow competition.
Microsoft's trial balloon about disallowing the use of "potentially viral" software is undoubtedly intended to be part of the legal protection for
BECAUSE THEY ARE DIFFERENT TYPES OF LICENSE, MORON!
The GPL is a license on *copying*. That's why you see it in a file called COPYING. The MS EULA is a license on use. The GPL is supported by copyright law. The MS EULA is supported by nothing except a few dodgy court decisions (MAI v. Peak, say).
Um, also, the GPL has a laudable goal, and whether or not it is required, we should release the source to our code. The MS EULA's goal is evil, and ought to be fought.
Now go back to your hole, troll.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Another thing to remember about .NET is that whether or not there is an Open Source implementation, the majority of the traffic will be going through Microsoft's servers... At least, for the HailStorm portion of things.
.NET - Open implementation or not.
I really do not think it would be healthy for the Open Source movement to embrace
Ryan, I hope you're right and this ends up being like SAMBA
How about naming any of MS's much touted successes that aren't broken duplicates of other people's ideas? How about any that actually worked before version 3?
Ummm.... Excel... ummm... ummm....
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
that he didn't try to top his last trick, convincing us that he didn't exist.
How we know is more important than what we know.
While my reply may start wandering off topic, I think your comments deserve some response. It's great to see a serious critique of Open Source development and its limitations. I certainly agree that Open Source is frequently imitative rather than innovative. I also agree that the most innovative projects require rare expertise that is often difficult to obtain and may be diluted to mediocrity by having too many fingers in the pot. I personally favor strong moderation of Open Source initiatives.
However, there are some real benefits that are worth mentioning. The product of these efforts will approximate the desires and goals of its developers (who are invariably also users). Commercial software, conversely, represents a best guess of the customer demands as understood by marketing, is then often coded by developers who haven't talked to more than a few live users (if any), and as a result often, not surprisingly, misses the mark. With open source, the goals of the developers may not be compatible with the 'general public'. But the software is more readily adaptable because you as an individual user can change it or integrate it into a larger effort. A second area which I feel often gets ignored is the symbiosis between open source and standards efforts. It is possible for standards to be defined and evolve among a small set of corporations, but the feedback gained by releasing an open specification (preferentially with a working implementation) is extremely important for resolving differences of interpretation.
I see the Open Source movement filling niches lacking commercial viability and turning existing technologies into commodities. An innovative product like Photoshop may define a market and effectively set a standard for a few years. But over time, the cost of creating a competing product falls. Whether an open source effort such as the GIMP comes a long or the technology gets assimilated into a large operating system, eventually these technologies become an expected part of the computer experience. I remember when word processors were examples of exotic software. Now many introductions to programming walk you though developing one as a simple tutorial. As technologies mature, I strongly endorse Open Source initiatives because they keep software alive and growing to meet the demand of modern users.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
I mean, really.. We have open bytecode-based VMs, we have XML-RPC, SOAP etc. We have C-like languages up the yin-yang on UNIX. The whole OS is built around the idea that a network connection is just like a file. Now MS is trying to sell this concept as if its something new? or interesting? What is M$ giving us here except an 'authentication service' - hell, you could probably whip that up in a weekend with an SSL-enabled apache and perl, and yet another language, based on proprietary technology and attempting to duplicate the functions that Java is already providing? MS has proved time and again that they aren't interested in working with anyone else unless they retain control, and they make the most $$$. If there was ever a time to make a conscious decision to say - 'Not this time, Bill. You can cram .NET up your pasty-white corporate ass.', this is it.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
No, I'm not saying KDE is bad because
I'm saying that when the FSF was confronted with KDE licensing trouble, they launched two projects - one intended to embrace and make liveable (the free qt project, which died I believe), and one intended to entirely replace (gnome).
Such a dual approach might make sense with
BTW, what about the PKI for OpenPGP? Could it be augmented to do this somehow?
Hmmm....
Bind
Telnet
Most of the other infrastructure of the Internet - especially in the early days.
vi
Sendmail
Netnews
Mosaic
BSD
UNIX itself - up through at least Version 6 and maybe 7.
I could go on.
Yes, they weren't explicitly "Open Source". But they WERE developed in environments where the source - either deliberately or defacto - was open or opened (for some value of "open") or otherwise not kept proprietary. Many of them were developed before there WAS an explicit open-source software model.
And yes, some of them didn't run straight from conception to execution according to the orignal design. (But what project does?)
Take Unix, for instance. It was a spare-time hack done in the back room by a handfull of techies trying to turn an abandoned computer into something useful. When it first become part of an official project it was officially the underpinnings of a word-processor application for the legal department - under a strict injunction NOT to spend their time writing an OS. (The minimalization of the kernel proper - with important core functionality such as command interpreters as applications - may have arisen partly to provide plausible deniability: "That's not an OS. An OS does THIS and THAT and THIS OTHER THING, right? Well this doesn't!"). Its source was freely distributed to hundreds of educational institutions, for the cost of media and shipping, until upper management finally took notice when the kernel appeared in its entirety in a set of OS course notes that quickly became an underground classic.
There were major questions about the proprietary status of Unix. It was written before copyright had been revised to apply to software or the patent system hacked to apply, so the only protection it had was trade secret - which evaporates when the cat leaves the bag. It was written by a regulated monopoly, which was mandated to publish and make available anything it did that had applications outside of telephony. The entire EXISTENCE of SVRn may have occurred because a proprietary rewrite was needed to "close" the Unix source.
Perhaps there haven't been a lot of high-profile breakthrough applications out of open source just lately. But how many breakthroughs have you seen from CLOSED source lately? How long has it been since something as fundamental as the Internet, the Web, or spreadsheets came out of either open OR closed source projects, hmmm?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The concept is simple, but the execution would be admittedly difficult. Microsoft is the master of this strategy so it might be difficult to turn the tables on them in this arena. Also, it would be extremely difficult for a less established, more decentralized competitor to gain the mindshare necessary to gain control.
.NET is to take control away from Microsoft. And, in order to wrest control of the .NET technology, we should be ready to follow in Microsoft's footsteps.
Nevertheless, the only way it makes any sense at all to support
Scott
And yet have some trouble spelling 'ridiculous'... amazing software, that Windows!
As for Microsoft being able to change stuff to frustrate open source .NET clients, this ability will be limited because they will want to remain compatible with their own clients.
In short, if Andrew & friends can keep up to the point of making it possible to run a PDC on Linux and serve a bunch of W/2000, I'm sure it will be possible to do the same to .NET.
The real issue is, however, that we would still be delegating centralized control over the Internet to one private corporation which is Real Bad no matter what OS you have on your desktop.
My personal opinions, of course..
.NET platform. At the moment, it's an unproven technology and is relying on the marketing force to get it established. And seeing there's 2 or 3 .NET articles on /. every week makes me wonder if the community here is just doing free work for Microsoft. I don't even remember when slashdot last posted an article about the competitive technologies (J2EE) last time.
.NET, they will use their entire legal force, patents and such, to stop it from succeeding. Remember that .NET is major move from MS to get into new markets and introduce new licensing models (rent software, etc), so basically they're putting all of their corporate power behind the .NET effort and they'll be damned to let any Open Source effort to take a single $ out of their market share. We've already seen some indications of this in some of their new licenses which puts the Open Source licenses in some disadvantage.
.NET on the low end market so they're unlikely to react in negative fashion to such endeavours (SUN is only one of over 20 J2EE platform providers, including companies such as IBM, Oracle, BEA, Sybase, etc).
.NET might be an interesting project. However, I don't see the point of putting a major Open Source force behind a battle that will be fought in Microsoft's terms. I see it more productive to fight the .NET on our own terms. Choose your battles wisely.
But first of all, all this is doing is adding the hype behind the
Second, I think what is inevitable is that if there is ever even a threat of genuinely competitive Open Source implementation to Microsoft's own view of
Learn UDDI, ebXML, J2EE. There's no risk in providing Open Source alternatives on the first two. J2EE has still some licensing issues that requires extra work to get around for OS projects but it's quite feasible and have been done already. It's a proven and established platform. Basically SUN would love to see Open Source J2EE implementations fight the threat of
For those who are interested in working in the Windows realm, reverse engineering
jboss.org
Apache Jakarta
Enhydra
Jetty
When I can put a record in our DNS server that tells people where our users can be authenticated, then we'll have a workable solution, not before. Why should we subject everything to a unneccesary single point of failure (M$) when we don't need to, don't have to, and it's not even prudent?
We should use the email address as a key, the DNS server for the user's domain could then be easily specified to point anywhere, even M$. It would be simple, consistent with existing protocols and memes, and easy to understand by the masses.
--Mike--
hmm.. i'm thinking that came out wrong.. of course, now that's it been modded down, nobody's ever gonna see it, hah :)
.NET taking over people's lives in the distant future, reminescent of 1984.. but if there's an open-source alternative, would the people be able to turn against the ruling power?
:'(
but there have been so many articles about
i can set "no score +1 bonus", but sometimes i wish i could automatically post at -1 so i couldn't get modded down
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
You forget passport and a total 0wnership of the desktop. This means people will not write .NET applications for unix of any kind. You may be able to serve them from unix, and MS would be stupid to stop it.
.NET emulator. Dont you think MS will incorperate win32 and IE specific features into c#? Seems like a no brainer. With the track record of wine, I would be very surprised if they can pull of a robust, stable .NET client.
The real problem is writing a
Uh there's a hell of alot more to .NET than C#. You need to think a little bit deeper.
.NET is a platform, C# is java. I mean similar to java. yeah.
.NET is a services framework. C# is a language similar to java.
.NET uses passport and the windows desktop to lock people into microsoft's services and partners. C# is a lnaguage similar to java.
.NET will make heavy use of win32 and IE to perform. C# is a language similar to java.
You get it?
Considering that MS praised the judges and almost splooged spontaneously on camera in their follow-up press conference, saying how accurate the judges are, I think they agree with you.
MS has such high praise of the appelate court ruling that they must, as a consequence, agree that they are a monopoly in market for desktop operating systems.
Learn how to code like a man. Emacs or Vim, baby. Dont give me none of that pussy shit. Microsoft is your drug dealer and you gotta quit cold turkey, dude. I'll help you. Drop me a line sometime.
You mongoloid cretin. Do you have no respect for individual freedom and liberty? Because techies were screwed by abusive corperations we should somehow accept this as normal and justified? Go back to the stone age you neanderthal.
.NET?! You are stupid to think they wont.
And how could you not conclude that MS plans to incorperate win32 and IE specific features into
Go tell that to all the people running 'net cafes out there.
Go anywhere in New Zealand - even the tiny little out-of-the-way towns - and you'll be able to purchase Internet access at very reasonable rates. Even if it is a side room on a dial-up line at a local information center.
It's cheap, it's everywhere, and it's now.
Must remember to take my server SSH key fingerprint with me on a piece of paper ...
Um, the registry contains much more than just software settings.
If you did a cp -r etc/* and did an upgrade then copied it back would it work? No. You have to be selective with the conf files.
Same with the registry. Just backup HKCU/Software/Whatever and your software settings will be sweet.
The greatest trick Bill Gates ever pulled, they will say, was that he made windows desktop software so ridiculously difficult to install, use, and maintain (via the windows registry).
I'm sorry, but I have to say the windows registry still remains one of the best things about windows. Don't give me that "it corrupts" shit. That was years ago. It's so much better to have a centralised storage database for settings.
You're telling me that the registry (structered settings database) is MORE complicated than the gazzilions of configuration files in Linux (all of which have different formats etc)?
I think you've watched antitrust a fe wtoo many times there....
Future historians will say that greatest trick Bill Gates ever pulled was not lulling IBM into a false feeling of superiority and then clubbing them to death. Nor was it stealing Apple's revolutionary crown jewel and using it to rule to the desktop. The greatest trick Bill Gates ever pulled, they will say, was that he made windows desktop software so ridiculously difficult to install, use, and maintain (via the windows registry) and then convinced everyone to buy into a networked solution, .NET, to solve these problems he created. That will be the legacy of Bill Gates' genius.
I think the big question is not whether .NET can be reverse engineered, but does anyone want it?
I have the feeling that Microsoft developed the idea of .NET to entrench their Windows monopoly, not to add some desperately needed services for customers. Just like integrating IE into Windows 98, this is not something people are asking for, but once it's implemented Microsoft's customers won't consider it something they care to complain about.
I could be wrong, but who's asking for this? What major need is Microsoft expecting to solve with .NET? Microsoft with their monopoly is able to change the rules of successful product development -- instead of developing something that solves people's problems, they spend billions developing things to entrench their monopoly but no one complains about. I remember reading articles before Windows 98 (97 back then) was released where pundits were asking why Microsoft was bothering to integrate IE with Windows. Who wants that? Well, customers may not have been asking for it, but it got Microsoft what they wanted -- the tools to be able to control content on the WWW, and make the Internet their own on-line service.
Well, the analogy is, what if someone found a way to "integrate" IE with Linux's or the Mac OS's UI in the same way? No users are clamoring for this, and something that looks like it's "hurting" Microsoft, would actually benefit them. Realize their real goal is not to get everyone to use Windows; it's to create a "sticky" service generating recurring revenue where the barriers of entry so high that their monopoly is preserved. That can be done with a closed OS or with a closed on-line service.
So the question is, if someone reverse-engineers .NET, are they really solving a problem, or just helping Microsoft entrench their monopoly further?
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
It is so obvious to me that the majority of people on ti sboard do not have the slightest clue as to what .NET is, what it means, or how to program for it.
.NET.
Do yourselves a favor and pick up this book from O'Reilly ".NET Framework Essentials" ISBN 0-596-00165-7
Read it, then have an opinion. Most of the posts on this board are drivel with regard to
If you don't know the words...don't sing the song.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
The Open Source folks really crack me up. MS has invested 4 years and hundreds of thousands of man hours in the development of .NET and the open source folks think they can hunker down for a weekend and pull it out of their collective asses.
.NET.
What a joke.
If open source was so good at innovating then why are they always playing catchup?
I think you guys should go back to doing what you do best...arguing over the library used in KDE, or better yet, arguing about which desktop you should use...KDE or Gnome. There you will feel happier, be more content, and be surrounded by the ones you love.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are going to blow you away with what we are able to do in
I'm still working on a clever footer.
I can't see them making the .NET port itself _free_ under any definition of free accepted by the GNU-folk. Maybe even as far as shared-source, but definitely not free in the sense that you can do what you will with it.
The trouble is, I'm reading about .NET all the time, but I'm still vague about what it is. Seems to have something to do with the internet, something to do with accessing my data from whereever I am, and something to do with being wonderful because Microsoft invented it. Oh yes, there's something about a language (C#?) that will run everywhere (just like Pascal, C, C++, and Java have promised to do).
I've heard roughly the same comment from some several programmers. What is so hard about printing from Unix? Linux distros generally have ghostscript/magicfilter installed. Commercial Unix is usually at sites with Postscript printers. Postscript is a great language for defining graphic output. What is this Windows Printing API and why's it better than Postscript?
I'm skeptical. Remember, Microsoft said they would use XML formats in the office suites. It turns out they meant use nominal XML wrapped around a big chunk of binary data. If they're smart (and they are) they'll treat 'obscurity' as a knob they can adjust. They'll start at 0 and turn it up gradually until nothing is compatible. And it is quite possible to do this while adhering to all the standards you mentioned. XML's not that friendly when it's a huge CDATA block that's an encrypted RAM dump from a Win32 machine. And think of all the games they can play with certificates hardwired into the clients - only Microsoft and their buddies would be 'legitimate' in the .NET scheme. And as they turn that knob it goes from "I don't get the padlock icon" to "I get a dialog box - insecure site, continue connecting?" to "Access denied - you have been reported to Passport central."
no, actually they put a few different open source licenses on their blacklist by name, including the GPL and MPL.
* .NET is an alternative to Java, as .NET has a Common Runtime Language, something like the JVM; .NET is build from the ground upwards; .NET is an open standard, Microsoft has put their specs at the W3C organization, when w3c co-operates, we might find the specs to be free, and no reverse engeneering will be necesary
*
*
So actually, .NET (except from Hailstorm/Microsoft Passport) is a Java killer. Especially in the middleware world .NET is going to play a big role (well, that's what they want anyway). The .NET platform is said to be platform independant, and I doubt they will achieve that because the world of Java has also many problems with this. It is said that Microsoft started their .NET development about five years ago, I guess somewhere at the time when SUN started their trial against MS, which became later the antitrust case.
To conclude: reverse engeneering is not necesary as MS wants the specs to be open (uhm, this is what I hear okay). The only question is whether we're allowed to develop Open Source software for the .NET platform.
--
Bizar technology?
(no text)
-no text-
APIs can be reproduced, so copyright is essentially useless against reimplementation.
It is true that APIs are not protected against cloning under copyright law; but if they implement a novel and efficient solution to a technical problem, they may indeed have protected it under patent law.
For example, Microsoft has a patent (US 5,297,284) on the layout of the vtables of pointers to functions used in COM objects with multiple inheritance. It is therefore legally forbidden to add a compatibility option in gcc to clone this. (Although according to this post on the gcc list the WINE people do have a workaround).
If you think that MS Legal haven't done their level best to protect .NET against independent third party clones, then you are naive. The recent pre-announcement of the crippleware .NET SDK for BSD explicitly mentions that it includes the licensing of relevant patents, as does MS's development agreement with Corel. Independent implementers are unlikely to be so favoured.
They are about to massively upgrade the software they use for sharing live sales and warehouse stock-level data with their supply chain. The company reckoned that .NET was exactly the sort of foundation they needed, and considered it at some length last week, before (reluctantly) agreeing that there was no way they could commit to something before it had had a widely evaluated and reviewed 1.0 release.
To amplify what cthugha was writing above: unless linux can implement this platform, or offer an alternative which is both as easy to use and as easy to develop for, MS will lock in a lot of the server marketplace.
There was a good article recently in Linux Magazine on what the CLR would need
- GCC.NET
.NET? (April 2001)
A couple of other articles (less focussed) discussed why adopting some of-- Mark Mitchell, release manager for gcc 3.0 and CTO of CodeSourcery
What is Required for GCC to Support Microsoft's
-- Interview with Dick Hardt of ActiveState.
Pages 3-4 discuss
-- Jon Udell from Byte
What linux can learn from
For all the throwaway remarks Bruce Perens makes, I don't think it is going to be an easy job -- and cloning the libraries will be a massive undertaking. (For comparison, just look how much of the standard Java libraries are still to be implemented by GCJ).
But even incomplete first steps could be very worth while, especially
I guess its a step towards weaning Microsofties away from Microsoft servers, but it seems like a lot of effort
I think you are altogether too sanguine.
The aim of the .NET API is to dramatically lower the bar for writing server-based apps, leading to a huge expansion in such platforms. MS's services like Hailstorm are only a tiny part of the picture. Unless the unix community can effectively market an alternative API for creating server applications which is both as friendly for end-users and as easy to develop for, we risk lock-out from what is likely to become the dominant sector of the server market.
Hailstorm is a tiny part of the picture.
The 'traffic' will be going to the vast number of third-party apps, which .NET is designed to make it much, much easier to write.
It isn't the Hailstorm servers you need to worry about -- it's all the servers running those third party apps.
Do you want to see Open Source locked out of what is likely to become the dominant segment of the server market ?
Try looking it up on a mailing list, and all you get is endless postings from aa@bb.cc.net . Or try Google and it ignores it altogether.
This is what annoys me the most about .NET
Otherwise I'm with Xandis (who appears to have got modded down off the face of the earth for daring to suggest MS might have done something right for once, so here's a copy):
But the most important thing about .NET (from a marketing point of view) is the scope of what it lays claim to.
Whether it is actually true or not, the umbrella name suggests that MS has a complete integrated package to offer -- everything you need to click-and-paste together apps on your standalone system, which can then be seamlessly transferred to run as server apps without changing a line of code.
It may still be vapourware, but IBM, Sun, Oracle etc don't even have a name yet for such an all encompassing dream.
It isn't meant as just an API for invoking applications -- it is meant as a complete API for creating them. With its support libraries, we are talking about something as all encompassing as win16 and win32 MFC were in their time, but of course now much much wider. (Do platform capabilities have to grow with Moore's Law too ?)
The idea is that -- for example -- you could click together a standalone app to run on your workstation; but transfer it to a server, and all your local forms and GUI are automatically translated to web equivalents.
You can write objects in whichever language you like - VB, C#, perl, python - and not have to worry about bindings or compatibility; you can automatically inherit and extend any of the objects written in any of the languages, either at runtime or at compile time, without even any header files to worry about -- even if they are bought-in objects pre-compiled to bytecode.
The aim is to make it easy to do things at a much much higher level. It is on a completely different scale of developer-friendliness than having to worry about the minutiae of interfacing with Corba, or drawing a page box by box with GTK. Just plug in, and off you go.
I am not saying that the underlying technology is necessarily particularly advanced -- but to create all of the components to make the whole platform is a huge undertaking.
The big questions are whether MS can deliver it, and (especially) what the performance will be like. But if they do get it right, their aim is to de-skill the whole business of writing everyday garden-variety server applications.
It is missing many of the key libraries that would most applications would use; and a lot of the internals are intentionally low performance.
It appears to be a bare minimum for (a) .NET to be teachable on university CS courses; and (b) MS to be able to point to 'two independent implementations' for standards approval -- which it needs to reassure CIO's that the platform won't get hijacked from underneath them.
We haven't seen the licence yet, of course; but I would imagine that any patches would belong to MS; independent distribution of patched code would be forbidden; and that MS would have the right to suppress any patches which altered the functionality of the product.
This is one product I think MS have no desire to see working any better.
Uhm ...
- API for server application => CORBA ?
- friendly for end-user => GTK+ and/or Qt ?
- easy to develop for => python ?
I admit I know nothing ofWhat I'm missing ?
Ciao
----
FB
Not necessarly of CLR. But having a standard for extension modules interface followed by both Perl and Python (and Ruby?) would be nice. No need to re-implement three times the binding to the same library (think of FTK+ or MySQL or PostresQL or orbit or ... ).
Ciao
----
FB
Microsoft, Corel Open .NET
Is BSD The Tortoise?
--
Am I the only one who thinks .NET is the most retarded name Microsoft could've come up with for this? It's not even trendy. It tries to be trendy, but it fails miserably.
If I was heading the creativity department over at Microsoft, the guy who came up with the name .NET would be fired and be escorted out of the building. It's almost as bad as the make-up compact laptops Apple was designing before they realized that those notebooks looked stupid, and that sleek design was better.
Trolls make great pets. Adopt one today!
...why would you want to reverse engineer this beyond just being able to access this service when they absolutely must? Would anyone here actually want to use this? I don't. I like owning my own files and I like my privacy. I also appreciate the hack value of having my own intricate operating system and computer.
Obviously, some people will like .NET because it's for .MORONS. I won't, and I really don't want to use it even if it is reverse engineered.
When people start realizing that Microsoft is ass-raping their privacy, wouldn't it be nice if they could turn to open source solutions to get their privacy back? I think that's the number one thing on our side.
Microsoft does not want the network to be the computer, it wants Microsoft to be the computer.
Samba was a good reverse engineer of a proprietary Microsoft protocol, but damn it, CIFS/SMB is not very good. Anyone who's actually had to get knee-deep into NetBIOS crap knows that it's insecure and not very well designed. I don't want to have to make another Microsoft POS a daily part of my life.
Trolls make great pets. Adopt one today!
we made linux and the sundry OSS programs because MS didn't give us what we wanted the way we wanted it. I don't know much about what .NET offers or why I would want it (I don't care one way or the other) but I'm more interested in an OSS version of .NET (.Virus maybe?) I don't see a reason to port MS stuff to linux. I just don't. I don't think anyone is firm on using .NET yet and if they know that there will be an ultra portable OSS system coming down the pike that behaves much like .NET perhaps they'll wait. Apache is better than MS servers so maybe .Virus will be better than .NET. I'd focus more on doing our own thing (which we excel at) than trying to copy MS.
-
I think that .NET is an interesting idea. But I'm confused why people consider this a revolutionary idea - ok, so MS has all your apps on the central server. I think I must have missed something, because most of the primary software (OS, basic functions, etc) are run locally.
.NET when the blatantly obvious alternatives exists - especially when I can get away for $350 per client box.
Whereas with some of the more interesting projects - that have come to light lately - we are making *significant* headway into the 'NC' idea that was oh-so-trendy about four and a half years ago. The idea of HD-less boxes has become available to the masses. The Linux Terminal Server Project has managed to compile an extensive resource for creating NC's that are feasible for businesses (and significantly more efficient to administer than either a set of Linux boxes or Windows boxes.) K12LTSP is also on the way for schools.
Will either of those projects reach wide-adoption? Not bloody likely. But maybe I'm missing some grand-paradigm of ASP's that can't be fulfilled by a well-designed client/server relationship. I don't think I would ever invest in
As I recall, they only explicitly stated they would port it to a BSD, which has a non-restrictive (in their eyes) license.
"Funniest thing I have read all day. "
obviously you did not read this followup
the final nail in the coffin for OpenSource. If you think it is hard now trying to find a job using technologies that work rather that technologies that are popular, just wait until .NET comes out. This is when the shit is gonna hit the fan. We are fucked unless we do something drastic. We are all going to be out of a job.. and all the people who have been spending their time drinking coffee and eating doughnuts at these stupid fucking .NET seminars are going to take our place.
.NET beta... KILL THEIR WHOLE FAMILY.
So what can we do? There is only one solution. Start killing. If you know someone who is excited about compileable ASP code... KILL THEM. If you know someone who has Visual Studio
If you want OpenSource then you are going to have to contribute to OpenKilling. This is the time to seperate the true advocates of free software, from the the poseurs who brag about the money they made when RHAT was hot... which reminds me, if you know someone who sold RHAT at a reasonable price.. KILL THEM.
Why do you think Microsoft has been marketing the GPL as a virus. Making it look bad to the same people .NET is marketed too? You think they really give a shit about GPL?
.NET CLR for Linux hits they are now the "Savior". They know people will reverse engineer. THey wont fight it. But you can be damn sure /they/ are the ones with the legitimate port and can control their lic and software in that way. Oh they are going into new "open grounds" you bet. But heh, only to control them too. I cant believe even people like ESR and MIguel are so damn focused that the Mundie speakings and all are the immediate threat. They arent. .NET is. IF You even think that MS are ultimately evil and out to destroy you. WHatever. I dont get involved. But you can bet that MS doesnt just do marketing for one single purpose. Eveyrone knows they are /brilliant/ at the game of marketing. THink about it.
Only insofar as they can use it as a marketing tool, far fetched but yes. Oh give me a break please. THey are only dicking around with some small inconsequential to the majority package (Moviel net SDk or something) making it GPL incompatible. Its all marketing and real cheap for them to do at that.
Buttering everyone up so that when their
Jeremy
Thats true and it is not. It is a lot of things they are shoving under. But it /does/ have a definable set of beta software at this point. There are some core ideas. Its so obfuscated because its a lot of things to a lot of different people. When the software hits people computers en masse a more central focus will be gained on how to use .NET. There are a lot of cool things coming with the .NET stuff that Java does not do. Research it some and get a better grasp. There are plenty of books from ms press from people who have a clue. Believe what you like but microsoft is betting a lot on .NET.
Doing so will violate that license. Saying that reverse enginering software, even if the license it comes with states it's not allowed, is OK, is stupid, to say the least. By agreeing that reverse engineering of software should be allowed even if the license doesn't allow it, you automatically also agree with the fact that people shouldn't obey YOUR licenses. Copyright anyone?
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
AFAIK most of the Open Source projects have a single Dictator at the top, or at least one powerful leader who the rest of the team defer to on technical decisions. Some of the leaders may not be in the limelight much, but if you observe the workings, they are there.
So far Linux, Apache, Postgresql etc all look like what ESR calls Cathedrals to me.
You don't create a masterpiece by vote. The teams usually vote on things that don't really matter or where the Technical Dictator doesn't know better.
I bet it's similar in Microsoft, there are lots of projects, but one powerful leader in each project.
What OSS doesn't have is a single Dictator who has say on ALL the projects.
Why should Microsoft pay someone to port .net when the community will do it for free and get a much higher quality port than Microsoft would if they did it themselves. Are efforts to reverse engineer .net playing into Microsoft's hands? As long as we fight the battle on their turf, we are greatly handicapped. If we can design an alternative to .net and pull the game onto our turf, we stand a much greater chance of succeeding.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
It's Java with a connection to a server someplace. Either that or an ASP or something. In other words, what's so special about .Net? Nothing. There was this thing in The Washington Post a few days ago about what Hailstorm offered. There were 14 services but most of them seemed rather trivial, like "myBookMarks" and "myLogin" or something like that. (sidenote, they were all called mySomething, which might not bother me so much except that I have never seen anything called yourSomething hisSomething or herSomething. So why not just drop the "my"?)
Anyway, .Net seems like a tempest in a teapot to me. None of the services described in the post article were compelling enough to make me want to upgrade Windows.
The only thing that will make me upgrade Windows is new hardware that requires an upgrade for support. That means SMP or a 64-bit processor. If they force me to get a passport to use my hardware properly, then I may bite the bullet and move to *NIX. By then, perhaps there will be an IDE comparable to MSVC and/or MacOS for x86. If there is, bye-bye Windows.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
No. Go back and read what Microsoft actually says. They say that "open source" is viral.
Since anyone with any inkling at all of what open source is about understands that such a claim is complete nonsense, most people fill in gaps and think "oh, they say open source, but to make sense they must mean GPL."
Sure, they may mean GPL. Their marketing stuff makes some sense if you read GPL. But in general, they do not say GPL -- they say open source.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
no, actually they put a few different open source licenses on their blacklist by name, including the GPL and MPL.
In the EULA recently mentioned here on slashdot (and since removed from the Microsoft site), Microsoft also named the LGPL and Perl's Artistic License as being on their blacklist. Neither license is a "copyleft" (or "viral") license, despite Microsoft's claim to the contrary.
The truth is, Microsoft is made of people (just like Soylent Green). Some of those people understand the distinctions between the different open source license. Some of those people do not. Some of those people know which open source license are free, and which are copyleft, and some of those people don't have a clue.
But like in all debates, it's very important to listen to what Microsoft is actually saying, and not just what you hope they're saying. They are not making a distinction between the different types of license, hey are making no effort to clarify the licenses, and they often muddle the differences. Much of the muddling is probably unintentional.
But for many, many, many people, this is the first time they're hearing about the different types of "open source" or "free" or "copyleft" software license, and it's a confusing picture, and Microsoft is making no effort to make it less confusing, and is making some effort to make it more confusing.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Fight Spammers!
Fight Spammers!
you could ONLY talk to opensource entities since these were the ones that had the 'extensions' in them (just like M$'s webserver has extensions that make many browsers incompatible).
fight tyranny with irony, I always say.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
There is more about porting .NET to FreeBSD. We can read at Microsoft to Help Port C# to FreeBSD.
.NET on FreeBSD, but involves only some of the low-level technologies that are part of .NET. Microsoft's decision to use FreeBSD rather than the far more widely used Linux is reportedly because of the company's disdain for Linux's GNU Public License (GPL), which Microsoft has described as "Pac-Man like" and "a cancer." The FreeBSD license is reportedly far more amenable to Microsoft because the license doesn't require the author of commercial works to provide the source code to others, as does the GPL."
The original link is at http://www.win2000mag.net/channels/net/.
From the original article:
"Contrary to reports, this porting effort doesn't constitute an implementation of
Unh hunh.. And Osama Bin-Laden will celebrate the 4th of July, and the Lion will lay down with the Lamb... If you think that MS is going to release ANYTHING under a free license after all that they've said about the GPL, you have to be smoking something that I want!
_If_ the source is even available, it'll be under MS's shared source program, and likely include such wonderful EULA provisions like banning the use of GPL'd software in conjunction with it... Why would they 'legitimize' Free software after spending so much time trying to stop it's 'viral' influence?
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
Don't forget that one possible court-imposed punishment of Microsoft could be the opening of its code. If access wasn't limited to major software competitors and was freely accessible, would re-engineering of .NET be good, bad, or otherwise?
A port of .net for linux will increase ( although not very much ) their user base.
... that will pay Bill's bills.
.net certified too.
.net services provider (with an alternative office.net). A huge task!
.net will be an alternative .net toolset (C/C# compiler, interpreter...), an alternative office suite(.net) and an alternative authentication/services server. All that cheaper and more productive than M$ ones.
As it was stated in a previous article MS wants to focus his future bussiness in authentication services.
For example: Your passport account will have the documents (W*rd, Exc*l) that you are currently working on. So you will be able to log in from any computer, appliance etc.. and work with them.
Then you will pay a monthly fee for the use of W*rd, Exc*l
Probably and any application provider possibly will have to pay a lot of $ to be
The war then will possibly be to set up an alternative
So the alternative to
(Sorry for my ugly english)
Microsoft is already an open source company! Not, really!
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NO TOUCH MONKEY!
a. Linux (the kernel) was originally formulated to be UNIX-like, conform to POSIX, and be a MINIX workalike (plus features, of course, and optimized for the 386). b. The GNU part of GNU\Linux is all about taking existing commerical tools and implementing them in an open-source\free way. c. XFree86 is a free implementation of the X-Server design. d. OpenOffice is a massive attempt to compete with MS-Office and be an Office-workalike. e. Mozilla is an attempt to movie what was Navigator into the modern, spec-compliant age and wrest control back from IE. f. SAMBA is a major project to attempt to imitate to the point of compatibility SMB sharing in Windows.
..you forgot about gnutella! Swift, fast, open source, and the protocol was written pretty much from scratch!
With great power comes great electricity bills.
The .GNU project is already in the planning stage.
ourpla.net is your planet
The "Open Protocol" is a MARKETING ploy.
The long term goal of .NET is to trap everyone into relying on MS for all their computing needs.
Who the hell wants to reverse-engineer a trap?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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Oh, and all this time I thought that slashdot got MSNBC'd... :)
Now consider this... you reverse engineer some piece of MS.net software, (ie. future enhancements to the SMB protocol for use with SAMBA) all on your own, and make it work on Linux (for instance). Here come the Microsoft lawyers.. saying.. of course you reverse engineered it, we let you look at the code!!
Now, prove that any further Microsoft compatibility you achieve came from honest reverse-engineering, and not peeking at their code.
Get my point? This "Shared Source" policy of Microsoft is their realization that no matter what, if you can engineer a piece of software, someone can reverse engineer it. So they've decided to avoid the problem all together, and release their Code (poisoned with licensing of course) to everybody. And again, even if you don't look at it.. prove you didn't see it!! You can't.
Attacking the GPL etc could be a very smartly timed move by M$, imagine, get the Opensource zealots in to a fit and state "No way is .NET going to be ported to Linux" and let the fools do the work. Are they smart enough for this? Are we a porn in their little game? Maybe not but then again?
I guess time will tell, going to be an intersting ride anyway...
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
I've given away slightly more insight in to my life than I wanted to there I think.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
umm.. You shouldnt do that..Goes against the Shared source model I have been advocating..
- Bill Gates
Rapid Nirvana
Yes, it will be possible to do an OSS port of .NET. You simply can't create something as big and as ubiquitous as that and keep details of the protocols, et al that it uses under wraps. AFAIK, Microsoft has no intention of doing that.
What they do intend doing is whacking as much IP protection on it as possible, so that they can control the future development of the transaction models (such as HailStorm) and thereby control a large amount of the transaction-based activity on the 'net (most e-commerce, if they're successful). It simply won't be legal to create an OS/Free port of .NET without MS's say-so, and by the way they're behaving, they ain't gonna say so.
Remember, profit isn't as important to MS as control is.
I don't think this will lend Microsoft anything more than what it is already going to get. The whole Windows corporate world is buzzing with this .NET stuff, and if no one is there to keep tabs on Microsoft's progress, then they will be able to squeeze us with more products that *must* be bought. By releasing a free version, Microsoft will know they cannot get us that way. If it wasn't for Samba, Windows users would probably be buying CIFS access licenses for...oh, wait, those of us not using Samba for domain controllers are already buying Client Access Licenses.
To let Microsoft slide at this level will be to let them know we have a limit and gives them time to get ahead.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
It's probably because they have to stop, read, and post comments about M$'s latest scam on slashdot.
And they'd be making at least TWICE as much progress without having to read Jon Katz.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
I'm not reaaly familiar with what .NET really is - but then again, who is. But my IT nose detects a very nasty smell under .NET's lid. So here is in short a request to think about my little private paranoia.
.NET _needs_ an Open Source involvement to be successfull. .NET will need lots of GNU-Linux instances running .NET-aware implementations to help them try to make it a clogging de-facto _Internet_ standard THEY control for a change.
.NET a perfect interim step towards _control_ over content-structure (something one step beyond XML)? Or do I see things that are not there (yet)?
I am convinced that
While talking about control: for what it's worth: isn't
--------
* Sigh *
With the exception of C#, .Net is basically stuff that's already has an open specification, with a spiffy new marketroid's name.
Jeesh, I finally had to wait untill around 11pm since slashdot went down yet again at around 4pm EST! You know slashdot is not giving linux a good reputation.
Anyway I don't believe this user is a troll. Now only 5 hours later I can finally reply in the "best programming langauge" story but I am sure my comment will be very far down on the list now. I was able to ping somewhat but I had no reply so its not a router problem but a server problem. Maybe Rob should switch to a real database like oracle instead of relying on mySql in which www.phpbuilder.com showed to be unreliable under high load and user connectivity situations.
http://saveie6.com/
Lame names? Look - they already named an entire OS after ONE POORLY IMPLEMENTED FEATURE OF THE STANDARD GUI - they prolly chose .net because it was already in the public domain... if an OS company is allowed to de facto dictate the programming language, the markup language, the application serving format and standard... you think you have a mononpolistic atmosphere NOW? You ain't seen nothing yet - they will no doubt vigorously pursue any reverse engineering efforts, blah blah blah, buy anyone who makes inroads in order to squash them...
Their server sales are being eaten away by the evil open source competition, so guess what - they create a new standard that will demand you use their servers (you didn't think they were going to deliver the .NET capabilities as a cross-platform package, now did you?)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Here's the problem: Nobody knows what .NET actually does! When I interviewed for a job at Microsoft in December (well after .NET announcements) I straight out asked, "What is .NET? What does it do?" The engineer replied, "They're still working that out." There's not much to reverse engineer.
.NET is for, and if/when a Linux/Unix/BSD/MacOS port is developed, MS will throw a fit and get it declared a copyright violation...
However, I do believe that if/when somebody figures out what
Kit
Take Unix, for instance, It was a spare-time hack done in the back room by a handful of techies trying to turn an abandoned computer into something useful. Yes. Let's take UNIX, actually. How many people worked on UNIX in its initial developmental stage? Not a whole heck of a lot. Hacker tradition holds that it was Kernighan, Ritchie, and Dennis if my memory serves me correctly (which I'm not 100% sure of ... ) The key word is handful.Don't get me wrong. Ever since I've become an open source supporter, I've been much more than impressed with what I've seen. Heck, I trust more that Mozilla 1.0 will work correctly, and that gxanim will be able to let me watch the Utena movie in DivX format, more than I trust that Windows will work correctly at some point in the future. (And I've had some bizarre Windows crashes ... as in, "Let's click on the Start Menu and watch Windows BURN!!! ten minutes after the system boots!" type crashes ... ) Open source is an excellent way to develop stable, user-friendly software, and perhaps its greatest advantage is the ability to draw on a vast developer base.However, if we're to address what Microsoft calls the "chasing taillights" factor, we don't just need to be able to do amazing hacks. We need to be able to innovate, no da. And I believe that this is the point that Dan was making. I believe that it was Knuth that first hammered home the point that innovation does not happen in committee. (I mean ... look at Microsoft :) I think that if we're going to have successful new OS projects, the best way to do it just might be to have a few VERY committed people sit back and get a nice, clear vision of what they want to do and how. Then, bring in the rest of the community and get down to it.Of course, I'm very willing to be proved wrong by someone :)
I think you had it right first time. They seem to be actively trying to screw us in the media.
--
I would be a paid subscriber if Taco and Hemos weren't such cunts
I'm sitting in a session @ M$ Tech-Ed europe, where they are explaining the details of .NET
main /. story says:"
Microsoftis free to add, extend and
modifythe underlying protocol to
breakany third-party implementation
thatmay rear its head?"
but here they are VERY keen to tell everyone that .NET frameworh isn't a proprietary standard: enough to fully implement has been submitted to a standards body!
therefore, it SHOULD be possible to implement from ground up on Linux.
P.S. C# looks very, very nice!
In Visual Studio.NET (beta 2 code)
(a) Go to the "Help" menu, select "Edit Filters"
(b) In "List of Available Attributes and their Values" expand "Target Operating System (TargetOS)
UPDATE (5 p.m.): HERE IS THE LIST OF OS's THAT .NET WILL SUPPORT:
The "Target Operating System (TargetOS)" list is:
Linux (kbLinux)
UNIX (kbUNIX)
Windows (Windows)
Macintosh (kbMAC)
Windows CE (WinCE)
Burn Hollywood Burn
Microsoft has already comitted to an Open-source Common Language Runtime, which will contain all the basic System.* classes and everything else you need to run any of the .NET compiled languages. It is being developed in conjunction with Corel, and will be released for the *BSD platforms. It should be a short order to get it running on Linux.
.NET programming side is available. As for the extra frills, you'll have to use Windows for those.
What they aren't doing is putting WinForms out there, which is an AWESOME library for dealing with desktop apps. On some level, I understand this, because so much of WinForms is dependant on how Windows does things, the porting job would be huge (but not impossible.)
ASP.NET will also be Windows only, but again that isn't surprising, given that IIS only runs on Windows.
Bottom line: They will be ensuring that the basic core of the
Reverse engineering them (WinForms especially) shouldn't be too hard though -- all of the classes have well-defined interfaces generally. It will just take a lot of tedious work.
-- russ
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
too confusing?
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
MS is crying OpenSource is bad now just so they can push .NET onto people using Windows XP as the delivery vehicle.
If it succeeds in a few years they won't care what OS you use. Just as long as you log onto Passport and transact some kind of business through .NET. That way MS will get paid it's tax just like they do now on every new PC sold.
This is an important point.
Microsoft has a monopoly, and is so abusive-minded that it can't see how abusiveness is self-destructive.
Microsoft can continue releasing deliberately poor quality software, so that users will always feel motivated to upgrade when a few of the bugs are fixed, and a few features are added.
In my opinion, Judge Jackson was correct to compare Microsoft with drug traffickers. However, it was not correct to do so publicly during judicial proceedings.
(See page 111 of the decision of the Court of Appeals [PDF format].)
Bush's education improvements were
If, instead of concentrating on reverse-engineering, time got spent on trying to make the JVM a little quicker, Mozilla a reliable speed demon and to incorporate translation of MS file formats, no programming model that MS would try to push would make a difference. The more interesting battle is in trying to break MS's hold on existing areas where it is dominant. Spending time working on a .NET replacement only enables it.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Couldn't they just have a clause in the licenses saying something to the effect of "This service may only be used from a Microsoft OS using a Microsoft .NET client."? You have to access their servers right? and in order to do that, you have to accept their terms of service. It'd basically be the lazy approach to breaking third party implementations.
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
According to what I have read, .NET open source is for the client side only. .NET servers will all be microsnot Win32/64... those heavy weight, massively scaled, bastions of security. Plus Bill's weasels and the Software Gestapo will be reading everything you own to see if there might be something they can use against you. I'd as soon have my eye sockets reamed by a hot poker than to every own another M$ product.
Even if .NET is ported to FreeBSB or some Linux, I'll not use it. Ever.
100% M$ free at home and proud of it.
apparently, it might be microsoft technology, but not just for windows. anything that can be compiled into MSIL (microsoft intermediate language) can be compiled into a .net program, be it a com object, a dll on a separate nt 4 box, a java applet, or even a piece of code called from a linux box on a different network.
platt talked about it being only a matter of time before compilers/linkers that translate code into this common .net-compatible code come out across different platforms.
then again, the box running end software will be a win2k machine, and code coming off other platforms would probably only exist as components if microsoft has their way.
in any event, my take on things is that at least part of a reverse engineer is going to be provided anyway.
Nothing could help bring Linux to the backend for corporations more so than this... OpenMail and Mailone are costly, and OpenMail is also now dead. This is a needed project!
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
Either I am missing the boat or you guys are too paranoid. I was under the impression that .net is really only for Win32 systems. It is a framework that allows developers to seamlessly offer and utilize web services over the internet. These services are offered via SOAP (and thusly XML). SOAP is an open standard, XML is an open standard. Just because the web server will only show the site to IE5 doesnt mean that Unix systems will not be able to utilize the web services that are offered by the page. The reason for that is because the web server that only serves up to IE5 uses the web service as well but only displays the results of that service to IE5 browsers. If you have a competing passport service and can convince others to use it, then you too will be able to offer it via a custome perl solution. The only thing is you will have to have a soap server (which I think apache does now) and be able to create soap messages. The thing is its all SOAP underneath and .net is just Microsofts way to hide developers from the dreariness of coding SOAP messages.
If you really want to see a widely-adopted, cross-platform architecture of this sort, fix CORBA, roll your own, or do anything but tilt at this windmill - they'll only move the target on you.
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
In my research on .NET for a few articles of mine, I have constantly found references to how Microsoft will support other operating systems such as Linux. Read between the lines however. Microsoft only wishes to create an implementation of the .NET server software, else they may miss out on the larger portion of the Internet that runs on *nix systems. Never once have I found a mention of a potential Linux of Apple client.
Actually, reverse-engineering .NET would be about as intelligent as reverse-engineering screen doors for submarines.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
The major underlying support of .NET for "web services" will be based on XML and SOAP. These are open protocols that do not require any type porting. All of the other stand alone programs on Windows, will be no different from writing a Windows app today in C++. If you don't use MFC, you can port ANSI C++ code to other platforms. Dot Net will enable developers to write GUI applications using Winforms that can be distributed stand alone or for the web.
All Microsoft is doing is creating an IDE with tight integration to make development easier. Some of the features will probably encourage bad code design.
.NET as the next computing platform to do distributed computing. A true port to any .NIX variant is unlikely. They will allow interaction between applications, but you will need a Windows enabled machine to use it.
.NET is no longer the only "virtual machine" for all standard end user applications and distributing computing. They do not want that. But on the bright side, the same distributing computing can be accomplished using SOAP, XML, and PHP on a FreeBSD server with a better uptime than any Windows box, especially those new XP servers.
The ability to inherit without regards to the language the class or component was written in is fine. But it does not encourage good design for use without a CLR runtime. So there will be a continuous gap between academic programming that encourages software engineering principles and "Windows Programming" that will require adaptation.
The idea is nothing new. It is one of the topics you learn in a "Introduction to Programming Languags Course" if you are a CS or CE major. Languages such as C++, Java, and BASIC, are said to have their own "virtual machines" regardless whether or not they are called that. The compiler and linker act as a virtual machine for compiled languages.
Conceptually every language is represented as a virtual abstract layer for the human programmer. At the machine level there is either a compiler, interpreter, or hybrid of both before the code is translated to interact with specific system hardware. All the CLR does is take this concept to a higher level of abstraction.
So now languages like VB, C# and C++ are being linked on the CLR and it handles the low level translation. You can even effect the way the CLR handles low level translation through the use of what Microsoft calls "Assemblies". Nothing new here, most programmers will not have to go that low-level. Microsoft is introducing
They are providing a higher level of abstraction. Instead of learning low level machine language, you can make adjustments to "Assemblies" written in XML syntax. All of this is intrinsically designed for the Windows Operating Systems. A real port to other Operating Systems means that
SubtleSeer
Dudes... Open-sourcing .NET is gonna be like trying to nail Jello to a wall. This MS 'concept' is as much about marketing as it is about technology. Using their tried-and-true modis operandi, .NET is a re-branding of their existing junk - ASP, IIS, etc. etc. As a technology, it's about proprietary Passport interfaces and the like.
Does anyone REALLY want to port C# anywhere?
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
Microsoft has said that their plans include a reference implementation on a free UNIX platform, likely some BSD or Linux. They are staking their future on this platform, so they want it to be adopted widely and they definitely don't want the DOJ to kill it. I think they may play it safe and make their own port under a free license.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Linux Magazine has a good article on how GCC could support Microsoft
You can find it here
...You are over-qualified and under-paid. If we give you a raise, we will break the cosmic balance of the universe.
Other parts of dotNET are already being open sourced. SOAP for example is being cloned all over the place. It is pretty clear that someone will have an Apache version.
The part of dotNET that would be hard to copy (and probably not that worthwhile) is the rack of API goodies that ship with windows. But that is not what a clone of dotNET would be useful for.
The main reason I would want a version of dotNET running on another platform would be because the whole big idea is network computing. If you have a legacy system running on a mainframe you don't need to move it onto a different platform just to use it as a Web service. Equally you might want to extend some embedded system and make use of a Web service on another box that is being set up.
Microsoft is trying to sell Windows as a big feature set development platform for building dotNET services. To succeed they need dotNET services to be available on other 'legacy platforms'.
Microsofts complaints about the GPL concern the viral aspect.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
C# is anything but "pretty much the same as Java." Go read a book or something.
...
// blah
But in regards to your comment, because C# considers value vs. reference types a matter of semantics rather than essence, the lack of compound fundamental types isn't as much of a problem as it is in Java. Just go ahead and define yourself a tuple. If ya want, overload operators for it (something else you can't do in Java).
public struct Tuple {
public object one;
public object two;
}
//
public Tuple fooFunc() {
return Tuple( 4, new FooObject() );
}
You'll end up copying the tuple, but the overhead of this is minor (you won't copy the FooObject instance, either)! Not quite as elegant as Python or ML, but doable and readable.
C# even supports variable parameter lists (something Java doesn't), so you could write code like:
return Util.MakeList( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 );
The JVM was a revolutionary technology in its day, and it's still powerful enough for today's business software. But the Java language itself is pathetic. C# is definitely a great improvement and worth exploration even if it comes from Microsoft. It's a much better balance of power and simplicity (though it still uses the abominable C syntax).
I had hoped that if .NET was cloned in an open source environment, that it would be sub divided into smaller sections to allow one piece to rise to the top. SOAP, for example, although never exclusive to .NET is expected to take off in other technologies. Web Services are another example. If .NET is reduced to a set of frameworks, rather than a platform, it would be very difficult for Micros~1 to completely control its future. It would also be easier to integrate into existing frameworks (such as J2EE) or products (tuxedo, apache, etc.)
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checkout http://dot.kde.org/992627943/
Here is what is says:
A few days ago, Infusion (screenshots) was announced on apps.kde.com. Along with Citadel/UX serving as backend, Infusion aspires to compete with the likes of Aethera, Magellan, Evolution, and yes, Microsoft Outlook+Exchange. Is Infusion there yet? Nope. But from what I've seen, I've certainly been impressed by Citadel/UX, and once I managed to get Infusion compiled, I was able to enjoy some neat functionality. Coupled with the enthusiam of author Brian Ledbetter, it would seem that Infusion is going places. Read on for further details of my Infusion experience and for an interesting interview with the author. Update: 06/16 03:30 AM by N: Art wrote in with some interesting comments on the upcoming version(s) of Citadel.
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
"C# is a language similar to java"
...with the one fundamental difference that it requires you to explicitly mark methods as "virtual" if you want to override them in subclasses.
For a) making methods not overridable by default
and b) overloading the word "virtual"
they shall die.
p.s. the 2 cool things c# does compared to java are:
1) (type-safe) function pointers (called "delegates")
2) the "X as Y" syntax which allows you to downcast in expressions, e.g.
Object x;
Lemur y;
x=y;
System.out.Writeln( (x as Lemur).numberofpaws );
In java you can downcast like this, but you have to temporarily assign x to a var of type Lemur first.
graspee
DISCLAIMER: I MAY BE COMPLETELY MISTAKEN AND DOWNRIGHT TALKING SHITE.
Ah! An extra pair of parens !
/. post. Before I wake up, can someone bring on the Japanese schoolgirls ?)
Thank you!
Someone mod this frood up!
(Now I have learned something really useful from a
graspee
Let me clarify that by saying that when I buy/download my software I want to own it, and be able to use it when and where I want to. Open Source is less evil than the alternative, but I see no future for the
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
Competition is always a good thing. Right now, Sun dominates this space with Java. IMHO, Java is doing quite well, and with J2EE, it essentially brought the application server market to the masses.
With Microsoft knocking on the door, it will only strengthen Sun's resolve to continually improve their platform. Sun does have some issues to deal with, namely that Java isn't perceived as being a RAD environment for the masses, like Visual Basic or Delphi/Kylix. Also, .NET, by its nature, is multi-language write-once, run, well, at this point, on any Microsoft platform. If they do get it to other platforms, then it's multi-language anywhere. (unless MS plays their old games) Sun will get the message as their market share dwindles, but I'm sure their guns are already aimed and loaded.
MS enhancements to the platform will be hampered some if they wish to keep their "standards" hat on with ECMA. If they pull away, the backlash might be the last nail in their coffin. .NET will not kill Java, no matter how hard they try. Only Sun can kill Java, and they would mail their coffin shut by doing that too. ;)
Yes, I agree. However, you don't see companies making competing implementations of MTS. In the case of Java, there are countless implementations of J2EE services, which is why I suggested "to the masses".
The big question is, how long will it take for MS to decide to let Scott McNealy's Solaris systems run .NET applications? I think until h*ll freezes over!! Look at Oracle 9i...Larry Ellison's company hasn't released trial downloads for it on Windows platforms. Oracle 9i touts better integration with Windows 2000 in the documentation - how long until it integrates with .NET?
All key questions for .NET folks. If you buy into .NET early, be prepared to be Microsoft-oriented for some time. I think open source type porting of .NET is the shortest way to get .NET apps on important platforms, e.g. Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, et al...
People are kidding themselves if they think .NET will go away. It offers some pretty cool technologies, though I must say that the Hailstorm platform (a layer of .NET) troubles me a bit. That's where Passport comes into play. The low level CLR (common language runtime - similar to a Java VM) is fairly distinct at this point, from what I can tell. If anyone begins to port .NET, it would likely start here.
As for C# being an open standard, the problem here is that it will get everything INCLUDING the kitchen sink added to it. Just like C++. Reading the C# spec was like looking at C++ with some of the bad stuff kept in, and some of the bad stuff taken out. At least Java has some executive control, and adherence to key principles, namely keeping the language simple.
I say, the best defense is a good offense, and by embracing .NET, open sourcers defend against those CIO/CTO and other MIS types from making MS-only purchasing decisions. If these types can get competing solutions at no cost, or in open source form, they need not shop at Microsoft. In essence, open source gets MS's Intellectual Property investment for free!! Albeit at some cost of having to figure out what the heck MS has cooked up.
Of course, Hailstorm is the real sword, since it works in the MS proprietary Passport stuff. This will be most difficult to subvert, but the underlying .NET framework should port nicely and solve 80% of the problems people deal with.
1. Write a JIT compiler for the Microsoft's Intermediate Language (IL) - basically the same as a Java runtime. This was submitted as part of Microsoft's open standard submission, I think.
s p
.NET platform lies not its underlying platform, but in its vast library (think of Win32 but in a nice, neat, powerful object-oriented format) and development environment. Copying the base platform is the easy part, and isn't going to get you very far... copying the library is probably much trickier, but necessary if you want to try to embrace and extend.
.NET initiative, it's probably better to strike at the SOAP objects and .NET authentication, as those are just XML specs. Write some Perl, PHP, and Java modules which can communicate via MS' XML standards... that's a lot more possible, and probably a lot more palatable to the Open Source community.
2. Write a C#-to-IL compiler (or perhaps VB, etc). Specs are also an open standard; I think there are third-party Perl-to-IL compilers already, for example.
3. Write the base classes. I'm not sure how much native code goes into these, but probably quite a bit. A list of the base classes for Microsoft's Common Language Infrastructure submission is here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/ecma/Allmembers.a
4. Depending on the functionality you want to enable, write the stuff that isn't part of the standard submission. For example, to copy their server platform, you gotta make the ASP libraries, the data libraries, etc. Copying the GUI elements for desktop apps is probably trickier...
Trying to embrace and extend would probably be difficult with all the catch-up you'd have to do. The appeal of the
If you could get all those steps done, you could achive the ultimate goal of... what? Letting people develop for Linux in Visual Studio? I guess its a step towards weaning Microsofties away from Microsoft servers, but it seems like a lot of effort to do something that'll ultimately still be under Microsoft's control. I don't see WINE doing any embracing-and-extending...
If you want to try to co-opt the
--
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Nietzsche
The CLI, the basic API of .NET, is an open standard, as is C#. See http://www.ecma.ch/ecma1/MEMENTO/tc39.htm
yeah, sure, right, of course they will port to the "evil virus" that "destroys property rights" and stifles innovation. they'll port to Commodore Pet before they port to ~ix. folks, there are going to be two standards.. billg's way and the rest of the world, just like the old mainframe days. what's that, you say billg wants to take all the software off the clients and hold it and the data centrally with exclusive and proprietary features? Damn, fire up the 1610 and punch some cards, we're back in 1968 again with billg and the job deck revue! it purely sucks. dot-not purely sucks.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I personally think that this is a trick to lure Open Source communities. Let's think for a while: Microsoft target is for company executives who doesn't know us that work like a dog during the night on how M$ server or Exchange crashes. The only thing they know is that in the morning all works as usual and the work goes on. They mostly don't know other alternatives. What they really want is to ease the management job. That's it.
Let's face it. If the .NET wouldn't been born, another what-you-name-it similar project will be underway. It's inevitable. It will, I believe, simplify a lot of management stuffs (not managing people, of course), especially data organization. Thus, those pointy-haired-bosses would be euphoric to hear this beast's incarnation.
But, don't fret. I bet that at first the .NET will do all the sputters like the first Win95 does. If our server dies, we, the lowly sysadmin servants, spend countless of sleepless nights to fix it. In this case, if .NET crashes, we can tell our boss: That's nothing we can do boss. Blame 'em! (and, of course, leave his office with an evil grin)
If you Open Source guys port it and then try to somehow "clone" the .NET server, then you Open Source guys will be toasted, right? If you try to "imitate" the client, then do you still remember the AIM tactics?
I think, it's better for us to firstly build a .NET alternative and then try to "cooperate" with them (not the other way round). Then, if something get messed up, you can save your face. Hey, it's that beast's fault, not ours! If this is the case, M$ would then force you to choose between the two. Open source alternative would be favored, I suppose. If we imitate the client first, then people will mock us as being inept in cloning the technology.
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Error 500: Internal sig error
This discussion has two major points: a) Can it be done? b) Should it be done?
The answer to a) is yes in pretty much every case like this, I thought. .NET has to work through specified protocols, and Linux can pretty much ape any protocol it wants. Bits are copyable, protocols are copyable. But then, other ppl have already made this point.
I personally don't think that people should be worried about point b). As far as I know, no-one's complained about SAMBA encouraging people to use windows. I thought that the reason we were all defending open source and software libre was not dogmatic, but out of the solid belief it produces better software. By aping .NET, Linux removes the dependence on windows, and allows people to choose the better OS - which, for a large and growing number of people, is Linux. And all of Microsoft's power resides in their OS - if microsoft's OS monopoly is removed, .NET won't be half as important as it used to be.
It also has to be remembered that .NET's success as part of the windows platform is not assured. Heck, personally I can't see why anyone's pushing the Network Computing concept at all. Hard Drives are faster, cheaper, and much more secure, than bandwidth. Unless this changes (and it WON'T), Network Computing will not get many takers, let alone the amount of business that Microsoft suggests. To worry about 'legitimizing' .NET is to fall for the Microsoft rhetoric that presents the adoption of .NET by world+dog as a fait accompli.
--This post is about truth, beauty, freedom, and above all things, Karma
-- This post is about truth, beauty, freedom, and above all things, Karma
All this talk of reverse engineering .net is all very well, but very few people seem to understand what .net is or in-fact which parts of it could be usefully ported to another OS.
.net so far (as far as developers are concerned) is the RAD abilities of the new languages (specifically C#) and developer tools and the web services (ability to call methods remotely, via SOAP, on another machine). RAD tools are already available for other OS's the only advantage is the new C# language, which is sufficiently like Java to consider a Java to MSIL compiler and a MSIL Virtual machine or just a MSIL to Java byte code converter. Writing SOAP services is already available using Java (I think).
.net (any part of it) needs to be considered in the context of that you want to achieve and what is realistically achievable by an open source team.
Do you want to implement a JIT/ Virtual machine for MSIL (.net framework version of Java byte code)? Do you want a compiler to generate MSIL?
Most of what I've seen of
At the end of the day any thought of re-implementing
Didn't X begin under an open-source (or even free?) license, becoming less and less open every release?
I don't know if anyone noticed or not, but Microsoft has a lot of presence in the desktop market. While MS wastes it's time/resources/marketing fighting against the superior incumbent linux, bsd, and solaris machines, we could be sneaking more desktop apps into linux, and more linux onto desktops... Despite slow growth in desktop sales, Windows and MS Office are still their bread-winners.
I think it is inevitable that we will eventually have to workout a way to interoperate with the MS .NET platform.. But its a not a good thing to embrace.
If we do manage to get in workable on Linux/BSD/Solaris it will only strengthen the .NET platform at no extra cost to Microsoft. I dont think they will block the Open source effort to reverse engineer it... atleast initially.. because they want .NET to become the dominant force.
Later, however, Microsoft will make continue to make 'enhancements' to the platform that will make it harder and harder for the Open source people to keep up with. They might even pursue some kind of legal action to stop it in its tracks..
- Tempestdata
Isn't that what the '.net' thing is meant for? I find this entire 'product' pretty alarming. Quite frankly, I'd hate it knowing that Microsoft manages my data... with so many security holes and such it is no brainer that the stuff may get easily lost. Anyhow, those holes is a minor factor however... The greatest concern is that Microsoft is really trying to legalize 'tapping' into other peoples' underware... Imagine the immense powers that Microsoft will enjoy being in the capacity of the world data keeper? This would allow Microsoft to fully track every single comp. user in ways unimeginable before (however, I have strong doubts as to whether Microsoft is not doing the same thing at the present times... ). With this 'innovative' (quote from Microsoft), Billy will have a better understanding of what a particular user is (as a person or individual...) they their closest relatives! Starting from simple things like keeping a list of software products used by an individual (and thus have nice means of prosecuting illegal copies of protected software...) to credit card numbers, contacts (phone numbers, names etc), personal preferences (sexual orientation -- by analysing web usage -- for example)... clearly the '.net' product will turnout to be the ultimate Big Brother, much greater then the highly acclaimed Carnivore. Poor and damned are the ones who commit their souls to Billy. Speaking of Anti-Christ, I think that Microsoft fits the criterium nicely. I say, "Bring HALT to this Microsoft BEAST..."... Microsoft should be broken up into pieces for good, otherwise all of us are to suffer.
I guess you'd have to be better than just another 'Anonymous Coward' to post comments that carry no sense in them whatsoever. I've made a legit post, and if some Nut-Freaks don't appreciate they are not asked for their 2 cents.
What we really need is a framwork which is ".NET compatible" That is -- every service written for .NET will work with this new framework if everything is configured properly. However, it's true that M$ will control all the authenecation for .NET. For that reason, there need to be other authenication services. Not just one alternative, but competing sources for "Passports". In addition to keeping up with .NET, the system should be extended in an open way (as many have suggested), but NOT in a way that fundamentally breaks .NET. This stategy won't work because M$ has all the leverage. Before any serious extension can be done, the services need to be liberated from the watchful eye of M$,s passports. The fundamental thing is to get it out there in such a way that ANYONE can provide Passports. A service should be able to decide whether a given passport will be allowed (or maybe it will allow all or not even require one) I haven't read much about this yet, so I don't know the details, but rest assured that I will getting a book soon.
Windows is more convenient than Linux just as having an ingrown toenail is more convenient than seeing a podiatrist.
One of the biggest strengths I see about linux is that its software base is unbiased. Yeah, most of us are biased agaisnt Microsoft at heart, and could exist without it, but the whole thing about openness is that EVERYTHING should be available. .NET should be reverse-engineered if for only this reason. As for attracting new users, how many newbies would use linux much if they couldn't talk to their friends over IM or MSN as they expect to? The same thing is true here, if we don't have it, we block a whole user base. Being free in linux means you have a choice, one of those choices should be the choice to use .NET.
Windows is more convenient than Linux just as having an ingrown toenail is more convenient than seeing a podiatrist.
I was under the impression that Microsoft had intended on porting this to other platforms other than Windows. In fact, I thought that moving to .NET was integral to maintaining their monopolistic structure (ie, if .NET runs on all platforms, including Linux, and Microsoft is the only producer of .NET, then Microsoft still maintains control of the messenger).
.NET.
If this is the case, you probably won't have to worry about Microsoft port this thing all over the place. Its in their interest to do so, since they won't have to maintain their OS monopoly anymore. They'll have another, more powerful one. Instead, I think you should focus more on producing an OpenSource/Free alternative (and possibly compatible) to
Porting isn't the issue here, I don't think at least.
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System.out.println(((Lemur)x).numberofpaws) ;
Stumbling in the dark
I hear slavering of jaws
Eaten by a grue.
I would love to have code written in different languages use the same runtime, same garbage collector etc. We would definately benifit from having a free software solution like this. And since, AFAIK, CLR is an open standard, and it will have Python, Perl etc. ported to it, it might be a good idea to just do a free software implementation of CLR.
One thing that bothers me with both Java and C#... How come arrays are still the only fundamental compound type? Lists, please! Tuples! Especially when you have GC, these are really handy.
I hate that in modern languages like this, I can't return several values from a function in a clear and sensible way, like in Python or ML.
Yesterday I attended a Microsoft seminar on .NET.
From what I can see is .NET is a brand name (like ActiveX). This brand's products use w3c approved technologies such as XML, http, and SOAP. C# looks like a nice blend of Java and C (NOT C++ Amen). In other words, the interface level is non-propriotary. Why reverse engineer their OS? Just write web services for linux ground up and adhere to w3c interface standards. That's what IBM and Sun are doing.