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Petreley on Ximian and Mono
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Bad Ximian. In this week's Infoworld opinion piece Nicholas Petreley points out how Ximian's .Net Clone, Mono, may very well be the "Destroy Open Source" Trojan horse that Microsoft has been desperately seeking. Thanks Nick for the wake up slap. We needed it." I don't understand how Ximian expects to succeed either. Lots of other companies have attempted to co-exist with Microsoft in a similar fashion, and they all lasted right up until the instant Microsoft decided to squash them.
Anti-Microsoft people should come up with extensions to .Net which fragment it, just like Microsoft tried to do with Java. Perhaps Mono could be used maliciously like this, but I think in that case it would backfire and only hurt Unix users. But you've got to hand it to Microsoft, NT 4.0 is actually halfway decent for light use once you install Cygwin and Netscape.
Yes, well said. Reading most of the comments in here so far makes it sound like I stepped into a room with a bunch of paranoid lunatics.
Microsoft actually has some pretty good stuff going in .NET, and they're extending an olive branch to the open source world. A .NET common language runtime (CLR) for Linux and other Unix-based systems strikes me as a win-win.
This scare-mongering going on here is just childish.
Ah, nothing like reeking *nix elitism in the morning...
I use CLI all the time. However, I want to have several editor and terminal windows open at the same time. That's why I use X. I also want the screen look aesthetically good and that's why I want KDE on top of X.
Because the GNOME developers *wants* that of course!
If Nautilus is really that bad, then the GNOME developers would never have made Nautilus the official file manager.
And now Eazel is gone, you're still complaining about it?
we should, however , copy the good ideas. the common runtime language its, IMHO, a good idea. I think that the open source/gnu world is not really using its full potential, which is the open source. Although the source is available, most developer will only develop and use the librarie in its language of choice. Its not possible to learn onother language, just because you want to use a library, and there is waay too many languages. What is needed is a common intermidiate language that is easy to map. A lower-level language that is easy to JIT , ( c ? ) and some metadata to express the structure ( xml? uml ? ) the bottom line is the open source has tons of good stuff, languages, compiler, librarie. but no good way to integrate and extend. ctyu
After all, the parts that Ximian is working on duplicating are all soon to be ECMA standards with plenty of documentation.
3 HR 0FHIOH3RO32R3H30R9H3RFIUHRF
I just went to the MS site to check what they've submitted to ECMA, and the libraries submitted for standardization contained only 70 classes.
I hope there's more to it than that, otherwise this ECMA submission is more or less useless. You get the language but you will never get cross platform apps written with it.
Microsoft is going to have a hard time fiddling SOAP so that it's clients still work and Mono clients don't.
<SOAP>
HO23RHOWHOWHOFIH2OF903HFHI0HFCW0H203RHIOH3RHFR2
<SOAP>
Done. SOAP is XML, it describes the structure of the data, not the semantics. You can still put whatever proprietary crap inside the payload. Having it wrapped inside an XML element won't do anyone any good.
But owning the customers is exactly where things are going. AOL is doing it. Yahoo is doing it with Yahoo IDs and clever acquisitions such as egroups. And Microsoft see the future.
With that in mind, it's certainly foreseeable that less and less of Microsoft's revenues come from the operating sytem, while more come from owning their customers.
Does IBM do anything related to
To quote:
You can download SOAP, UDDI and WSDL implementations for free from IBM, and they're all in Java. Most big Java application servers already support Web Services. I see little value in
Ximian may continue to develop and advocate porting the .NET framework to *nix, however the chances of these developments making it into Gnome itself are next to none.
Anyone who remembers the long technical debate over whether or not to include bonobo (another Ximian technology)in Gnome itself, will tell you that the chances of this making it into the base Gnome package are non-existant.
Considering that bonobo was a Ximian technology that the main Gnome developers were split about 50/50 in opinion over, and the lead guy at Ximian seems to be the only one who supports Mono, the chances of the main guys at Gnome letting this get into the base are non-existant.
So, Mono will only be available (by default that is) through the custom Gnome desktop offered by Ximian. Add that to the fact that anyone looking at this situation will tell you that the chances of mono ever even becoming usable are *very* questionable.
Add *that* to the fact that all most no open-source developer would even consider using Gnome...
In conclusion, Mono is a very disturbing effort IMO, and maybe the head guy at Ximian needs some sleep. But as for being a threat to open-source? It Won't be installed default on *any* distributions, so people will have to go out of their way to use *Ximian* Gnome (which some/many do), then Ximian will have to foce a large majority of open-source developers to base the technology of their applications on a platform created by everyone's least favorite monopoly...
And all this is assuming Mono ever becomes usable, Good luck Ximian!
hmm - on AMD 800 Mhz, 320MB RAM, KDE CVS from last night...
$time kmail
real 0m1.439s
user 0m0.650s
sys 0m0.000s
So KMAIL will be slow if you try to run it when you're loading it from another, non KDE enviroment, it has to load all services.
The upcoming version of KDE 2.2 should give you at least 30-50% speed boost when starting KDE applications.
Hetz (Heunique)
Someone is making one..
Anyway, Sun report has been read by the KDE people also and some of the points are being discussed on the mailing list - feel free to look at it at lists.kde.org
Hetz (Heunique)
You forgot a third option: one can ignore it and continue living a happy MS-free life.
There is no such thing as "decent" distributed objects infrastructure now, and won't be for quite a while -- the technology isn't advanced enough to provide model that will provide the design that will provide the standard that will provide the implementation, so all we have (COM, DCOM, Java-based stuff,...) amounts to amateurish attempts to do things with no theory or design behind them. I also have a strong suspicion that neither Microsoft nor Sun and especially not Gnome will originate this design.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Damn it. You have to look REAL hard to find more stupid people than /. people. Yeah i know... Call me a troll. I don't give a shit.
You yell and you scream and you do all kinds of crap. And when all comes to all you don't even know fucking why.
People here talk about .Net as it was the same as passport etc. Those things has NOTHING to do with each other.
People wake the fuck up and live in this world, instead of you holy fucking linux bullshit all the crappy time. .Net actually is a brilliant technology which could kick some major ass if implemented on the linux platform. You are just to stupid to see it.
Jesus christ. /. the home of thousands of idiots
"Well, to be fair, a far larger number of companies have had very lucrative and stable relationships with MS than the converse."
Not even close. Certainly, you have heard of more companies that live in symbiosis with microsoft, but for every one of those, there are probably ten that got squashed that you never even heard about. Funny how that works.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
I haven't understood Ximian's strategy from the start. Some important people have already noted that .NET isn't that technically great, that it may or may not be a big security risk, and that it definitely looks like an attempt to kill Java. So why is Ximian so eager to buy into it?
.NET, but given that it's a nascent collection of tools, and that it has no foothold in the consumer market (other than hype), wouldn't it be a better strategy to produce a competing free alternative? Tripping the giant always seems better than sleeping with it...
There may be a lot to
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Except "we" don't all hate it.
Just ignore Bowie's whining. Look at what happened when he was heading the UI guidelines effort of GNOME in 1998. Produced nothing but flamewars because of his lack of social skills (read the August archives of gnome-gui-list for examples).
/mill
Yes, and it would be nice if Microsoft simply released .NET under the GPL as well, but that's not going to happen.
Like it or not, Microsoft controls the desktop, and they will continue to use that leverage to control what technologies are viable on the server. SMB works because it is available on every Microsoft client ever. That means that when the Free Software hackers figure out how to impersonate a Microsoft SMB server we magically gain compatibility with the entire world. This is hard, but it isn't nearly as hard as Microsoft's job of trying to find ways to extend the protocol that don't break backwards compatibility. Once something like Samba exists it basically ties Microsoft's hands. They want desperately to make incompatible changes to the protocol, but they know that if they break any existing applications or clients that their customers might very well get tired of the game and simply switch to Samba.
Which means that Mono has a golden window of opportunity here. If a useful version of Mono can be developed right now, while Microsoft is still trying to win developers to the .NET cause, it could grab a significant marketshare (especially on the server where Linux has serious traction). Microsoft can't make incompatible changes this early in the game, or they will scare everyone away, and if Mono was actually useable, then it's existence would serve as a deterrent to Microsoft trying to shaft their customers down the road. After all, as long as there is an alternative to their technology Microsoft has to listen to their customers.
SMB may be crap, but the existence of Samba has opened up the market for Linux file servers. Nowadays most large organizations are using Samba, and even quite a few small organizations have some sort of commodity server running a version of Samba.
Samba is clearly a case where it was a worthwhile effort to reverse engineer a closed protocol. SMB clients are so ubiquitous that it makes sense to try and figure out how to talk to them.
.NET should be even easier to reverse engineer. After all, the parts that Ximian is working on duplicating are all soon to be ECMA standards with plenty of documentation. Besides, all of the RPCs are done via SOAP which is basically nothing more than spitting plain text XML out of port 80. Microsoft is going to have a hard time fiddling SOAP so that it's clients still work and Mono clients don't. Especially since even non-guru hackers like myself will be able to open up the RPC packets in the text editor of their choice.
Remember, the desktop controls the server, not the other way around. Servers can be changed out over a long weekend by any halfway decent sysadmin. Desktops require bargaining with end users who will give up their familiar tools over their dead bodies. SMB became the file transfer protocol of the LAN because it was "good enough" and it was on every single Microsoft client. .NET is soon going to be on every single client as well, and it is cool enough that it will get used. IBM and crew will make sure that we can create .NET compatible services under Linux (they are nearly done now) because they want to continue to sell servers. But unless there is a .NET compatible client Linux will slide even further into the Internet ghetto than it already is. Pretty soon only the hardest of hard core Pro-Linux sites will function 100% on Linux boxes.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
I don't use bookmarks that often, but I find the Search tab in Mozilla sidebar quite convenient. I have it set to Google, of course. It's nice to be able to quickly jump between results returned by the search.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Of course it will happen.
You wanted competition, now you got it.
If you try to compete against Microsoft by giving away an OS for free and making money off support and services... And if this competition actually is successful(so far it's not because of the lack of stability and robustness)...
Then Microsoft will clearly have to move to counter the competition. They will do so by giving their OS away for free and making money off support and services.
I can't believe you didn't realize this?
BTW, MSN and the other MS websites are not cash generating. They've been liquidating them piece by piece over the past year.
As someone who has read Petreley for the last 6 years or so, off and on... (I usually can't stomach reading an article in it's entirety)
:)
I can assure you that he is part of the ABM crowd.
I mean Microsoft, not ballistic missiles.
But personally I think Microsoft is bankrolling his column, because he provides some of the best reasons to not use Linux.
That's fascinating because for the longest time vc++ conformed to the C++ standards much moreso than gcc.
That was until gcc was replaced by egcs with v2.95.
"Referring to it as a .NET clone mires it in all this Passport crap"
.NET fairly well from a Microsoft perspective, I'm actually very amazed at how easily people have decided to confuse it with just Passport.
As someone who has been following
I'm also trying to figure out exactly what the complaint is with Passport, but my mind isn't as creative as someone like Petreley.
If there is one universal truth in this world... It is that Microsoft does not like breaking backwards compatibility.
.Net. They've completely ripped the foundation out from Visual Basic and the migration from VB6 to VB.NET is somewhat painful.
.Net framework and start up something new.
They are, however, doing this with
I highly doubt they'll be doing that again, unless it is to completely scrap the
".NET isn't that technically great"
Why do you feel that way? Have you even bothered to look into it.
.Net has some really smart minds behind it, and technically it's better than Java on paper anyway.
This does already exist, see this /. discussion about LBX&RX. It is included in XFree 4, unfortunately no one uses it.
Yes, but you can use QT, but can you use all the KDE/Gnome libraries?
I don't know how they describe it in the specification, but there is so-called meta-data in each assembly (the equivalent to a jar). This meta-data describes the classes, methods and so on.
Microsoft has promised to put C# and the virtual machine through the ECMA process. However, if most C# developers come from the Win32 background and heavily use libraries such as ASP.net, WebForms, ADO.net then how will those applications be portable?
You see it more from the compatibility-side than I do. I like C#, the CLR concept, the base libraries and that's it. I want some nice KDE-libraries for the CLR so I can write my KDE software in C# and/or Python. The possibility of executing Windows-software is only a side-effect for me. There will probably some company like Ximian doing it if there is a market for it, but I don't care too much about this. If MS starts making incompatible changes that's bad, but doesn't really affect my software.
You said you rarely need to use pointers yourself. I agree. And when I do, I don't want to do it inside the virtual machine and compromise it's stability or security. For any system programming I will use C.
But then you have whole categories of software that cannot be run by your VM, for example every piece of software that uses signal processing (video/sound stuff), probably also games. You cant get platform independent if you still have to use native code for 20% of the applications, even if only 1% of their code is native.
Beside that, using native code does certainly not improve your stability or security as long as it runs in the VM's process. The only secure way is to have it in a single process, and you can have that without native code, too.
Adaptive optimization of HotSpot really does make a difference in many cases.
The reason for all the complicated adaptive optimization stuff is the bad design (performance-wise) of the bytecode. Because in OO-software most methods are very small the best way to optimize a program is by inlining. Hotspot does exactly that. But because in Java every method is virtual (unlike CLR) and you can load new classes that override methods from existing ones at every time doing this is dangerous, and you may have to redo the inlining after you load a new class. This is quite a complicated and expensive process, so Sun tries to avoid for most methods it by making it adaptive.
They created a monster because their bytecode is a little bit too flexible. In the CLR this is not neccessary. You can even pre-compile your assemblies if you want to.
Some people claim this is what gives C# better performance. I'm not convinced.
The most important difference is that you cannot load any classes dynamically. AFAIK this is not possible in
It solves many problems of the current systems:
- you have a single API for all programming languages (which
admittedly all get quite similar because they all have to support various
OO-features, exceptions and so on). Currently it is only theoretical
possible to program for Gnome or KDE in a scripting language. In reality you
will get only half of the APIs and it means a lot of trouble for the end
user.
.net also comes with a unified format for things like API
documentation (that is written in XML and generated by the compiler itself).
- You dont have trouble any more if you use a non-x86 platform. This could
bring real freedom in the platform choice.
- Things like buffer overflows will be very rare (they are still possible
because you can use pointers, but you rarely have to use them and your code
is marked as insecure).
I think it is desirable to have something like this, and if MS releases the specs for it and you get some interoperability for free this is a good opportunity. Even the design of the CLR (Common language runtime) alone is such a huge effort that the free software community just saves much time by adopting it. And the base library looks very nice, they even have unix-like things in it, for example support for perl-style regular expressions. Something that is still missing in the Java (even if they announced regex support for a future release)... Speaking of Java, I dont think that it is an alternative:- It is definitely not more 'free' than the
.net stuff (if MS really
submits the specs to ECMA)
- The JavaVM is quite limited to Java as language. Yes, there are other
languages for the JavaVM, but the VM isnt really flexible enough and you
dont have things like pointers available which you need for system
programming.
- Java's performance sucks because of several design mistakes (ok, they
are only mistakes if you see it from a performance point-of-view, you could
also argue that Java's design is cleaner). MS got several things right that
cause the bad performance of object-oriented Java projects:
- they do
not make every method virtual
- there is an alternative to heap-allocated
and garbage-collected objects (small objects can be allocated on the stack
and are passed-by-copy)
- they made some restriction into their IL (intermediate language) that
Java's bytecode doesnt have and result in faster/easier code generation.
Both are stack-oriented, but in IL the stack must have the same depth at
every jump-point
Of course, there are also ugly parts in...you're loading ALL the KDE/Qt libraries, too, since they don't get loaded when you start your environment.
Try this: First, start another KDE app (like Konqueror), then start KMail and see how long it takes.
The fact is your business may have done better if there was competition at higher levels.
Apparently there is no moral limit to one's actions as long as "profit" is the ultimate motive.
You're absolutely right. Corporations, generally speaking, are not in the business of being moral. They are not aiming to be upstanding citizens. One would be hard-pressed to find a single corporation out there whose sole focus from its inception has been "To restore morality to the corporate landscape and to human society."
I don't think anyone was necessarily trying to defend it or excuse the actions of corporations by stating it. It's just a fact. The only reason companies don't sell crack cocaine is becuase of the War On (Some) Drugs.
There are, however, some folks who *do* make this argument to defend the actions of corporations. Many of these people often chirp in defense of Microsoft. "Microsoft is the single most sucessful company ever." This is obviously flawed, as it is an ad crumenam argument. It's no different than saying, "Whatever makes a lot of money is therefore good."
By that token, the Seven Dwarfs (CEOs of big tobacco) are all moral and good despite the fact that they lied under oath when all seven testified nicotine is not addictive. Sell an addictive, deadly product and lie about it? You're moral and good as long as you make money!
(I would have no problem with cigarette companies if they were up front about their deadly product.)
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
The KDE libraries are a desktop perfection. I fail to see this price they are paying.
Ah, I see. And having KMail take almost two minutes to load on a K6-2 400MHz machine with 384 MB of RAM under no other load besides X, Windowmaker and DFM is perfection? Seems like a pretty piss-poor definition of perfection to me.
Proudly posting from Opera, just to piss off the really hardcore GNU zealots. ;)
I'd say that it was the residual resentment at Microsoft, and the realisation that the same could happen with any of their other partners, that led them to be so interested in Open Source and Linux: if the software is free and easily portable, then that's more money to be made in hardware and services, and IBM is just 1 massive hardware and services supplier, that has to produce software as a sideline to get the hardware to work.
So that makes IBM just like Apple, except successful. ;)
Ah, no wonder it's slow under pure WM. I installed 2.2 beta 1, but I've never run the desktop. I only installed it for the libraries so that I can run KDE and QT applications. Ditto with Gnome 1.4 for the Gnome and GTK apps, so don't think I'm just a rabid Gnome zealot flaming KDE. :)
Well, it is a bit of myth that Buddhism doesn't want to convert followers by force. Look at Sri Lanka -- the whole Tamil conflict is caused by the fact that the Buddhist majority there wants the Hindu Tamils to assimilate or move away.
Similarly, there certainly is conflict in the Open Source community -- different licenses, different desktop environments, etc. can start the same sorts of silly arguments such as the MacOS/Windows debate that happen in the closed source world.
My systems are running with no M$ OS, browser or tcp/ip stack. How do you explain my connectivity or even my server being available 24/7/365.25? Keep in mind that M$ borrowed heavily from the *BSD tcp stack for their worldwide connectivity. M$ Netbeui?? Hah, their non-routable ( unless encapsulated) protocol. Even they are dropping it in winXP.
Although I sometimes think of a hermit like existence as nirvana, my lack of MS OS has nothing to do with achieving peace and quiet.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
I don't understand this reasoning. I also think its fishy that Microsoft would help a GPL'd project after all the crap they just said about the GPL. They may want to turn the "cancer" against us somehow.
.NET in mind and not use any other system that they may be able to use the servers they control to hold information hostage somehow. True, the tools are open source but will the data pathways be open or private?
.NET to squash open source its not a very sound plan at all. It will still make .NET more feasible an option if both Unix and Windows can talk to each other through .NET services and I really believe that is the only goal they have with Mono.... to increase credibility of usefulness.
... I think it is especially hard for those who worship a license like the GPL to ever trust a company that is usually targeted as the enemy. Truly I stopped using linux because I got tired of all the zealots persecuting closed source vendors. I use FreeBSD now because I like the environment [and the kernel source :)] a lot better.
I suppose they believe that if they can get every Linux/BSD user to write applications with
If that is Microsoft's goal to wiping the credibility of Open Sourced systems out they forgot that one thing Open Source people are wonderful at is duplication of effort just for the hell of it. It means next to nothing for another group to spend their free time coming up with an alternative with similar or the same functionality. I mean GNOME started because of licensing issues with KDE. Before GNOME there was the Harmony project which was an attempt to replace all the functionality of QT with a drop in GPL'd replacement. Anyone heard of Lesstif? The free Motif clone? Mesa?
If Microsoft plans to use
I know its hard to look at this stuff objectively
The moment that we become dependent on software with restrictive licensing is the moment that this whole party goes down the toilet.
.NET specification is submitted as a standard. Mono is GPL. The people implementing it _are_ a part of the GNU/Linux community. What more do you want?
You mean, like depending on Java, as some people suggest as an alternative?
The
If the worst-case scenario happens, and MS finds a way to block implementation of mono, then what? Well, we are back at square one, without having lost anything. And as Miguel said, the only way would be to patent specifica ways to implement it, which still leaves developers free rein to implement it in a patent-free manner.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Your point about the oppressed Gnome being the secret reason the Linux community does not want to throw its weight behind a Microsoft developer standard is... a strange one.
.NET or not that I'm reacting to, it's the _very_ harsh language used, aimed at .NET, mono, Ximian, Miguel, and Gnome (it's been even worse at LinuxToday). Everybody involved has been painted as craven traitors, and the language used has at times been just shy of character assassination. I've been trying to understand where this reaction stems from, and it seems it is for some people an opportunity to attack a project they see as an "enemy".
You misunderstood, perhaps. It's not the adoption of
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
A group of open-source developers have started a project to implement a set of programs and protocols that have been submitted to a standards comittee. Like so many other open-source projects, others are free to use it - or to help developing it - or not as they choose. This is nothing strange; this has happened many times before. So why this sudden outpouring of emotions, and even, in a few cases, hate?
.NET is not a danger; it might be beneficial to Linux; it's not connected to Gnome other than being another Gnome application; even if you hate .NET, don't connect it with GNome; it won't hurt KDE or other desktops; you don't have to use it if you don't want.
Well, is it becuse the protocols are under another entities control? No, it can't be that; after all, Java Run Time environments, and GNU:s gcc Java compiler, have not received this reaction, even though Java is not only under the control of a corporation, but isn't even submitted as an open standard.
Is it because the controlling entity happens to be Microsoft? No, or the SAMBA developers would have been boiled alive a long time ago.
Are people perhaps afraid that this will giveMicrosoft a foothold to subvert the open-source movement? Maybe, but not likely; the existence of Samba, for instance, have only resulted in more Linux servers being deployed than would have been the case otherwise. It is likely that, by allowing other services to run on Linux, we will increase its prevalence further - and this time on the desktop.
Is it because it happens to be developed by some of the people that also work on Gnome? Well, it does seem that way, unfortunately. We have not seen the same backlash against FSF for their DotGNU, after all. What seems to be happening here is that some people have taken an ABG (Anything But Gnome) approach to their lives, and will take any opportunity to help their desktop of choice "win". Of course, the same immature personalities exist among Gnome users and among any even remotely divisive application/framework/whatever - just look at how long and bitter the Emacs/Vi flamefests were before a realisation crept in that they can peacefully coexist.
This would not have blown up like this, of course, had not Petreley written a very inflammatory, factually erroneous piece in Inforworld last week. For those of us who read him every week (I've stopped since that last piece), he has, ever since he started to use KDE, used every opportunity to attck Gnome for any reason he has been able to come up with. He is, in fact, a good example of the ABG crowd that seems incapable of lifting his eyes a bit and realize that the choice of desktop isn't really important (after all, you can run either, both or none without problems).
To summarize: no,
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
We need to make a system of decentralized authentication. So a user can put in "bob@bob.com" and the auth system will look up authentication information by looking up the authentication host for bob.com. This will create a system in which people can use familier email addresses for ID's. This is a very simplified explanation, but I think people understand the basic idea. I *thought* that Ximian would try to do the same thing, but apparently not!
I worked at a company whose goal was to create a system like this. For now, check out www.openprivacy.org or www.xns.org! We need to create a system that competes with Passport! It's crucially important!
Once an open system like this is created then people can realize the examples in the Hailstorm white paper (e.g. automated travel reservation, etc) using a completely open and standard system. People could still make money by building applications that use this platform. For exmaple:
Automatically schedule a movie with 5 friends on Friday and send an electronic ticket to your cell phone once everyone agrees on a time.
TeX is a "killer app". You may not like it, or use it, but it is certainly a killer app, in fact the main reason I started using Linux was to have a decent TeX system. I'd also call apache a killer app.
As far as innovation is concerned, I consider Qt to be pretty impressive. I use it a lot from day to day, and it is cleanly designed and a pleasure to work with. It's also making its mark as a solid foundation for KDE.
Think strategically...
.NET
:-)
M$ is entirely dependent on hardware sales. Unlike Apple they aren't producing any but they're tied (and hamstrung) by the old x86 architecture that is or will soon be interfering with their plans to insinuate themselves into every transaction occurring over the 'net via
Biometric authentication will force us all off the 32-bit architecture. And Linux is already on the 64-bit and its free, as in no acquisition expense.
Changing their business model this way only makes sense. They're now a monopoly, damn-near a utility like the electric company, but they are not in control of the demand side.
The margins are not getting slimmer but the demand is drying up. PC sales are dipping. The rate and their income is going to stabilize at maintenance levels. That's maybe 10% of their halcyon days.
The difference in revenue is like the difference between a gas-bar which pumps gas versus the income of a General Motors who stir up demand with novelty and styling (and with grudging compliance with safety and fuel economy regulations.)
Unlike other industries (automobile or appliances, [or even Apple computer,]) which produce a real product which can be made obsolete by a variety of means, M$ produces a product which is already good enough for common business.
Their claims of adding to the feature set is falling on deaf ears and people who don't need or can't use the features anyway don't have the money to waste.
EG: My employer used to install NT 4.0 SP5 and the full M$ suite per box on all desktops. They now have ONE machine with M$ access running on it. A lot of the extras that came with even NT 4.0 are being stripped out. We use Lotus Notes (4.6 'cause that all we need.) We are paring, trimming, dropping licensed seats and license fees because we HAVE to. We don't even care if its 'built-in.' Its taking up space we'd rather use for data and taking up administration resources. We didn't upgrade 100 desktop boxes, we upgraded ONE Citrix server.
Linux is a definite wall in one direction (*nixes are far more reliable for server business,) And its cost of acquisition is $0.00 while its cost of maintenance is the same. If its your company and your money, you'll opt to keep it by buying cheaper.
M$ wants new markets to exploit. Transaction processing is IT. Even worse, they can predict that their OS won't survive the move to a platform that they themselves would need to make their transformation successful.
Why do they want to change markets? Even a fraction of a penny per multiplied by trillions of transactions per year will make M$ even richer then before.
They can leave the OS 'garage' business reality behind to people like the Linux competition and Ximian who's price of entry is much lower (they don't have all that old software to support,) and who are being favored "de jure" if not "de facto" by antitrust investigations of governments world-wide.
That's what I would do.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
You would think that java would be another thing that would be very portable but Debian still does not include Open Office because none of the Free java compilers can run the java parts of it.
I was under the impression that no one included OpenOffice because it wasn't ready yet; I seem to recall an editorial in a magazine that criticzed Sun for giving us an "open-source office suite" that lacked basic print functionality, for one.
Now, to be fair, the editorial pointed out that Sun had to strip out all of the code that they had licensed from others, but the point is, OpenOffice on it's "debut" was much like the Netscape 5 codebase; barely usable without major work.
Granted, this was many months ago, and I'm sure much work has been done to clean up the OpenOffice code. But how come I can't find anyone talking about OpenOffice besides their own website? Does no one care about the "MS Office-killer" any more?
Jay (=
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Excuse me?
Gphoto2, and every other app that starts with a G and is geared toward the Gnome desktop.
>"all most no open-source developer would even consider Gnome..."
Pretty bold statement buddy, did you happen to canvass the developer commuinity or did you come up woth that FUD on your own? or is it your opinion that you twisted to make you sound knowlegable?
I'll bet a $1000.00 that you didnt do any research and you pulled that statement out of your arse, just like the rest of the whiners and complainers here.
Mono is a great effort.. The people in our world became great not by sitting in their basement rocking back and forth mumbling.... they rattled the cages of the lions and tigers, You become great by stomping on the toes of giants.
I applaud them for such a huge undertaking...and I hope they thumb their nose at MS by making it non-compliant... Kinda how Apache isn't compatable with IIS or how TCP/IP wasnt a MS innovation (Thank GOD for that!),I can go on forever comparing Open standards we use every day compared to the MS locked down version.
If they do it right, they will make MS look stupid, get people using an OPEN standard, and possibly actually turn a profit.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
There's a good article on kuro5hin about this very issue......
Nobody's saying the Samba project was a bad idea. But it would have been a better use of time overall if a better protocol than SMB had been developed in an open manner so that everyone could write equally-workable implementations.
If it's necessary, someone can reverse-engineer the Microsoft proprietary parts of .NET. But it's much better to get the whole thing out in the open to start with and fix any technical deficiencies up front before there's an installed base.
Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus",
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
hey
.so on windows (they call them DLL's on win32) SIMPLE
look why did microsoft invest a whole bunch of R&D monies in an IL when they could just do "normal compilers" like they had done and could do it very well
well LIB's and those
thats it
Microsoft had a nightmare with libs and useing VB and C++ caused a nightmare beacuse of all the old API's so they wanted all langs to have the same libs
now +COM did not live up to what it had promised and the standard way of delivering it in a standard way
CORBA on the other hand has this and each Object can interact with others and can use the Corba Component Model (CCM) java 2 has an ORB GNOME has an ORB whats the problem ?
people think they have a better way just use the simple it works solution IMHO
sort it out KDE is JUST C++ and thats why they dont get these problems
regards
john jones
Celebrate the finer things in life
No. But it might kill Ximian. Or turn it into a slave of MS. It would, perhaps, be better to avoid this outcome.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The problem is, they are also endeavoring to be a single point of control. The basic design principle is dangerous. I also think that it favors enemies of freedom. A more decentralized design is necessary.
It's true that AOL is a bit better than MS, mainly because they aren't a large software seller. This could change, however. I think that one could even depend upon it changing once they were victorious. All a battle between giants buys us is a bit more time to find a substitute. It doesn't matter who it is, you don't want someone else controlling your data and your applications. They won't act in your best interests. They couldn't even if they wanted to.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
And that's your cheerful scenario? You make optimism look pretty bleak. If MS is the only viable OS/Software company, then things are going to be really tough.
Sorry. I find your "non alarmist" scenario nearly as frightening as the article. And I don't find them mutually exclusive.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Anyone who knows me in my personal life knows that I'm often terrible with my analogies...When it comes to competitions, sometimes I hit a bullseye, other times I misfire and end up killing someone sitting in the stands. :)
(Hah. And there you go.)
The point I was trying to make was, that the only way to be first in anything is to have the balls to take the lead, instead of imitating the current leader, which unfortunately both Gnome and KDE both seem consigned to do. They'll never win with that strategy, and anyone with half a clue back in 1996 (*cough*) could have seen it coming.
Thanks for the intelligent reply, btw.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, System 26 GUI Component Stockpile
Bowie J. Poag
"Lets make Gnome look and feel like Windows." - Gnome, 1996
"We're not trying to copy Microsoft.." - Gnome, 1998
"Lets make Gnome look and feel like Windows." - Gnome, 2000
"We're not trying to copy Microsoft.." - Gnome, 2001.
Mmmmkay. Glad to see Gnome is sticking to the same ideology that brought such revolutionary advances like "The Foot Menu". I'd be hard pressed to find a bigger waste of effort than to clone
The world is filled with with flea market knock-offs and ultramundane ideas. There are better flags to march under than this one, i'm afraid. If only a fraction of the effort that will be undertaken to make a clone of
Nobody seems to want to do that anymore.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, System 26 GUI Component Stockpile
Bowie J. Poag
The strategy of producing a competing technology has been brought up a hundred times, but it would not work. Competing head-on with Microsoft on their own turf would almost surely be suicide. Hell, even Microsoft realizes that there are some areas where even they can't compete head-on with the current market leaders. So they are working at the periphery, making sure that their products provide easy access to these other technologies.
.NET (or Mono) will be successful or not, and I will stay neutral and not firm up my opinion about Ximian Mono until I see further how things are going to play out in the .NET landscape. I'm not saying for certain that .NET is the right place, but perhaps Microsoft in fact needs a dose of their own "embrace and extend".
.NET becomes a popular platform for net services and it is not available on Linux?
.NET turns out to be a popular web services platform by having an implementation available?"
I have no idea whether
Linux has seen a lot of success in the server and net services marketplace over the past few years. Do you really want to see that cool off if
So many of the posts here seem to be manifestations of peoples' anti-MS, anti-Ximian, and anti-GNOME sentiments when the underlying issue should really be "Should Linux hedge its bets against loosing server market share to MS if
Nick Petrely has some good things to say from time to time, and I read his column, but take what he says with a grain of salt.
If you look at his past connections, it seems that he is really much more anti-MS than pro-open source. He also tends to be somewhat alarmist. Five or Six years ago, he was a HUGE OS/2 booster; OS/2 is as far from open source as is Windows. Then, when OS/2 was going down the tubes, he became an advocate of network computers (anyone remember NCWorldMag.com?), also a tad bit removed from open source. Then, when network computer related mags stopped bringing in the dough, he finally became an open source and Linux fan.
Clearly, his selection of things to support show much more of a tendency to be the currently hot anti-Microsoft technology du jour than any consistent track record of open source championship.
Finally, in the last year or two, Nick has been on a heavy anti-GNOME campaign. He obviously doesn't value competetion, having said that all of the GNOME developers should have given up and jumped over to KDE as soon as QT became GPL. Whether you like KDE or GNOME (or XFce or Windowmaker or [...] for that matter), most people feel that choice is good and both projects have benefitted from the generally friendly competion.
Like another poster said, take a deep breath, and take it with a grain of salt. If open source dies, its demise will not have been because of Ximian and Mono.
MS cuts the rope. Making propiertary API changes to explicitly *not work* with any competitors.
.NET that are being implemented by the open source project are (or will be) ECMA standards. Now, Microsoft can, of course, attempt to muck with the standards, but their changes will have to be open and incorporated back into the standard. They could also make their own implementation non-standard, but since it is their standard, they will probably think twice about doing this since they would take a LOT of heat for it (not that they haven't taken heat before, of course).
.NET
.NET features that are missing rather than starting yet a third alternative from scratch just because we don't like MS? The problem here, of course, is that large segments of the free software community balk at Java as well because of its "half-free" license (I disagree with this, by the way, I use Java frequently).
.NET on Linux does have a chance of failure, just like any other undertaking, but its probably better than doing nothing and just hoping that the whole of .NET will fail in the marketplace.
Well, this is always a possibility, except in this case the portions of
we as a community should be innovating new alternatives to
This has been suggested many times, but I think it is doomed to failure. Competing head-on with MS on their turf with a late-coming alternative supported by a small open source project would probably be extremely difficult, especially since it is the PHBs in the corporate community that must be sold on it. Heck, Even Microsoft realizes that there are some areas where even they can't compete head-on with with the leaders in certain areas, so instead they are making their products work easily as access points to these other services. Besides, if we wanted to take this approach, why wouldn't we strengthen an existing technology like Java by adding the
In any case, as I mentioned previously, implementing
So many of the posts here seem to be manifestations of peoples' anti-MS, anti-Ximian, anti-Miguel, and anti-GNOME sentiments when the underlying issue should really be: "In case .NET turns out to be a popular web services platform, should Linux hedge its bets against loosing server market share to MS by having an implementation of .Net available?"
.NET becomes a popular platform for net services and it is only available on MS server platforms and not on Linux?
.NET (or Mono) will be successful or not, but if it doesn't pan out, Ximian will have lost some money. Big deal. But, OTOH, if .NET is successful and it's not available on Linux, MS will certainly gain server market share at the expense of Linux.
Forget that it's Ximian doing it. Forget that it might have some applicability to GNOME. These facts just bring out peoples' emotions that have nothing to do with the real issue. Consider the underlying question.
Linux has seen a lot of success in the server and net services marketplace over the past few years. Do you really want to see that cool off if
I have no idea whether
First, the South Park "Underwear Gnomes": .NET Environment
1. Duplicate the
2.
3. Profit!
And secondly, an old cartoon I clipped from Omni Magazine:
A scientist is proudly displaying his solution to a problem. Complicated mathematical expressions cover a chalk-board, but in the middle is a little section marked "and then a miracle occurs".
I think Petreley is right. If Ximian doesn't duplicate Passport, and MS changes the interface, the whole thing is useless as a complete open-source alternative. Sort of like what AOL does to the AIM interface every time they want to lock someone out.
.net is just microsoft's new generation of development tools and run time support. It's lots of serperate thing that have been put together for marketing reasons.
:-
.net applications, it's just easy to do so because it's there)
A summary
New compilers for C++, C#, Javascript and visual basic. These no longer produce native 80x86 code but instead produce a intermediate language. These IL files are then run using a just-in-time compiler when they are run. (OR optionally when they are installed)
Because they compile to IL, the binaries are in theory platform independent if anyone writes a JIT compiler for that platform.
All of the languages are compatible at run time so you can mix and match languages in any way you like.
The common run time library contains classes for just about everything you can think of. It's a replacement for the win32 API and just about every other library microsoft have ever done. And it seems pretty complete and well designed. They really do seem to have just abandonded all of the badly designed stuff they did oin the past with a clean break.
The common run time works just as weel from all supported languages.
You can write ASP pages using the supported languages and class library. There are objects for web based controls which automatically generate web pages using whatever is appropriate for the browser being used. For example edit boxes that can validate there contents on the client using javascript on some platforms but will do server side validation when it's not available and without any programmer involvement.
Plus lots of services are supported like passport (although there is no reason you have to use it for
It all seems to be very well documented (for microsoft) and much of the system has been opened up for standardisation by ECMA.
The threat to the open source community is that microsoft do seem to have done a really good job on the technical level here. Copying it certainly has its own risks, but not not doing so means that microsoft could concevably have a better designed environment than anything that exists in open source.
Sig is taking a break!
From where I'm looking, Mono may actually be a very good thing. If it works, all the problems with language bindings for every feature you want to use from Python or Perl or whatever disappear. Nice. Sure, we can have that today via CORBA but do we? If Mono is dropped, lets replace it with something that solves the same problems.
.Net having SOAP as an open rpc layer makes this a 15 minute task. Its no more complex (probably less so) than using remote Windows only ODBC sources over XML-RPC, and in the worst case, there are closed tools that can bridge that gap and optimise it, no doubt there will be in the future for this problem too. Problems create markets. They don't tend to result in good programmers being sacked for something inherantly fixable. The same is already true of bridging ODBC.
.Net based on one aspect of it, an aspect that Mono isn't really concerned with anyway. Microsoft's services above and beyond the basic system are their affair. Let makes better, Free ones. "OpenTraveller" has a good ring to it. No one is forced to use Passport.
Petreley doesn't seem to take into account that open source programmers are programmers. Some extremely good and they have a tendency to open their work to others. Once a (albeit windows reliant) Passport Proxy Service is created that takes an open interface from outside, there is no reliance on the whole system being Windows based and no control granted to MS. They can change their system, but we can change the interface, a much easier task.
In fact, the point of
And if Microsoft did try to pull something like this, the chances are those in government fully mindful of their history will move in once again. They already are over XP (and there they will probably lose) but such a move as Petreley describes is unlikely to be ignored - it is directly and 100% obviously anti-competitive. Not even Judge I. R. Technophobe could miss that and if his prediction of people being sacked happens, it will only add wieght to the actual, individual damage the move has caused. In fact, I'd be surprised if you didn't have a decent shot with a class action against MS if their actions caused you dismissal.
In the end, I think we're making lots of noise about
The benefits of the project are huge and numerous.
- A language independent VM
- fast cross platform applications
- simple use of libraries without SWIG
- a 'super OS' layer that gives you more freedom to change OS. Even away from Windows while retaining the same applications.
The underlying approach of Mono/.Net is good - its what Java should have been in the first place.
Either we extend Java or simulate the CLR system. If we don't do one or the other, in 5 years time a very large segment of our industry will have less reason to consider open source and that is far more worrying.
Its easy to be negative, but what does Petreley suggest instead?
"anyone OpenSource"?
.Net makes a lot more sense than Java. Maybe one day this will change, its just a shame Sun didn't have enough of a clue to do it already. The enemy of your enemy can also be an idiot.
What the heck are you talking about? We are programmers and we want choices. Lots of them. In the end we'll have both and will choose what we like thanks.
From an Open Standard viewpoint,
They won't change the APIs, they'll change the
underlying protocol in such a way that they're
products keep working and mono doesn't.
Well, .NET is not just about e-commerce. It is supposed to be a platform for "Ubiquitous Computing". You should be able to walk up to any computer, log in, and get your desktop up on it.
The new Passport is supposed to support that. If you buy into this model, your login is tied into Passport. Ximian may come out with a GDM that talks to Passport to log you in.
Microsoft actually has some pretty good stuff going in .NET, and they're extending an olive branch to the open source world.
An interesting metaphor to use... I would have gone with "bury the hatchet". And we all know where they want to bury it, don't we?
deus does not exist but if he does
Apple? Since when did any flavor of MS-Windows come with Quick Time? Or even an Apple-Talk protocol?
ISTR that when MS 'invested' $150 million in Apple, that was a condition of an out-of-court settlement; part of that court case involved Microsoft's transgressions on Apple's QuickTime patents/IP. (there was supposedly more money involved as well... however as nothing was confirmed, a lot of this was speculation).
This settlement involved Microsoft licensing some of Apple's patents, anyway, thus leading to possible mentions of Apple's name somewhere deep in the windows/ directory. OK, so it's not 'software' per se, but...
deus does not exist but if he does
Magic Carpet
:)
Feel like being taken for a ride? Or being caught in a Hailstorm?
Obviously all of the good names have been taken -- only the dubious ones are left, even for the largest of companies
deus does not exist but if he does
Yes. But my point is it won't matter whatsoever. Linux will still have a good managed programming and execution enviroment. It should also be able to interoperate with other non MS CLI implementations.
Yes, and my point stands... that won't amount to a hill o' beans in the 'real world'.
Is it really worth the effort, when we already have Java?
deus does not exist but if he does
Well, the CLI is a standard (unlike Java) and it has more features that Java hasn't got yet (though it is SLOWLY getting them).
There's stuff in the CLI that improves speed (like structs) and others which improve simplicity (like boxing - so everything is an object).
Technically I'm quite impressed by C# and the CLI; there are things I would have preferred to be done slightly differently, but on the whole it seems to have done quite a few things right that Java did wrong.
However, I get the feeling that interoperability between CLI implementations will be just as difficult to achieve as Java's "WORA", if not more so, due to MS's gratuitous "twiddle the hidden APIs" and "depend on features only implemented in the Windows version of [standard]" gestures. It's made them the financial giant they are at the moment -- why would they stop now, especially when they can't be sued for doing it with software they already own?
We could just all use Sun's JVM for Linux, but isn't compeition 'a good thing'?
I would have preferred Java to be Open, and the future development of the language to be determined by an independent body... but I guess that wasn't going to happen either.
Competition between Sun and Microsoft may be a good thing for Sun or for Microsoft, or for the occasional consumer, but only tangentially are there any benefits to the consumer. First and foremost for all of these companies is market dominance. Remember this when choosing technologies, and if you feel that you are furthering ends that you are unhappy with (from any company or group), take this into account as well as any temporary convenience gained from using a particular technology.
(/me steps down from the soapbox...)
deus does not exist but if he does
First of all, excellent post.
:)
:) To stretch the analogy further, I'd even be pretty careful were I a passenger in the front cabin of either of the two semi-trailers...
Thanks
You took it further, as I should have done, and analysed Mono's place in all this, a somewhat precarious one...
But, when you have two gigantic semis, one labeled "Sun" and the other labeled "Microsoft" and they start barrelling towards each other in a game of enterprise chicken, I wouldn't want to be in the VW Bug with the stuffed penguin hanging in the back window that happens to be caught between them.
Very nicely put.
deus does not exist but if he does
Nah, I would suggest the VW bug was drafting behind the Sun 18-wheeler.
:)
At the moment, isn't the Linux VW bug parked next to the Big Blue supertanker?
(Let's stretch this analogy to breaking point... and beyond! (ObToyStory reference from a Debian user
deus does not exist but if he does
If Microsoft changes their implementation of their CLI (the CLR), who cares? Linux will still have a completely open CLI implementation. It's basically a better java without any strings. Microsoft can't do anything about it because it will be a standard.
:)
Sure, it'll be the 'standard'... but the version in use on most of the world's desktops will be the real standard. The game of taking an established cross-platform standard and changing the Windows implementation is nothing new to Microsoft... maybe doing it to their own code is, though.
deus does not exist but if he does
Quite possibly - I left before their big conversion to Open Source (worked there before going to university, just as they were beginning to wonder how this Internet thing would impact their business).
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
I don't recall any Slashdot trolls in 98 or 99 saying that Gnome would fail. They were all too busy bitching about how KDE would never succeed, and how Gnome was the RMS-anointed true desktop.
Then Trolltech spoilt all their fun last year by GPLing QT, making KDE (by rights) the GNU desktop of choice (RMS has said many times that he prefers the GPL to the LGPL -- he even changed the L in LGPL from 'library' to 'lesser'). Now that the Slashdot idiots have realised that they can't make KDE go away, they've turned on Gnome, because they don't know how to do anything productive.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Interesting that you didn't mention IBM :)
:). You won't believe how bitter they were at how their relationship with Microsoft had turned from very close (OS/2 was going to be a MS-IBM joint production, with Windows as a feeder route) to sour backbiting.
I was working at IBM when OS/2 Warp came out (and they gave every single employee a free copy, which was a nice supply of extra floppy disks for me
No matter how big a company you are, it's really not a good idea to get IBM mad at you. I'd say that it was the residual resentment at Microsoft, and the realisation that the same could happen with any of their other partners, that led them to be so interested in Open Source and Linux: if the software is free and easily portable, then that's more money to be made in hardware and services, and IBM is just 1 massive hardware and services supplier, that has to produce software as a sideline to get the hardware to work.
Many companies have lucrative relationships with Microsoft, but that doesn't mean that MS are liked, or respected, or trusted.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
a java version would be JAAS ( Java Authentication and Autherization Service). see
http://java.sun.com/security/jaas/faq.html
This just happens to be a java version of PAM ( Pluggable Authentication Module) framework already built into Linux. It uses standards, such as X.509 certifacates.
But it is java, so why would anyone OpenSource want this, when they can be safe on Microsoft's lap?
ok algorithms are not copyrighted, but they do get patented.
U.S. patent 4,405,829, which covers RSA encryption, has caused problems for opensource encryption for a decade.
If the Mono project is successfull at creating a common language runtime with support for multiple languages and support for multiple platforms it will have done it's job and it will be a good thing.
.NET crucial to Ximian and Mono's success: .NET, the e-commerce development environment; and .NET, the infrastructure to manage Internet e-commerce security. At issue is the latter portion of .NET, which is part of Microsoft HailStorm. HailStorm includes an e-commerce authentication service called Passport."
If you look at these points made by the author of the article:
" There are two elements of Microsoft
These things are outside the scope of the Mono project. There is a seperate project that seeks to create an alternative to passport, and there are companies building e-commerce solutions on unix and unix like systems.
None of these things are dependent on each other for their success, but they could potentially help each other out.
Later, Seeker
I'll take the organized patterns of chaos over the chaotic organizations of man, any day.
Iommi/Tankian/Marlette
"Nobody ever, ever, ever wanted a sidebar in their browser. Nobody. Ever."
I was never that fond of the sidebar in IE, but now that I've been using Mozilla for a while I miss it when my bookmarks are not immedaitely accessible for selecting/editing in my sidebar.
Later, Seeker
Honest, I didn't find this until after I posted my previous comment... I just found this little tidbit on the Washington Post's site:
- AOL Might Join 'Identity Service' Battle
No mention about access for non-microsoft browsers & operating systems, but this is the company that owns Netscape... and Scott McNealy is involved."AOL Time Warner Inc. is considering entering a race against Microsoft Corp. and other technology companies to establish a single Web identity for consumers, attempting to become one of the dominant Internet gatekeepers for a vast array of personal information.
AOL's project, which it calls Magic Carpet, would allow people to store personal information online to simplify transactions on the Internet, according to an internal AOL document and industry executives. AOL Time Warner would be chasing Microsoft, which has already developed a service called Passport that has more than 160 million accounts. AOL officials declined to comment."
- "...Magic Carpet, however, is referred to in an AOL strategy document on Microsoft. And at a summit of Internet industry leaders in Carlsbad, Calif., this week, Sun Microsystems Inc. chief executive Scott McNealy said he had talked to Barry Schuler, chief executive of America Online, AOL Time Warner's online unit, about the developing technology."
It's no secret that Mr. McNealy has no love of Microsoft. I think he'd make the effort to ensure that Netscape/Java works, and on all platforms. He knows how vital it is to his own future to pry Microsoft's fingers away from the Internet's throat.It's going to be interesting to see how this all turns out...
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
- Microsoft can change Passport, and thus hurt open source very badly.
Counterpoint:- If they do this, it is very possible they will (again) prove their position as a monopoly... and invite more anti-trust (and other) lawsuits
Point:(Counter-counterpoint: Microsoft isn't afraid of lawsuits.)
- If they break open-source
.NET, they will cause managers to fire their open-source people and wildly embrace Microsoft's compatible-by-default products.
Counterpoint:- If a company depends for its' lifeblood on a single point of failure, management is sunk already.
- Management may also take the 180 opposed view, form alliances, and build a competing product against
.NET. However, it'd take something the size of AOL/Time Warner to make it happen.
Point:- Nicholas Petreley makes some very lucid and thought provoking points. He points out a very possible future.
Counterpoint:- Microsoft isn't that stupid and mercenary.
Wait a minute... Yes, they are! So much for that pair of rose-colored glasses."...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
I presume that Mono's C# compiler will be of similar quality, at least after half the planet gets a chance to bug-fix it into the ground.
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
And, for the longest time, CC, from Bell Labs was the only C++ compiler (er, translator). Did you have a point to make about quality, or not?
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
no. they started .NET in case the justice department succeeded in having them broken up. in that case bill & co would move to the .NET fragment (applications company) and leave the other half (OS company) to die. thus keeping M$ intact. since the justice dept failed, they can now consolidate by putting hooks into doze and leveraging both the platform and the platform independant infrastructure. its very smart for M$...quite impressive.
The CLI and the JVM are comparable in this instance. As for which is better, I'm still not sure. For example, Python (through the use of Jython) can be compiled to Java bytecodes and can extend/be extended from Java classes (or anything else appropriately compiled to Java bytecodes). The same is true for ECMAScript (Javascript) through the use of Rhino.
Through the use of gcj, Java can be compiled to native code and has excellent two-way hooks to C++ for "native" code with CNI. C bigots can still use JNI (ugh) if they so choose. Java VMs are definitely more mature and "battle tested" than .NET's CLI, but I'm hard pressed to really pick a theoretical (intrinsic technical merits) winner. The more I hear about .NET, the more it truly does look like some things that Java has been doing for years.
And who knows, maybe the Java language will be ported to .NET. It can't be too hard considering the similarity with C#. If this is the case, Java becomes the more flexible solution again in that it could have three targets: Java bytecodes, CLI bytecodes or compile to native.
Ummm... Shouldn't that read, ".NET is an environment for language and platform neutrality. Distributed computing is a key part of that?"Distributed computing is one part of it (a big part when you factor in Passport), but no bigger than EJBs (and related techs such as RMI-IIOP, CORBA, JNDI, etc.) are for Java. The distributed aspects are dependant upon the language/bytecode aspects, not the other way around. What good is Passport without the language/platform support and the CLI? What good are EJBs, Jython and Rhino if there is no JVM? Slightly different comparisons, but not by much.
And for the record, OpenBSD *is* better than Perl. ;)
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Again... so?
MS already does the same things with C/C++/EcmaScript should we not bother with OS implementations of those?
Note that I didn't mention VB, the thing that makes the languages in question interesting and I assume the reason that Ximian is interested in C# is that they are or are in the process of becoming non-proprietary standards.
Check the links in my previous post and you will see that C# is on it's way. Unless MS pulls a Sun and decides not to let ECMA standardize the language at the last minute, C# is on its way to becoming an open standard.
If you believe in OpenSource then you probably foresee a day when OpenSource and open standards will carry more weight than win32. At which point MS's old bait and switch will cease to work. If not what's the point?
"Hey... don't be mean." --Buckaroo Banzai
Petreley is fairly entertaining. Unfortunately like all pundits he has a tendency to oversimplify and be "alarmist" some times. In this article he is basically saying...
"This leads me to suspect that Microsoft is engaged in a bait-and-switch scheme to finally wipe out the threat of open source."The question is... so?
The scheme that he proceeds to lay out, that MS will let Ximian implement some part of the Passport scheme and then break the protocol would not "...wipe out the threat of open source."
The two things simply do not follow.
In order to connect them, you have to follow some weird train of logic that, only e-commerce matters, therefore only Passport matters, and that the Open-Source movement will only have one implementation of them that matters and when MS pulls the rug out from under us, we're all going to hell. Most of which doesn't make any sense.
From the article:
Ximian's effort reproduces only the development environment in open source. It does nothing to reproduce or replace Passport.
So then what the hell are we talking about Passport for? What is Ximian actually doing?
What Ximian is working on implementing and MS has actually submitted to ECMA-TC39-G2/G3 is C# and the CLI, which Petreley only barely mentions!
Bottom line whether or not Ximian succeeds at porting .NET and subsequently they or somebody else ports some Ms.Passport.* classes to their platform, it will not sound the death knell for Open-Source software everywhere (Geez, it sounds even more non-sensical when you write it out).
The drafts of the standards that Ximian is actaully working on can be found here.
In the meantime if you want to make up conspiracy theories about e-commerce ask yourself, "What are Visa/Mastercard up to? Aren't almost all e-commerce transactions done with credit cards?"
"Hey... don't be mean." --Buckaroo Banzai
It might suprise some Slashdot readers to find that monetary success isn't an antithesis to Slashdot popularity. The technology industry is full of corporate giants with deep pockets and little critical focus (can't please everyone) by Slashdot readers. Take Cisco Systems and an example.
I will tell my friends, and please ignore the sig.
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
I don't suppose there's any chance of grabbing Miguel for one of Slashdot's "Ask Miguel de Icaza Your Questions about Mono" feature, is there?
You think Microsoft was about to give his fight against opensource? It would be too humiliating. Also, this remember me the simpsons when Gates say: You think i became rich by signing check? (poor translation) Seriously, it's not in the habit of Microsoft to help other software companies, specially opensource one!
If there is a superior Passport alternative that can be used with C# and Java and Python, then why train your staff all over again?
.NET Services is put together. It uses XML over HTTP to shuffle data around. Neither Passport nor any other Hailstorm service is built in such a way that it locks any development environment out of the game. If you can stuff packet stuff TCP 80 and read the responses, you're in.
That's the entire point to how Hailstorm aka
Regarding an X plugin for IE, I'd LOVE to see that. Admittedly, it's been a while since I looked, but I have yet to see a good X client for Windows.
Now, the reality of the situation, using X servers for running everything, well, that's something of a pipe dream. People have grown too accustomed to having the full power of a system at their beck and call in distributed computing. Push everything back to the server, you get all the headaches and bottlenecks that come with mainframe based computing with none of the benefits.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Well, not nearly that painlessly. Right now C# for Windows will be the only language with a standard library supporting Passport (as far as I know anyway).
This link says that Passport 1.1 is supported by everything from solaris/netscape to free bsd, linux, hpux, and aix running apache.
While I'm sure that once passport.NET comes out, windows languages will have libraries for accessing it, because it's just xml over http, implementation on any other platform should be a relatively trivial matter. Shake yourself of any mistaken belief that MS must provide a library for every language that any developer cares to code in. Their only responsibility is to provide the interfaces to the service. Anything else is only a convenience to those implementing it.
We need an open successor to Passport immediately. It's inevitable anyway.
Don't bet on it. Sure, there will be competing efforts, but they'll need to provide a compelling model for developers (and the business masters they serve). Realize that Passport will be the lynchpin holding together all of the Hailstorm services. If all a competing service has to offer is SSO/Authentication, it will fail. More than likely, DOTGNU services will have to support both their own auth and Passport auth, assuming they want to have the maximum market reach possible. For DOTGNU services to support only their own auth is as stubborn and stupid as MS supporting only Passport, except that MS has valid reasonse (I'm not approaching whether they're good or not, just that they're valid business-wise) for only supporting Passport.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Show me the specification of the standard C# library. There isn't such. Microsoft is doing a very clever thing -- standardizing the language, but not _the libraries_ that programs written in C# (and the other CLI languages) would use. That's what .NET is all about -- libraries.
This essentially means that the C# "standard libraries" would be forever a moving target, with the state of the art being defined by MS. Welcome to Wine all over again.
My previous message is a bit misleading.
.NET (the ones that are absolutely essential for the languages) _are_ submitted for standartization. However, they are not nearly enough for writing portable code. Mono would most likely have to implement parts of .NET that are not standardized to satisfy developers' demands.
The very basic parts of
With C# Microsoft are not sacrificing any performance, Java implementations are still processor and memory hogs.
If both languages are compiled to byte code, and compiled at run-time, how does one not sacrifice any performance yet the other is a processor and memory hog?
If you think that
No, it is a platform war. It's J2EE vs. NET. JVM vs. CLI.
Not only that but Sun will sick lawyers onto folk who don't do it their way.
Yes, I'm sure we can expect nothing like this from Microsoft. Have you checked their patents lately?
It isn't just Microsoft that Gosling and co don't want to hear from, there are plenty of people arround who are serious heavyweights in the language design arena that got the brush off. Microsoft were very interested to hear my ideas, Gosling was not.
Maybe Gosling didn't like your idea. So what? What do I care?
"Heavyweight" companies like IBM, BEA, IONA, Apple, Novell et al seem to be able to work with Sun on the JCP. Claiming for example IBM has had no affect on Java and has been "brushed off" is ridiculous.
C# has several very nice ideas about how to write programs that use XML.
What features does the C# language have that makes it superior in handling XML document structures?
I don't give a honk about write once, run anywhere. There are only two platforms that matter today, Linux and Windows. Running on Apple, Solaris, VMS, Irix, HPUX, Genera, BeOs, etc. is not something I am going to sacrifice 80%+ of my CPU for
I'm glad you do have the luxury of not giving a honk about platforms such as HP-UX, Solaris, AIX or IBM mainframes.
I, on the other hand, really can't go and tell all these companies who have made millions in investment to their Solaris, HP-UX or IBM hardware, to honk it. They need solutions, not useless rhetoric.
or spend three times as long writing the program putting in optimizations that depend on the structure of the VM implementation or JIT.
What kind of optimizations did you have in mind that depend on the JIT and take so much time to write?
As long as KDE doesn't go along with this .NET non-sense Open Source should be safe.
Open Source will be fine with or without KDE.
My Bash shell isn't going ANYWHERE.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
If it ever comes to the point that I can't open a file type such as a Word document, I'll just start insisting anybody I associate with send me stuff in something universal, such as plain ASCII, if they wish for me to view it.
Microsoft doesn't have any monopoly that we didn't gladly hand over. I use Windows, and even somewhat like it for some things (read: games) but I'm the first person on earth to preach the use of suitable alternatives whenever possible.
And no monopoly on earth is ever going to kill free software or the free expression of ideas.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
What's the point in using Open Source if no-one else uses it?
...
What constitutes a useful program?
I ran an Amiga for many years when "nobody else used one", not only because there was great software that fit my needs available, but also because it was a great platform for developing some of the custom software I needed.
I never really gave up using the Amiga, even still today, it just got to the point where most of the new software I needed was on other platforms, so I changed with the times.
I'm not "locked" into Microsoft by any means. My current day Windows machines might always run Windows until they fall over and die, and my current BSD machine might run BSD until it crumbles into the dust.
But what future OS I may run will depend on what serves my needs then, and there will be a good chance that if I know where to look I'll find open source software. It may not be popular, and it may not be published by some big company, but if it works
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
If corporations implement Gnome/Mono as a part of their IT strategy and suddenly Microsoft decides to strangle Mono to death with Passport, that's a fatal blow to the credibility of Open Source.
Oh get real!
So what if every single bloody Linux distribution company goes under? So what if 99.99% of the entire computer industry thinks Open Source software is unsupported rubbish run by college kids?
So what if the entire corporate world thinks the ONLY OS is a Microsoft OS?
That's not going to stop some from giving the source code away to a program they write. It's not going to stop someone else from improving upon those ideas, and spreading them out.
Open Source isn't going anywhere. It's been around much longer than Linux. It's been around much longer than Microsoft. The idea of free software has been around for much longer than most people who use Linux today, and Gnome/Mono are just petty projects in a much more massive movement.
You can ph33r Microsoft's 1337 455 control of your lives all you want.
But SOME of us will continue using free software whether it's just a neat little utility for Windows or a full blown operating system.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I assume you're referring to ORBit-C++ .
Your point is a good one, thanks. But Phil Dawes, until recently a driving force behind this project, is extremely busy with his day job at the moment. I'll ask him to comment here. If there is sufficient support for getting this up and ready soon, then I can at least help with the documentation.
Um. Do you know what .NET (the part Ximian is porting) is? It has very little to do with the W3C. The standards have ALREADY been submitted to ECMA (not W3C).
.NET and flame Ximian have no idea what is going on (or what the CLI is).
.NET binaries. It is unlikely that this would happen, and if it did it would be a shame, but it wouldn't be a disaster. You can still use Mono to write secure managed code to run on every platform except windows (people are already doing that with right?).
What do you think Ximian is basing Mono on? Decompiled MS code? Nope. The specs.
The current submissions (and mirrors) can be found here:
Ecma Standardization (MSDN)
It is unbelievable. 95% of people who post about
If Microsoft changes their implementation of their CLI (the CLR), who cares? Linux will still have a completely open CLI implementation. It's basically a better java without any strings. Microsoft can't do anything about it because it will be a standard.
Let say Microsoft decides to mutate their CLR to do non standard stuff and Mono can't interoperate with Microsoft's
Whatever Microsoft decides to do, Mono will still be good for developing on both windows and non windows platform.
Yes. But my point is it won't matter whatsoever. Linux will still have a good managed programming and execution enviroment. It should also be able to interoperate with other non MS CLI implementations.
Well, the CLI is a standard (unlike Java) and it has more features that Java hasn't got yet (though it is SLOWLY getting them).
There's stuff in the CLI that improves speed (like structs) and others which improve simplicity (like boxing - so everything is an object).
Reverse engineering a 'free' java would be quite an effort, whereas the CLI is clearly and openly documented - making the porting effort much easier.
We could just all use Sun's JVM for Linux, but isn't compeition 'a good thing'?
Now, I suppose it's the natural order of things for the Unix userbase to fragment and fight civil wars. But, when you have two gigantic semis, one labeled "Sun" and the other labeled "Microsoft" and they start barrelling towards each other in a game of enterprise chicken, I wouldn't want to be in the VW Bug with the stuffed penguin hanging in the back window that happens to be caught between them.
That sounds kind of like the way Linux sat a few years ago. Maybe they should have giveen up on Linux like you're suggesting with Mono? After all, you wouldn't what to get caught between Microsoft and Everyone else.
You've got the bravery to show us that trolls really can find work in the "real world".
Easy does it!
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
They take and they add. KDE has a launch button and task bar, made famous by Win95
Made famous in the USA maybe, but the task bar was made famous in every British school by RiscOS circa 1989. Though the RiscOS taskbar was actually functional and not just a glorified on-screen version of Alt-Tab.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
I don't mean to criticize their project, mind you. Lack of documentation is an issue with just about every open source project at one point or another, since it's inevitably done last. It just makes it kind of difficult for folks just starting out in CORBA to use anything they've done without more research than the day job will typically allow.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Would get more shit talking to Orbit. There's a project to get C++ talking to it. Last time I checked they had quite a way to completion and had no documentation. I'm not even sure there is one for Java. I haven't been able to find one anyway.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Has anyone here read The Prince? Machiavelli lays out the strategy for gaining power, and it applies as much in the business world of the 21st century as it did in the political world of the 15th.
You must side with every lesser state which you can, and you must immediately attack and destroy every greater state. The less powerful ones can help you take on the more powerful ones, and by siding with them you give them a sense of security such that they will not aspire to grow beyond your power, and you can crush them once they are your strongest remaining neighbor. The more powerful ones will only become greater with time, and siding with them will only act to crush your own power. Therefore, your best chance, no matter how small it may be, to destroy your strongest enemies is immediate action against them.
However, Microsoft's vision seems to be making the .NET as popular and central in people's lives as Internet. In such a case, FS||OSS has to provide a solution, just like MS had to revolt their Internet strategy a few years ago.
I guess other parts of .NET will be ''easy'' to duplicate, except the Passport. So, create an alternative, based on an OPEN protocol, and make it preferably an ISO standard. Then, make the Free .NET support both.
Of course, it may be difficult for an alternative authentication&payment system to compete with Passport. But I'd believe some such systems exist already and many banks and other e-business companies will be competing with Microsoft anyhow. They'll just need co-operation from the FS||OSS community.
If USA is too tough a battleground, start in Europe. It's much easier to get an authentication/e-payment system working in a small country than in USA. An European system might have some taxation advantages too, as MS is a foreign company. It might also be possible to join with some mobile phone payment systems, which are already quite common.
I don't really think we need
When Z is need and or desire, it would be very hard for B to survive without it.
It seems completely reasonable to me that one could use the .Net platform under Ximian or Microsoft for everything except the authentication services of Passport and still benefit from most of the other features of the platform. Then, you could build to use any other authentication service, even if you're dead set on using a centralized service. From what I have read about Passport (and how controversial it is) this seems like a good idea even when using the Microsoft platform. I think that what is really required here is that Passport should surender to become an open standard, and Microsoft will still have plenty of leverage to accomplish total domination. I don't know about you, but it terrifys me to think that Microsoft would one day hold a significant portion of the worlds passwords in thier own database.
It was only put in IE and Mozilla for one reason -- to sell links.
you forgot Silicon Gra...err, SGI.
Fermat's other theorem: "I have a simple proof, but I can't write it down as I fear it's a DMCA violation to discuss it"
Same for Passport. It's an authentification service, right? Won't it work with any browser? Or will it take a special client? If the latter case, I assume there's a published API that Ximian will use to implement a Linux client. And I can certainly understand Petreley's fear of relying on something that MS can undermine at any time.
Is any other reasonably well-known company providing an alternative to Passport? Seems like Sun, IBM, and Oracle would want to be in this business as well.
They might do this, but I wouldn't expect all that many consumers to take advantage of it. Why? WinXP has higher CPU/RAM requirements than the older OS's, and most owners are not up to upgrading their own hardware.
Ximian should fight fire with fire.
It should just use the other companies (the m word) protocol as a reference and then add their own extensions to it as required.
No doubt the two implementations will be targetting slightly different markets so there may be areas of the protocol that are fine by the other companies standards, but arent good enough for our values.
Microsoft has teams of lawers who have been looking at the GPL. The Open Source community had better fear Microsoft more now, than ever. MS is looking for a weakness, and I'd be willing to be that they've found one. Never trust the enemy, when they suddenly behave friendly...
Perhaps the GPL should include a bit about source code not being legally used, extended, or looked at by Microsoft people?
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
"I can think of fewer than five examples of MS relationships gone bad in the past (blockstackers, DRDOS, Sun/Java, um... kerberos?) "
Well, I can think some more...
IBM (OS/2)
Netscape
Borland
Wordperfect
Lotus
Apple
Real Networks
Fraunhoffer
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
The link in my sig is not about me, it is some funny site I once found. I got redirected when searching for www.askjesus.org. I'm very fond of this absurd humor.
--
Bizar technology?
Perhaps waiting with Mono until end 2001 would be a good thing to do here.
--
Bizar technology?
ok ok... I dont think this is the end of the world or a threat to open source thinking like Nicholas Petreley seems to. But I still think its a little bit silly.
1) Mono will be poor quality.
Sure, C# has been submitted to a standards board but that doesnt get you home free. Probably, eventually the Mono C# compiler will be as close to the Microsoft c# compiler as gcc is to vc++. I find that its actually a major pain to switch between the two compilers. For one project I used templated methods a lot throughtout my program and then I found that vc++ did not support this with the version I had (1998). Now vc++ does but fixing it is not a simple "apt-get upgrade."
You would think that java would be another thing that would be very portable but Debian still does not include Open Office because none of the Free java compilers can run the java parts of it.
I guess my point is look how well Microsoft support w3c standards. Mono will be different from the Microsoft c# compiler and thus worse. Different == worse.
2) This is an unpopular idea.
Remember how depressing it was when slashdot used to post articles about mozilla at around m14 or so. Everytime people would post about how crashy and buggie and slow it was. But the good thing about that was that most people recognized the need for Mozilla and how it was perhaps Linuxs best shot at getting a working web browser.
Mono I think is less popular than Mozilla and less obviously necesary. Especially when you consider that a lot of gnome programmers are perfectly content programming in c. I dont see them as the type of people who will switch to c# overnight.
3) This idea wont make any money.
Isnt Ximian a company? How do they think that this will make them any money? Dont they have more pressing things to do with their time?
In the end this isnt an idea that I would focus much attention on. If its an idea thats very fun for you personally then by all means keep at it. But dont expect it to be extremely fun of financially rewarding.
In case you missed it the first time, here it is again for Reference
.NET is implemented, and that leaves us in a vulnerable position.
Putting faith in commercial entities, and backing their initiatives without regard to its license could be the end of our community. As Petrely so clearly stated, The GNU/Linux community has no control of how
I for one don't really care if Ximian does well in the market place. If their stuff works with M$, and plays well, and they enjoy commercial sucess, good for them. Just don't let their commercial concerns taint the GPL'dness of the product. As long what they produce is GPL'd, we are safe. The moment that we become dependent on software with restrictive licensing is the moment that this whole party goes down the toilet.
~Religion is O.K., as long as it gets you laid.
Unlike when Microsloth attempted to break Java, Ximian (and everyone else) unfortunately does not currently have enough economic or political power to break this Empire ordained quote "standard", because statistically, M$ has all the money, power, and influence. The best thing that Ximian could do would be to start their own independant system which would be similar and most likely compatable with many of the .NET features. This would not only prevent it from being weakened and eventually killed by M$, but it would also encourage further development for open soure e-comerce platforms. Attempted fragmentation is not the answer. The answer is overpowering .NET by creating a fully independant system that is much better.-
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Perversely greped and groped by PowerPenguin
Hey, he's changed that article so it could at least be a bit serious, check out the original one here from last week.
It includes among other things flame bate such as:
The real shame is that Gnome once had a great reason to exist, but cleaning it up now seems like a waste of energy. GNOME was born because a terrific Linux desktop called KDE looked as though it would help Linux give Windows a run for its money. Many open-source developers protested that KDE was based on the C++ Qt graphical toolkit because Qt was not true open source at first.
Isn't that quite obvious? No more need to create a separate account with a gazillion websites. You already have an account when you get there the first time. Easy, convenient and unsecure as hell. But Joe User likes easy and convenient and has been brainwashed to never think about security.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Then it dawned on me, take a look at any Open Source project that has tried to keep up with MS. Say... Samba? Even look at Java, MS basically made sure that certain basic function calls behaved slightly differently, or didnt work at all. There were small things they added to the syntax. Just little tiny things, not really breaking from the Java standard, but if you were to try to go in and implement something and have it run the same on any non-MS vm WORA just didn't exist.
I don't ever want to see an O'Reilly book on the shelves named ".Net Implementation Annoyances".
It's too easy for MS to yank this out of Ximian's hands. Have we all forgotten who we're dealing with? Is this some kind of "Kinder Gentler" MS? Take a wild guess how they will react when Linux becomes the deployment platform of choice for .Net, take a wild guess what happens when someone starts an "OpenPassport" that is better than Passport. Don't think for a second that MS will have some grand epiphany and join the ranks of Ben & Jerry's and just try to play nice with everyone.
The saddest part is (and I can say this cuz I'm a devoted Gnome user) Gnome needs lots of work. All those man hours fscking with .Net could be spent on Gnome just getting it on par with KDE for cryin out loud.
I'm quite curious, could you name some examples?
oversight on my part. I guess that would make IBM the fifth example ;)
You are Wrong!
"But to say that Microsoft has helped other companies financially is preposterous "
I have worked for companies that make windows/dos apps for nearly 15 years... This work has paid for my children, house, cars, appliances, gizmos, toys, vacation and food in all that time. I've personally done quite well by them, so have the several thousand other people at my current corporation, and the millions of others from here to India and on to London.
I don't think you get the scale of the industry that has grown up around MS... While they may be worth many billions, the combined wealth of all the peripheral and partner corporations reaches into the TRILLIONS.
"
Well, to be fair, a far larger number of companies have had very lucrative and stable relationships with MS than the converse. Companies like all the major software houses, particularly the ones that MS directly licenses software from, standards makers like Intel, HP, Apple and NCSA the major hardware OEMs Compaq, Dell, Gateway and all of the other hundreds of thousands of people around the world who've carved quite a decent living out of the MS umbrella of industry.
I can think of fewer than five examples of MS relationships gone bad in the past (blockstackers, DRDOS, Sun/Java, um... kerberos?) while thousands of companies have made handsome profits. Must I remind you that making a profit is the aim of a company?
Visa International is a very unusual organization. It's a corporation owned collectively by the 22,000 banks that issue Visa cards. Visa International runs the interbank network and sets the standards. All those competing banks agree to comply with Visa's standards. Yet the banks own Visa, so it can't walk all over them. Hock calls this a "chaord".
Here are Hock's design principles for such organizations:
These principles sound like unrealizible ideals. Yet they created the largest business organization on earth. Anybody thinking about open-source alternatives to Passport needs to understand how Hock pulled this off.
If it's that's the case, then explain how Eazel got Nautilus into GNOME? This was even before Eazel went out of business and people were able to strip out the crap "services" that were built into GNOME 1.4. Evolution and Red Carpet are no doubt going to be very much centerpieces of the next GNOME. Both of these provide dubitable Ximian "services".
I think you have a very naive and incorrect view of how GNOME works. Ximian is pretty much in control. You could have observed the situation when they thought they were under threat by Red Hat's Bonobo2/HUB paper.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Nobody can ever say for sure where products like this will lead. I do have to say though that Im disapointed that Ximian developers are working on a project of this sort...you'd think they could think of other ways as a company to make money without the help of microsoft.
Please keep these 2 things separated:
- The
.NET framework which is used by developers to build webservices, which CAN use Passport.com to do authentication services (but don't have to, you can build your own if you like)
- The webservices build ON TOP of the
.NET framework (like Hailstorm).
Thank you.--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
I really doubt many of us would like to see Visual Basic for Linux/X11. And isn't C# just Microsoft's new name for the same technology?
Yes, I did get the job. Yes, I understand very well I might not have got any response after that. Then I could have got another job at a company with people more in their senses. Simple as that.
Wake up. One single open source project is not going to kill all other open source projects. The fact that .NET still makes one hell of a development environment remains, whether we will have passport or not. True, passport remains important, but it's not going to be the end of all e-commerce solutions, and even if it is, it's not going to kill all open source (or free software) applications.
Indeed... I don't see how getting linux to support .NET will damage (if this is your intentions) microsoft in any way. It's just another way for us to use their products.
However, i'm impressed with many of microsofts products and i beleive this would be a very useful to the linux platform. If i could run office, explorer and other MS products (i wonder if they're gonna release monster truck madness... :P) on my linux machine i know i would use linux alot more than i do (i just use it for my webservers)
>The last time Mr. Softy blew off a challenge was the Internet, circa early nineties, and we saw how swift and serious the course alteration there was.
It was actually the mid 90's and the course alteration only appeared swift and serious if you believed what Microsoft's lackeys wrote in their pc magazine columns.
During the course of the Antitrust proceedings it was revealed that Microsoft knew long before windows 95 was released how important the Internet was to become. Otherwise why offer to split the browser market with netscape? Why license the Mosaic source code and repackage it as internet explorer, which was then bundled with 95? Why else bundle a TCPIP stack with 95, thereby squeezing out Hummingbird, FTP software, Trumpet, etc.?
The internet didn't fit perfectly with their established business model so they had to pretend they were not moving in that direction to keep their corporate sheep from straying. But once enough people had gotten on the internet and they couldn't mislead any longer, microsoft suddenly "saw the light" and literally within days released many months worth of code.
It seems like you've exhausted all of the possibilities I can imagine. Nice work!
Slashdot: "An Open Source company wants to do something that Microsoft is doing. Therefore that Open Source company is Bad and is Doomed to Fail."
.Net clone because they think it's a cool technology and see some potential in it, and just to prove that they can.
Writing articles like that requires no thought what so ever. Here's some food for real thought:
1.) Ximian is just a bunch of hackers. They are developing a
2.) It's Open-fscking-Source. No one is going to force you to use it. If you do want to use it you can do so free of charge. If you don't like the way it works you can change it.
3.) These people are actually contributing to the community and producing usefull stuff. The only thing Slashdot produces is whiny trolls who bitch about anything anyone tries to do.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
And what kind of crack are you smoking today? .NET is no more "free" than Java, and is probably less "free," in every meaningful sense of the word. It is an architecture designed expressly to give Microsoft a way to dominate internet commerce. It is the antithesis of free.
The point I was trying to make was that we don't have an alternative yet. Mono has the potential to be finished before we get a free Java 2 platform.
So what? Creating a free alternative to windows networking took a lot of time too, but people seem to use it. The advantage that everyone overlooks here is that .NET isn't deployed! No one is using it for anything yet! And that means that there's time to compete with microsoft. Once .NET is deployed somewhere...well, then it gets harder...
I'm not sure what free alternative to windows networking you are talking about. NTFS was not created because we needed to compete with Microsoft, SAMBA was created to be compatible with Windows and it got Linux into a lot of companies. Also, we're not in the bussiness of creating new technologies for the sake of competing, free software is supposed to be about creating or cloning the technology that is needed. That Microsoft will make .NET huge I think is obvious, it will be asked for.
Monkey sense
My resume has never seen a word processor; I've told people this, and usually send either plain text or HTML.
BrassRing.com seems to require MSWord format... why does that betray to me a fundamental failure to get geeks?
/Brian
Instead of using the Passport service, why not use a system like Jabber. Jabber is an open protocol and is well documented. I'm sure someone will be able to extend the protocol to include secure authentication and e-commerce support.
the thing that annoys me about what all you people are saying is that you only see ximian copying MS, this is not really true. There is a VM like java but unlike java it can communicate with other languages. Think about it, you can split up your project into different area's, do your reports in perl, your network stuff in c++ and do your UI in something like python. you can create objects in one languate that have been created in another. Yes MS did publish the specs and we are implementing them, it will not include Hailstorm/Passport/OtherMsShit Its a platform, in MS .NET MS have made objects to access Hailstorm/Passport/OtherMsShit, if you read the Mono FAQ it says they will not be implementing them, perhaps we could make a mono.authentication.passport ourselves and just make it do something totally different, like authenticate against your slashdot login (ok maybe not). .NET is a great technology because it lets programmers with different skills work on the same project and implement different part of the project in different languages taking advantage of each languages pro's. Open Your FUCKING eyes.
Speaking of which it runs beautifully not only on PC but also on Sun and Alpha (I'm posting this right now using Konqueror on Sun Blade 100).
Once I replaced the butt-ugly CDE with KDE I've never looked back.
Hi,
.NET. Ok, it's from Microsoft, but that doesn't mean it is bad. .NET probaly will become a standard. You don't stop Microsoft by forcing others _not_ using .NET. You'll stop Microsoft by showing others a better way. Their curiosity will lead them to Free Software.
It's just like keeping your culture. The best way to do this is by still maintaining its traditions and customs, _not_ by imposing it on others.
That is why religions like Christiany and Islam can't coexist. According to their believes you have to impose the Koran/Bible on non-believers. Because to them, the ultimate truth is there. And _everyone_ has to believe it.
Instead, a "religion" like Boedhism is much more friendler. We believe that you have to find the truth yourself. We won't impose it on you. We believe that one day you'll find the ultimate truth anyway.
Nowadays some people find Boedhism attractive, though, we haven't imposed it on them. They just found it on their way on their search of the truth.
That is why the existance (and survival) of Free Software starts with you. By using its software, and telling your (good) experiences and the advantages to others, you'll spread Free Software to non-Free Software users.
You don't have to fear
- Viet Yen Nguyen
As an anecdotal story: Roosevelt had an American Indian Chief to the White House for a dinner. The President turned to the Indian chief and asked "do you have any advice for the President of the United States?" The chief turned to Roosevelt and responded "be careful with your immegration policy." Microsoft will treat us much the same ways that European settlers treated the Indians. They will come as frinds and then take the land.
Microsoft is our competitor, lets treat them as such.
LEPP
He starts off the article with ".Net is an e-commerce platform"
.net from the clueless marketing perspective.
.net has plenty to offer desktop development. This is exactly where mono is concentrating: Developing a CLR for linux. The biggest value, and what happens to be easiest, is simply adopting MS's standard binary format for code and data representation, allowing rapid inter-language communication and interoperation.
That's about all you need to read to see that he's comming at
From a technical perspective,
Where peterly is being especially retarded is in assuming that MS has an ability to limit what authentication services the linux clr, or any mono application/service can use. Authentication protocols and APIs are fairly trivial.
Perhaps peterly meant that MS's future authentication services will be providing significant value, and the world needs a knee jerk response inhibitting MS's ability to deliver value in whatever shape.
As far as I understand, the making of a whole .NET compatibility layer is an immense task. Writing a C# compiler is relatively easy - perhaps a year for a CS student, even less for an experienced guru. However the real problem is the libraries.
.NET uses a whole lot of libraries, which go all the way from standard UI elements and up to DirectX support. There is an enormous number of features to implement. Look at Wine, for example, which in spite of its excellent, big team, are currently lagging behind Microsoft (generally, Wine's support is on Windows 95 API level, with incomplete DirectX and advanced COM support. One programmer (or even a limited group of programmers) will find it hard to implement all of the libraries.
Finally, I think that Linux will have to support .NET (or some other contemporary technology) at some point. The only way to win in the OS war with Windows will be to provide an embrace-and-extend policy of our own. Look for instance at Samba, which is designed to retire NT/2000 servers. Samba did not become the Linux networking default, although it did take an important place in virtually every distro that there is. The same thing should happen to .NET
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Miguel, IL.
These are words that go together well, my Miguel.
I love you, I love you, I love you. That's all I want to say.
Until I find a way, I will say the only words I know that you'll understand.
Miguel, IL.
Sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemble, tres bien ensemble.
I want you, I want you, I want you. I think you know by now.
I'll get to you somehow. Until I do I'm telling you so you'll understand.
I will say the only words I know, that you'll understand, my Miguel.
Let's look at the worst case scenarios:
possiblity 1 (Petreley) - Ximian and gang of developers spend lot of time developing .NET for linux and it works great. It works so good that it steals market share from Microsoft. Microsoft pulls the bait and switch on passport interoperability protocol. (Microsoft can do this since .NET is "open" standard but has no obligation to reveal the propritary communication protocol to passport.) .NET on linux dies abruptly as a result.
Microsoft can get into trouble again with government by doing such a thing. Of course this hasn't stopped them in the past. Microsoft CAN do this but it's somewhat doubtful that this is most likely to happen.
possbility 2 - Ximian and gang of developers spend lot of time developing .NET for linux but doesn't work well so no one uses it.
There are some obvious reason why I think .NET clone won't be as good as the Microsoft's .NET. It's not because open source developers are less talented than Microsoft employees. Essentially Microsft can make .NET as part of the kernel. They can also modify the NT kernel tuned specifically for .NET's performance. Of course this isn't a wise thing to do for linux. It certainly doesn't make sense for Solaris since .NET is in direct competition with Java. Also many of the .NET library seem to have Windows only feel to it. That means many .NET for linux library won't be as straight forward implementation as Windows version. Having compatiblity/emulation layer will inevitably slow things down. Also there will inevitably bugs in .NET. The Ximian developers are then falling into the trap of implemention the bugs just like the Microsoft's .NET. Wine project is an example of this.
possiblity 3 - Ximian runs out of money and goes belly up. Development becomes handed over to public. Other dedicated developers picks up the project but progress is dismal. It's Eazel all over again.
.NET is very large set of library. It is comprised of server side application platform, development tools (compiler, debugger, IDE), and desktop side code that talks to the server. Since Ximian's business model and it's sustanability is somewhat questionable, it is conceivable that they may run out of money before they complete such a large undertaking. Also Microsoft will be releasing more libraries to extend the .NET. Ximian will need to constantly catch up to what Microsoft has done. The project is essentially "reinventing the wheel" type of project which may have trouble attracting developers. I think it would be frustrating to see flaws and mistakes that Microsoft has made and you can't just fix it.
* In all cases Microsoft can claim that .NET is a truely cross platform while the Mono development goes on. The kicker is that Microsoft didn't have to spend a dime for the development (or at least very little money). I bet MS Marketing department is loving this Ximian Mono project.
we have a choice as to install it, or not. XP users won't. it's as simple as that.
Make something better. Create something that people would rather use than .Net. Be a leader, not a follower.
And FIFTH. You can choose NOT to use passport and still program with .NET/Mono for ecommerce or kinds of software solutions.
I spent all of those years as Anonymous Coward and all I got was this lousy number (204976).
Seriously, what the hell is
Got friends?
As a long-time unix developer, I love the command-line. But I also love KDE. No one says you can't use both at the same time. Konsole is one of the best applications that come with KDE.
While most of KDE is easy to use without touching the manual, it doesn't mean it is dumbed down. KDE 2.x stays true to its unix roots, and I would consider it essential software (ie a "major part") of any unix workstation.
Well, yeah. Some of the guys finally woke up, which seems to be the reason why some of "linux based" companies seem to be more or less successful with it, like redhat for instance.
I don't understand how Ximian expects to succeed either
Perhaps not everyone is just the samaritan type which does everything for the better sake of everyone? Perhaps he just will get some decent money from Microsoft for it, which would pretty much mean "succeeding" for almost anyone outthere? I'm an open source oriented person too, but I still wish some of the guys outthere would wake up.
i don't want linux and the open source movement to have ANY ties with microsoft whatsoever. dammit miguel, why are you doing this? all you're going to do is tarnish the good Ximian name to us users.
any wheelings and dealings with ximian and microsoft SCARES ME TO DEATH.
First. MS Hailstorm (and Passport) don't have anything to do with Mono or the C# programming environment as far as I can tell. Mono is basicly a free software version of C#, not a free software version of everything the MS marketing department (you mean there's other MS departments?) has decided and will decide to throw under the .NET moniker. The relation between MS Passport and C# is coincidental.
Second. I don't understand what makes C# so superior to Java that we need it. The only reason MS is using it instead of Java is because they do not have a license to use Java. Microsoft, and Sun Settle. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be ported, I mean, name a language that isn't supported by free software.
Third. Nicholas Petreley is right that MS Passport is a problem, and the real threat to computer users and an open Internet. What is needed is a Internet Standard way of managing authentification, one that is standard and independant of any one company or computer platform. Where is the auth: RFC?
Fourth. Mono is Free Software :-) (Software Libre) not Open Source
MS can Embrace and Extend Open Source software, it can't Embrace and Extend Free Software.
Mono compilers, etc. are GPL'd. This means that everything that they do is documented. The author of the story does not take this into account. In the panel debate as OSCON, the question was asked of Microsoft executive David Stutz on whether Passport would be capable of doing a simple transaction without calling home to Microsoft servers. The answer given was that it was possible but that if Passport was successful that people might want passport.
Here is the actual problem. I would submit that passort is a liability from a MONO perspective but not unconditionally so. MONO is not a passport/hailstorm alternative because that is not Ximian's business model-- but I do think that it is impossible that Passport compatible competitors rise (I think that they will).
The market is changing, and although Microsoft will likely try to leverage Windows in gaining market share with Passport, and AOL will try to produce something similar (Magic Carpet) and leverage their ISP marketshare. Not that I like AOL, but it does create the need in ecommerce for choices for the end user.
Even if Microsoft were to try to enforce through patent law, AOL's market share will force choices to exist. If Microsoft were successful in leveraging Windows with Passport, it would be a clear problem regarding the Sherman Act sections 1 and 2. If you think Microsoft is in trouble with antitrust law now, wait and see if they try to take over these markets.
I personally think that Mono is important, and I support them. However, I would like to see people aware of the liability that dependence on single vendor solutions creates.
Sig: Tell all your friends NOT to download the Advanced Ebook Processor:
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
a) move the mainstream to Linux
b) adopt this envisioned .Net extension
Lot of static friction to overcome there. The last time Mr. Softy blew off a challenge was the Internet, circa early nineties, and we saw how swift and serious the course alteration there was.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
You make some interesting points here.
.NET and start calling it Mono or a C#/CLI implementation.
.NET only adds to MSs advertising. It also associates C#/CLI with authentication services.
.NET clone mires it in all this Passport crap that doesn't necessarily have to do anything with C#/CLI (although for MS, it does).
.NET plans.
I say we stop calling Mono
.NET is a vague MS marketing term, and referring to Mono as
If C#/CLI standards are adopted, they're just that: standards. MS doesn't have to stand by the standard, but it will be there.
I for one think there's a lot to C#/CLI, and would like to see it compete as a technology. Referring to it as a
So what if C#/CLI standards are adopted, and MS ignores them? We might still one a hell of a platform without MS, and the truth is, we would never know if we didn't try. If C#/CLI standards aren't adopted, then there you go. Case closed, everyone go home.
It seems to me it's time we start talking about C#/CLI in a way that recognizes it could be different from the rest of MS's
different from open source, I mean
You are thinking of HailStorm. That IS closely linked with Passport, and Hailstorm will be implemented ontop of/with .net.
Passport is not a core part of .net framework. Core part of the .net stratagy maybe.
Sorry to say, but when I first said this (replying to someone else who said it first, tho! ;)
it seemed like those of us saying it were lone voices crying in the wilderness... everyone else seemed to think this was a really clever way to turn the tables on Microsoft.
--
Ximian's deal with Microsoft makes me nervous - sure. But if they manage to extract enough info from Microsoft to build a decent .NET project, even if it doesn't touch Hailstorm, that may be enough to convince some other folks to try and build a Hailstorm alternative since the Mono APIs/clients would be there. So long as the licensing wasn't a poison pill that is the usual Microsoft MO.
But if we as a community would stop running around yelling 'The Sky is Falling' because of .NET and instead worked on that latest bug OR perhaps a .Net alternative, it would sure be a more productive and effective use of time!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Say that we're right and Hailstorm succeeds for Microsft - they are making decent money with a small market share on transaction 'taxes' via Hailstorm with .NET as the enabler. At the same time Linux is gaining ground because of its stability and robustness... Mono exists but doesn't really use Hailstorm, it has its own auth mechanism because the viral OSS software manged to peer with Hailstorm.
If the above comes to pass - I would bet its an almost certainty that Microsoft would start to give the PERSONAL/Residential version of Windows away for free. Oh sure, they would develop some license that forced OEMs to pay to install it on PCs they sold - can't give up that revenue stream. But when it comes to users upgrading their desktop - they'd get it for free. Why? Because of call teh cash generating technologies we are beginning to see in Win XP and the potential fee generation of Hailstorm. Allowing users to upgrade to the latest wizbang windows OS from WIN 95 or higher to Win XYZ would only give them MORE market share and ensure their dominance of the customer home PC market. How scary is that? I knwo most people dont' bother upgrading from WIn 9x because it works fine for them and its not worth $100 to bother. But if Microsoft started sending out WIn XYZ upgrade CD ala AOL - you'd be amazed how many people would upgrade - bang instant new users with cash generating capability - a user they WEREN'T getting money from before cause they were happy with WIn 9x and Microsoft Works.
That's what makes Hailstorm so important to Microsoft and also makes it so scary.
I may be wrong, but the pit of my stomach tells me it'll happen. The freebies have to be the enabling tehchnologies for the cash generating architectures. IE did it for MSN and other MS websites - just wait till the OS becomes the next freebie to steer customers to Micro$oft's cash register.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
The implementation language is irrelevant. The VM strategy is relevant insofar as it affects performance. With C# Microsoft are not sacrificing any performance, Java implementations are still processor and memory hogs. Yes you can get a Java coder who can write code faster than a bad C programmer, the same is true for LISP, but the architecture still extracts a performance penalty.
If you think that .NET is simply a language war then you just don't get it, C# is not central to the .NET architecture. It is however central to getting developers to pay for another edition of Visual Studio.
Java and C# are both at base merely a way of adding objects to C than the botched job they did in C++. C# is at least open in a way that Java is not, with Java Sun reserves to itself absolute control of the future of the language. Hello, this is the future of Open Source, I don't think soooo. Not only that but Sun will sick lawyers onto folk who don't do it their way. It isn't just Microsoft that Gosling and co don't want to hear from, there are plenty of people arround who are serious heavyweights in the language design arena that got the brush off. Microsoft were very interested to hear my ideas, Gosling was not. Sure they may 'steal' my ideas, but that is what I want them to do, use them. In fact I give them for free.
C# has several very nice ideas about how to write programs that use XML. It is not the only language that can be used to write XML programs, but it does make it easier and the advantage is enough to justify the cost of the compiler. I would be very happy if someone would do a C# front end for gcc. If that happened I would probably do all my coding in C#. I am not going to move to Java however because I don't like the baggage that comes with it, nor the 20Mb run time that the luser has to download to run the program, or for that matter the crappy GUI widgets that the loosers at Sun want me to use.
I don't give a honk about write once, run anywhere. There are only two platforms that matter today, Linux and Windows. Running on Apple, Solaris, VMS, Irix, HPUX, Genera, BeOs, etc. is not something I am going to sacrifice 80%+ of my CPU for or spend three times as long writing the program putting in optimizations that depend on the structure of the VM implementation or JIT.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Passport and Hailstorm are great things for folk to get paranoid about. But they are only a means of breaking open the AOL Instant Messenger position. Microsoft wants to stop AOL from being able to leverage the IM login as a universal interface.
The way to make ERP software pay is for the company that wrote the software to run it as hosted software. This is for several reasons. First the costs of 365x24 support are amortized over hundreds of companies. More importantly however for the customer the company that wrote the software bears the cost of maintenance and the pain of all the unreliability, bugs etc.
The core of the .NET strategy however is somewhat subtler. Traditional ERP systems force you to rip out your existing installation and replace. SOAP allows you to take existing databases and applications, write a thin layer wrapper around them and have them integrate with other Web Services. Microsoft has a two tier strategy, everything runs SOAP, Windows 2000 however will be the SOAP platform with the most, the most APIs, the most tools, etc. etc. .NET will fail however unless you can run the interface parts of it on other systems - including MVS, VMS, Solaris and of course Linux.
An open source version of parts of .NET is not a beachead against the open source community, it is denying Microsoft competitors revenue. Sun is already in freefall as UNIX types realise that a low cost Intel box running linux runs faster and more reliably than an overpriced Sun box. So deny Sun the revenues they might gain from selling Web Services boxes.
Sun, Oracle and Netscape ganged up to stop Bill with the anti-trust lawsuit. The story of how the suit was filled is a pretty disgusting case of special pleading by one group of corporations against another, especially if you don't like Microsoft. What could have been a successful anti-trust case became the explanation of why Netscape did not replace Microsoft.
.NET is simply Bill's way of getting revenge. However unlike McNealy, Ellison and Clarke Bill is not stupid enough to blab his mouth off in public about the companies he wants to destroy. The fact that he is not talking about Sun or Oracle is an insult to them, he is saying that they are not going to be players in the future of the software industry. Open source on the other hand is the only serious competitor left.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Thought it was called "Mono" because it is a low-level, virus-borne, social disease.
How sleepless is the egg, knowing that which throws the stone forsees the bone.
... not solely a technically viable alternative CLI platform, but one that would do to .Net what Linux is begining to do to Ms Server license pricing. .Net server component ensemble under the gun. Even if companies really wanted to use true blue Ms .Net, Ms will be nervous about calling their bluff and might restrain itself from some of the really eggregous licensing practices they might otherwise seek to inflict.
I talk to many execs in corporate IT who are delighted to use Linux for point tasks and (eventually) line of business apps not just because it does the job, but because every job which has an zero-cost-license open source product alternative to a Microsoft product creates pricing pressure on Ms. I'm fairly sure (believe it or not) that this has had a reining effect on Ms server licence pricing. Corporate IT despirately needs competitors to Ms to keep it in line somewhat.
A free Mono would put many elements of the Ms
cheating? two accounts and given all the points to himself. Too bad I don't have any mod point today to downgrade it :(
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
However, if we can also link up diverse scripting environments with SOAP and XML-RPC, there's no reason to worry. Choice is key. Most non-Microsoft scripting languages will never run well inside Microsoft's environment. Make it easy for Perl programmers to participate in SOAP networks without leaving home. Same with Java, Python, Tcl, and everything else.
Focus on the protocols, that's what's important. As long as we invest in diversity, Microsoft can't control. Instead of a one-party-system, let's have an n-party-system. That's how we guarantee choice, eliminate lock-in, and maintain forward motion.
BTW, an interesting detail came out at the open source summit on Tuesday. Dick Hardt of ActiveState reports that Perl does not run well in Microsoft's environment. The problem is that Microsoft's virtual machine is designed to run C-like code, but Perl is not like that.
Now I know the solution, we need a DLL-based open scripting architecture, that allows environments to compile and run scripts and have them call back into the environment, much like the architecture we developed on the Mac in the early 90s. Back then it wasn't so interesting because scripting was still pretty small, it was just us and Apple. Ten years later there's been an explosion, and there's another way, beyond XML-RPC, that's needed to integrate. It can be a tough sell to each individual community, as XML-RPC is, because the benefit is that it makes it easy to bridge to other environments. Most communities tend not to see too well outside their borders. But the larger world wants choice. No matter how great your scripting environment, you will eventually meet someone you want to work with who works in a different environment.
Ximian just views C# as a nice language to build the next generation of Gnome on.
Have you seen C#? It has enough keywords to fill a tube sock and beat a beaver to death. And the example code I've seen (especially the bits involving COM) has structure that reminds me of C code that uses #defines to compile on ninety platforms. It's one of the more heterogeneous languages I've seen. Bleah! It's like Java, plus a few cool shortcuts, plus a whole crapload of M$-specific garbage squeezed in with a shoehorn.
C may be cumbersome to many. C++ may also be cumbersome to a few. (Note that "C/C++" is not a language!)
But C# is not the answer! Java is not the answer either, but is probably closer than C#. As far as languages go, we still do not have the answer.
And don't bother telling me that we can't have a single language to fit all of our purposes. Basic information theory tells me you're wrong :-) We probably won't ever have a single language like that, but it will be due to political and social (elitist) reasons as opposed to technical ones.
Rant rant rant. All I do is rant. Oh yeah, I code all day too.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
If cloning .net unsucessfully will result in the death of open source - would in fact open source die anyway without an attempt to clone .net ?
.net anyway because too many people don't want to rely on a single system (passport) for the sucess of their business.
This seems to be an alarmist article - microsoft won't take over the world with
The recent MSN messenger should be a wake-up call to those thinking of going the MS route right now - are they capable of providing a stable mass market authentication service ?
Of course IANAL, but doesn't Microsoft's status of being found guilty of maintinaing a monopoly put some rather severe limits on what they can do? For example there are some lawsuits that are trying to stop the Windows XP release, and they can certainly use this monopoly status as ammunition. I would think that MS's trying to use .NET in this way (bait & switch) would instantly draw fire from a lot of areas.
The main question about Ximian and Mono is why they didn't start such a project based on the Java language with Gnome APIs a couple of years ago. But that question doesn't matter much at this point: they didn't. And today, it doesn't matter that much anymore: as languages, C# and Java are nearly identical. Whatever effort goes into enhancing compilers, runtimes, or libraries for one will pretty much automatically benefit the other. And any programmer that learns one can quickly get started with the other.
So, it's no big deal. If you like the project, contribute. If not, contribute to something else. Microsoft's shenanigans with Passport have nothing to do with software anymore, and you might as well ignore them; Passport and other issues like that will be resolved by politicians and lawyers.
Why doesn't he mention the dotGNU project, which is doing exactly that?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
7 times 7 pieces would not be adequate to shield the globe from such slime; it is puzzling that terrorists don't go after msft employees and property. Bill is Darth and the Evil Empire seeks to tarnish all computing with its insolence and in_NO_vation.
I agree with you, but I'd also have to say that more than a few people think that there always has to be a Linux version of everything Microsoft has. If you've ever seen the wish list for Mozilla, you can see this gets old fast. "Why can't it do this and that the same as IE? Why doesn't it support Active X? IE supports Active X. Why doesn't it look like IE? I like the way IE looks..." etc. Believe me, when MS figures out gestures are an awesome idea and incorporate it into IE, everyone will praise MS for such a great innovation... as some people (such as the MS PR department) don't consider anything an "innovation" until Microsoft does it.
Mimicking might not be the best idea, but remember that having an open source equivalent can make it a lot easier to migrate. And perhaps once the transition has already happened, they can find and open source alternative which better suites them (since they actually get the freedom to CHOOSE).
fact: word is a tremendous text processor
.NET do have some nice features
.NET is from MS (and pre-ECMA standard)
fact: word is from MS
fact: abiword guys are trying to make abiword like word
are abiword guys bad ?
fact: excel is a tremendous datasheet app
fact: word is from MS
fact: gnumeric guys are trying to make gnumeric like excel
are gnumeric guys bad ?
fact:
fact:
fact: ximian guys are trying to take this nice features into mono, and let some "features" out (passport)
what's wrong with copying if you are years-ligths behind in the desktop field ?
/sergio
The way I see it is this: Passport is trying to be "the" authentication server of the future of computing, and this is dangerous.
/etc.
.NET, the likelyhood of all those open source developers using Passport/Hailstorm is high. This is because of our hatred for "re-creating the wheel," or just our love for software re-use. This is very bad, because Microsoft will then have taken all the competing developers away from any competition that might have otherwise come to be.
.NET is good, and will enable the next generation of networked computing. I also believe that Microsoft knows this, and intends to use its new found "openness" to attract it's only competition (open source developers) to work on .NET, and thereby prevent these same developers from creating a free and open alternative that will allow people to use computers as they see fit.
Look at the current (*nix) system. For clients (ie. users and their programs) to get access to devices, or make use of the services provided by another user's programs, they have to be authenticated somehow (I'm not incredibly knowledgeable on authentication/security) using the centrally located passwd/shadow file in
Now... fast forward to the future (== zoom out to the internet). Personal computers will be a sort of "agent" for their owner (see the article "The Semantic Web" in the May 2001 issue of Scientific American), along with portable devices. These will need an authentication server that spans the entire network, seeing as "The Network is the Computer."
There is where the danger lies. Microsoft is the only commercial entity in position to controll this authentication server--using passport. And the only other entity in existance that has a chance to create this server is the open source community. There is proof of that in the very existance of the internet itself.
If Microsoft can get a large number of open source developers (or just influencial entities such as Ximian) using
I believe
I urge Ximian, if not some other group, to begin creating the alternative to Passport/Haistorm.
Just my 2 cents...
http://www.angelfire.com/ego/dotnjet
I don't think that we (meaning all computer users, but especially those of us in the open source community) should hate Microsoft. But I do think we should treat them for exactly what they are: a fiercely competative corporate machine that wants to eliminate anything that they can't control.
Making deals with them or working with their technology is a bad idea, without question, for all the reasons stated in the article and more.
We shouldn't ignore Microsoft; we may make software that interoperates with their technologies, or take ideas from their software to integrate into our own. But working _with_ them, and especially depending upon a service they provide, can only be a recipe for disaster.
You're attributing the success of all 3rd party developers to Microsoft's business practices. Had any other company's OS become dominant, 3rd party companies would probably have had at least the same success; possibly more if Microsoft's APIs weren't the crap they are.
I agree with the article not only on the mentioned issues, but on the broader issues of the open source movement rushing to copy what companies like Microsoft create. It seems hypocritical to me that the open source movement should so readily rush to imitate what it itself often condemns, rather than creating its own model based on open standards rather than proprietary systems. The open source movement has grown, and I have no reason to doubt that if we lead the corporations that currently govern the industry will soon follow, or be lost in the tide.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
perhaps ms ought to voluntarily split itself up. and change it's public corpo name and turn micro-soft (the os company) into a non-profit research organization for software development and testing for any software or hardware platform someone is willing to fund development for? this way, governments and other companies could fund the porting of .net frameworks to open-source platforms we all know and love which we can then all re-use in our own projects.
perhaps there would be sections of code (which we would have to communicate with one another about on /. and other fine forums from time to time)
we would have to hack out to i/o to disable built-in stuff we might not like (links to mindshi(f)t owned webservices, s/a nekkid people websites, for instance).
and say we'd have to tack on a gpl-like ms header if we choose to publish and distribute source code (along whatever other headers might be required, such as gpl).
- which said we had to include all the stuff they gave us when we re-distribute their code - with setup scripts for disabling the stuff we don't like for our target audience (hardware and software customers)
- which we might have to pay a royalty to whoever funded the research to develop what we're sharing, could be mindshift, the us government, some other government, some other company, so individual developer, etc if we were found distributing cd's with aol-like auto-launching setup scripts (for instance).
- the royalty price can be advertised in the header and can be free or made free by the primary licensee. or the royalty price cab apply to a group of modules - like a library bundle license)
- and call it the M$GPL
now, THAT is what i would call a betting a company mr gates. i sure hope that's what your thinking!
a-and, this way, imesho, you can get that last 10-15% of us to dislike the fact that you got so rich off the other 85-90% of us much less.
--oxo
can a borg do good?
msft ought to voluntarily split itself up.
.net frameworks, zum beispiel, to open-source platforms we all know & love - which anyone can then use in their own projects and products.
/. and other fine forums from time to time) that would need to be hacked out i/o to disable built-in stuff we might not like (links to mindshi(f)t owned webservices, s/a nekkid people websites, for instance).
and change it's public name.
- turn micro-soft (the os company) into a non-profit research organization or private university for software development and testing of any software or hardware platform someone is willing to fund r&d for.
- this way, governments and other companies could fund the porting of
perhaps there would be sections of code (which we would have to communicate with one another about on
a-and say we'd have to tack on a gpl-like ms header if we choose to publish and distribute source code (along whatever other headers might be required, such as gpl).
- which said we had to include all the stuff they gave us when we re-distribute their code - with setup scripts for disabling the stuff we don't like for our target audience (hardware and software customers)
- which we might have to pay a royalty to whoever funded the research to develop what we're sharing, could be mindshift, the us government, some other government, some other company, so individual developer, etc if we were found distributing cd's with aol-like auto-launching setup scripts (for instance).
- the royalty price can be advertised in the header and can be free or made free by the primary licensee if that entity so chooses. the royalty price could apply to a group of modules - like a library bundle license)
- you could call it the M$GPL
now THAT, mr gates, is what i would call a betting your company. i sure hope it's close to what your thinking these days.
a-and, this way, imesho, you can get that last 10-15% to dislike the fact that you got so wealthy off the other 85-90% much, much less.
--oxo
can a borg do good?