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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.
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!
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.
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.
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.NET is better equated to Sun ONE. Sun ONE provided Java, SOAP/UDDI/WSDL, and a platform for delivering web services, with strong support for XML. Java, by itself, has limited support for XML (JAXP is the only XML API included in JDK1.4) and does not have any built-in support for SOAP et al. Java is *not* a platform for delivering web services, which is the stated goal of .NET.
.NET is not a valid comparison. Comparing Java to C#/IL/CLR is much more valid. Comparing Sun ONE to .NET is also valid. But compring Java to .NET is, indeed, comparing apples to oranges.
Sun ONE, of course, brings these capabilities to Java. Comparing Java to
By the way, both Sun and IBM have bought in to the idea of web services enough to make web services a central part of their plans for the future of their companies. Maybe the idea of web services is fundamentally flawed. I don't think so, however. Web services are a natural progression of component-based software development. First we had monolithic applications. Then we had 3rd party APIs. Then we had object oriented class libraries. A natural progression is web services. Whereas OO libraries help programmers reuse code, web services allow corporations to easily integrate 3rd party services into part of a larger, single system. This is not easily doable with existing OO technologies (I'm thinking here of DCOM/CORBA/RMI/EJB/sockets--you can do it, but it's a royal pain in the butt).
--Be human.
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.
There's a good article on kuro5hin about this very issue......
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
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!
A complete and usable desktop like we've grown acustom to since Macos/Windooz should be the priority.
Actually this is the problem. Now don't misunderstand me. I'm not talking about thowing out all the past good ideas, and using something that doesn't work, simply because it's new. But one shouldn't blindly reimplement old ideas, including implementing their short comings simply because, that's what people expect.
Take for instance the start menu. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the user shouldn't be able to edit the root menu. Sure, you a limited ability to add new items, and then remove your items, but you you're stuck with what Microsoft decided would be "useful". (Run, Shutdown, Programs, Favorites, et cetra.) Don't use Favorites? Don't want it cluttering up your menu? Tough.
So GNOME and KDE (they both suffer from the same debilitating disease last time I checked) said, "Hey we need a start menu. Afterall Microsoft has one and when the Great Flood comes and Redmond is washed into the sea, those that the Great Penguin deamed worthy will go forth and claim the land and the people left will be expecting a start menu. Those that don't want a start menu, can remove it. So everyone is happy.
Not quite. For the would-be deliverers have decided that everyone should have "Programs", "Favorites", "Run", "Applets", "Logout", and "Lock Screen". You mean you would like to edit this? You can't under windows. What do you mean that's not acceptable? That's how Microsoft does it.
For all the talk about how Microsoft doesn't innovate, there sure is lack of innovation in the opensource world. I've yet to see it. In fact there has never been a "killer app" for Linux.
Sure someone will bring up something like Gimp, but let's face it. It's Photoshop, only more confusing and without nearly as many useful plugins.
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.
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
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 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?
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.
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?
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.
"
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.)
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.
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.
They both made a very critical mistake early on that falls along the lines of this statement:
"Lets build our desktop to look like Windows, because thats what people are used to."
Wrong. I can't speak for GNOME, but for KDE let me rephrase:
"Let's build the best desktop possible for developers (us) and users alike, modeled after both present functionality and new ideas."
it immediately commits you (and your project) to a life of constantly playing second fiddle..
Open source projects don't care about taking ideas. They take and they add. KDE has a launch button and task bar, made famous by Win95. It also has a desktop menubar, popularized by MacOS. Minimizing, shading, dockapp swallowing, system tray, desktop icons, multiple desktops. It's all there. Anything cool you've ever used, and then some, is there. Here's a recent scenario: a coder is sitting at his computer wishing he had a sidebar in Konqueror -- you know, something like what is in Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla. Does he live the rest of his life without such a feature? Making some sort of sacrifice to use Linux? Of course not! He duplicates the feature in Konqueror. The point is that it doesn't matter where the idea comes from. If it is useful, it is added. That's how Open Source projects work.
Rather than try out new ideas, take a few risks here and there, and rethink the ways in which things have always been done, they both followed like puppy dogs into the same bloody mess. Now both are stuck. The defacto standard Linux GUI is now roughly equivalent to a Windows desktop from seven years ago. Clap at your leisure.
Right... and could you open a remote file from within the included Windows text editor 7 years ago? And would selecting the "save" option cause it to be uploaded back to the remote location? Did you have a command prompt that supported scrollback and multiple tabbed sessions? Could you disable popup windows, but keep the rest of Javascript in your web browser? Could you log your windowing events to stderr? Can you do any of this with even the latest version of Windows? I think not.
refine that departure into a stable, usable, likeable model. They didn't do that. Now they're paying the price, and have no one to blame but themselves.
The KDE libraries are a desktop perfection. I fail to see this price they are paying.
Proudly posted from Konqueror.
-Justin
Psi - ICQ-like Jabber client
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
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.
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