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RMS Asks Miguel to Explain Himself
phaze3000 writes "RMS, responding to questions from the audience at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil last week, has asked Miguel de Icaza to explain himself to the Free software community about comments made last week that Gnome should be based on .NET in the future. More details at Brazillian site Hotbits and in The Register." I find this amusing.
quote:
.NET - you use the .NET API - the classes [sic.] they have defined."
"What's important to keep in mind is that you do not actually use the Windows API in
hello, what exactly needs further explanation? its brilliant.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
Did you read the article? RMS was asked about how he felt about Miguel's moving Gnome to .NET, he reponding saying he(RMS) found that hard to belive, anf if it was true he asked Migual to explain the move to the free software community. Thats all.
And gnome is not Miguels.
disclaimer-- I have recieved a very nasty email from Ximian basically telling me where to put, afer I emailed them looking for how I could contribute to the project, so I pretty much hate those guys. Ilike Gnome, I just think they're assholes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
MS knows that they can not make money off of selling the various windows platforms, and if this was their sole product they would be in deep red.
.NET has a few main objectives
.NET Office. Vendors will pay for levels of use like the 3% on credit cards. There will be various levels such as bronze, silver, gold and platinum
.NET applications and services. Big Picture may form here. They are probably funding XIMIAN. I do not know any one paying for redcarpet or purchasing Ximian Gnome Box sets.
They haven't made a profit from their OS division in over 7 years.
Faced with this and other facts you will find out that
#1 is cash flow, this will be accomplished through various licensing schemes and levels of use with the Passport Portal system and with monthly services such as
#2 To rid themselves of the need to make a OS. Why do you think they are lobbing for laws that require digital content management, If all OSs had DCM then it would work with #1 This is just trying to make the point the only reason they make windows and it's aborted registry is for DCM.
#3 Microsoft will not care what OS you use as long as you use
This may also explain why they are sensitive to the names of various Linux Distributions.
Get a free ipod.
I don't at all understand why you write "an RMS autocracy." RMS is not a dictator. He is, however, a very careful and concerned member of the community. He's the sole parent of the Free Software movement, which explains why he's concerened about what happens in all the projects.
GNU is about certain types of freedom, as carefully laid out in the various manifestos and licenses. I believe your are grossly, erringly oversimplifying the meaning of freedom. The GNU project is not about anarchy, which is what I think you're suggesting.
-Paul Komarek
Very few DOS apps ran correctly on win95. Many win95 apps didn't run on Win98. Microsoft changed their Word format between Office 95 and Office 98 (or 2000, whatever) in a gratuitous manner which prevented old office from reading new office documents. Microsoft repeatedly changed the Win32 spec in trivial ways to introduce incompatibilities with OS/2's Win32 implementation. Visual basic programmers have face repeated forward and backward compatibility problems (some noted VB book authors even quit recommending VB because of this).
Microsoft has no qualms about pissing off their (locked-in) developer community. They've repeatedly broke compatibility in every possible way. Why anyone trusts Microsoft, I'll never know. Microsoft's history (the real history, not Bill Gate's rewritten version) should scare anyone away. I'm guessing that you're either extremely young, extrememly naive, extremely forgetful, or paid by Microsoft (the last one was a joke).
-Paul Komarek
It's interesting how someone can post a link to Miguel's clarification but it gets lost in the shuffle.
Beyond that it amazes me how everyone seems to be overlooking the maintainers of the various Gnome applications. Just look at the shear size of the Gnome Software Map. If anybody is going to be making the call of using Mono, Bonoboo, or whatever when adding features to Gnome applications it will be maintainer(s) and contributors.
Hell even in Miguel's example of Gnumeric, I would suspect that Jody Goldburg as the maintainer would be making the final choice rather than Miguel. I'll grant you I don't follow Gnumeric development and Jody might love Mono but it seems everyone is looking in the wrong place to discern the future trends of Mono & it's integration with Gnome.
And yes, I do realize that Miguel was the creator but he seems to have his hands full with other things like Mono and Ximian. As I recall his stated motivation for creating Gnumeric was not even an interest in a spreadsheet but annoyance with the lack of one in Gnome.
~~ What's stopping you?
Windows, at present, only supports a single platform. Because of this they have no cross platform instalation issues. You must be thinking of some other operating system.
.NET. The XML services are another part. The tech is separate (though plays nicely together), but all part of .NET.
Rewind the clock. The AIM alliance (Apple, IBM, Motorola) are cranking out faster PPC chips, the Alpha research project is bearing fruit, and Intel can't get the Pentium to move. They start playing tricks like they did at the end of the 486 era with faster processors then busses, but they can't really get the speed up.
Intel looks like a dead end.
Microsoft's NT project looks like it will divorce them from Intel. Their NTVDM, based on an old OS/2 VDM (IBM's later version was better) can emulate the entire 286 instruction set, so you can run DOS apps inside of it. They develop NT on a non-Intel architecture (rumored to be MIPS) to avoid any Intel specific shortcuts.
NT 3.51 supports the MIPS (there was a project with several companies to build a desktop PC on the MIPS line, NT was the OS, and Intel pulled tech specs for their stuff from everyone involved ).
NT 3.51 supports the PPC. They are scared of Taligent Pink, the Apple/IBM project to build two OSes on the same core system. PC Users would run OS/2, Apple users their Macs, run the same applications with the different environments.
NT 3.51 supports the Alpha. The Alpha looks like it is going to be awesome and could carry Microsoft into the server rooms. It looks like a screamer. The AlphaPC, the cheap version of the chip, looks like a great processor. NT 3.51 and the AlphaPC could turn Microsoft into a workstation player and compete in the engineering space.
Intel is still moving chips cheaply (in the $400-$1000 range) so they are involved.
Microsoft has another project, Chicago AKA Windows 4.0 AKA Windows 93, released as Windows 95. It brings the Win32 API to the lowend world. Get your apps moved to Win32 from Win16, and you can move to Windows NT (but not OS/2). Stick to Win32s and IBM can still fight on with OS/2.
At that point in history, there was no Microsoft monopoly.
What happened?
Intel gets the Pentium Pro to perform well on 32-bit operations (though the 16-bit code in Win95 made it a dog there) and announces the Pentium II, a PPro without the expensive on-chip cache. Quad-PPros do okay as workgroup servers. The MIPS PC initiative dies out (taking one of the top graphics card makers with it, who couldn't compete without Intel's PCI specs early... and Vesa Local Bus wasn't keeping up).
IBM refuses to ship PPC computers (to run Windows NT) until they have OS/2 running there. Well, the OS/2 port couldn't make it. Sure their were dozens of machines build in Boca Raton, FL, they rocked. The PPC 620 was promissed with the 486 core integrated. Wow, OS/2 on a PPC with your old DOS/Win apps running on the 486 core? Never shipped...
NT drops to just the Alpha and x86. With no support for the other ports, Microsoft lets the development tools for non-x86 lapse. Visual Studio RISC was usually at least 1 rev back.
Alpha support drops out later.
Microsoft is now stuck with x86.
Itanium/IA-64 is on the way. Microsoft needs a 64-bit system to carry them up the food chain, and the Alpha is dead.
AMD's x86-64 is on the way, and while there is no official plans for Microsoft to support it, I'm sure that they will.
Microsoft is back to pushing cross platform.
J++ didn't get them there. The CLR may.
The CLR is part of
Microsoft HATES sharing their monopoly with Intel. Intel may be the junior partner, but they are there. Microsoft needs to increase its leverage. The CLR makes Intel a junior partner... VERY junior.
They can talk to IBM about PPCs, or AMD about x86-64.
Microsoft certainly has cross-hardware issues. Because of them, they are only on 1 platform.
NT is extremely portable.
x86 assembly code is not.
Alex
Couldn't agree more.
Just a while back I found some STL code to be broken in VC++ 6.0 that worked fine in VC++5.0 - Funny how the MFC stuff still works though. It seems that they target what to break. Breaking STL code is a no-brainer because that fosters apps that are more portable and from the MS standpoint that is bad.
So what does the average developer do? Avoid code rewrite and code to MFC - they (Microsoft) win.
Regarding Miguel's Actions:
.NET as the underlying technology, KDE wins (If it hasn't already).
I also believe Miguel is not thinking this through. But as has been said often here: Once the code GNU'd it can't be undone. Also if the Gnome project adopts
umm...i believe gcc does this already. gcc internally takes all types of code asm, c, objc, c++ and compiles to common bytecode. from their it optimizes the code and produces common machine language code.
Nothing special about microshit's "technology".
It's amazing they say COM-now-.NET is the wave of the future, when really if u open it up, its nothing more than RPC(remote procedure calling). Many of u guyz need to understand between *technology* and *standardization*. M$ just standardizes API interfaces, that's all. Nothing new.
Very few DOS apps ran correctly? Bullshit. Before win95 shipped, the win95 QA team went to Egghead and bought a copy of every title on the shelves and either made sure that they ran or informed the authors of the bad assumptions they had made in their code and how to patch them. Sometimes the application was directly patched at runtime by the OS. For example some applications would make use of undocumented behavior (like the burgermaster table in win13) that wasn't available on the new system.
Miguel has now responded. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/20 02-February/msg00042.html
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