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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.
The man is getting old and it shows.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
I think people have misunderstood Miguel. What he has done here is to use MS as an R&D dept. MS spent millions researching .NET and built a comprehensive set of tools. GNU (and the rest of us) can benefit from this research, they can take the best ideas from .NET and implement them in MONO. This is a GoodThing.
.NET and stick with the standards he wins because .NET will become fragmented.
.NET and C# are full of ideas borrowed from JAVA, DELPHI, DCOM etc. Why not pull an MS here and embrace your enemies. Take their ideas and run with them!
There could be a problem if MS shifts the spec or extends the spec. At that point if Miguel decides to chase MS he loses. If he decides to "fork"
I think Miguel knows what he is doing. I say give him a chance if history is any indicator he will kick ass.
In essence
War is necrophilia.
Given that Sun has publically stated they are going to move to using Gnome as their desktop (not that i believe it given their last support of the OpenStep UI) -- I believe they would have some serious issues with this as well
Its no secret the position Sun takes as it relates to Microsoft
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
Pinning GNOME to .NET sounds like a braindead idea to me anyway. Perpetually playing catch-up and being involved in an arms race with MS. If you have any knowledge of the history of computing then you'll know the sands of .NET will continually shift.
.NET
/. about it!
Just look at the lineage :
dde, ole, ole2, com, dcom, dcom + mts, soap,
J++ & Active Directory probably fit in there somewhere too.
Pinning your business model to any of these technological donkeys is an expensive move.
to paraphrase :
The MSDN treadmill moves pretty fast, if you don't look around once in a while, you might just miss out!
Everybody has a duty to question, I'm glad RMS has done it so publicly because if it was me that asked then I doubt we'd see any discussion on
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Yes, we hate MS. We really hate MS. MS is bad, mmkay? Now that that's out of the way...
.NET is coming, lets not dilute ourselves about that. MS owns the desktop, and if they want .NET, odds are, good or bad, .NET is making it into peoples homes. So our choices are simple, we can ignore .NET, do our own thing (bonobo, watever) and stay a fringe group (dont kid yourselves, were a fringe group) of radical non-windows folks. Or, we can do the smart thing, offer full .NET compatibility. If we do that, and manage to keep up with MS's API changes and whatnot, when MS phases in .NET as the only type of app out there, we're ready, and we've got a real shot at the desktop. Want to run office? Go ahead, we can install it from your MS CD with no problems (no WINE, no emu, native). I, for one, can't wait for .NET on linux. I'll be coding my web services in VS.NET while still hacking perl in my bash console.
.NET, and let MS develop the software. Seems very logical to me, I dont understand what the problem is. Yeah, we're imitating 'the beast'. So what? Immitate now, dominate later. If linux is to make it to the desktop, it needs to catch up to windows, and this is the quickest, most painless way I see of doing this.
.NET on linux, it gives .NET more market penetration, but then again, once .NET is on linux, who needs windows?
.NET is new, its untested, its unproven, but the simple fact is, it's a very promising platform. Yes, MS built it, because they have the resources to. Why not use it?
Slashdot keeps talking about how we need to make linux so easy that my grandma can use it, here's our chance. We copy
Yes, I'm biased, I contribute ALOT to the Mono project, but I honestly believe that without something that gives native compatibility with windows apps, linux will stay on the server, and my grandma will keep shelling out for new versions of windows.
And one more thought, MS isn't trying to kill mono. Has it crossed anyones mind that this is our chance to get MS to help kill themselves? They want
Yes, this is a rant, and I'm sorry for any grammar/spelling errors. But, before you mod me down into oblivion, seriously think about this. This really is a good thing(tm), and is the best bet of linux getting into mainstream desktop land.
The article points out that it should be OK for the free software community to implement MS API's like SMB (SAMBA) and Windows itself (Wine) because they are already established standards, but it should not be alright to implement .NET because it is only an emerging standard not yet heavily adopted by many.
.NET is popular and widespread before starting a compatable project, then it will already be too late and you will be eternally playing catch-up. Think how much more accepted Linux might have been if it was also able run Windows applications well from the get-go.
.NET becomes very popular and widely deployed as Microsoft wishes it to be. In this case Linux and other OSS will benefit from already having a .NET implementation (Mono) in place. No need to spend two or three years to play catch-up while OSS loses market share to MS.
.NET is a bust and never becomes popular or widely deployed. Microsoft loses big time (since they are hanging their future on it), and OSS (mainly just Ximian) loses a gamble by having wasted some development resources. Big deal. And mainly just Ximian would have lost anything, the rest of the OSS community will have lost very little.
.NET and C# become widely deployed and OSS operating systems are caught with their pants down, not being able to host any .NET related services or applications.
I disagree with this conclusion. Why wait. If you wait until
Here are the two possibilities:
1 -
2. -
These two alternatives seem better than the third possibility, which is that
So if you didn't see this one coming, you simply haven't been paying attention.
It looks like Stallman just didn't realize this was the plan. Perhaps he also doesn't realize .NET refers more to the Java-like language and runtime being implemented by the mono project than the privacy-trashing hailstorm system Microsoft is trying to wed it to.
As for myself, I'm a "free as in speech," copyleft, "do what's best for the free software community" kind of guy, and I don't see a problem with moving Mono to .NET, if it works. (AWT and Swing gave me a bad taste with Java, so I'm a little suspicious of .NET, but still optimistic.) Of course, I've known since the beginning of the mono project that this was the plan. Because that's been said openly at every opportunity.
I do wish Ximian could find it in their hearts to copyleft everything, though. (No library licenses, proprietary Outlook extenders, etc.) And I know, that makes me evil and heartless.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I think a lot of /. folks are letting their RMS disillusionments take control. I personally would definitely NOT like to see the Free software world start using Microsoft-invented, Microsoft-owned, Microsoft-patented technology if it can be helped.
This is like turning Gnome into a Windows app. Sure, .NET sounds cool from a technology point of view but you should know by now that technology doesn't live in a vacuum. As soon as anything based on .NET becomes a threat to Microsoft, they will cripple it, through technological or legal means.
The Free software community should stand firm and develop and use open technologies, and not even pay lip service to .NET.
I agree with the view taken by Nick Peterly (or whatever his name, I can't remember right now) that Miguel has been baited by Microsoft .NET and this will just give Microsoft a way to try and subvert Free software. Maybe that's not what MS was thinking at the outset, and not what Miguel is thinking, but it will be possible and we shouldn't allow MS that kind of power.
I for one will lump anything that uses .NET in with Microsoft products, even if it's "open source". Why take the chance? I'm surprised that so many /. folks are calling .NET "progress" or "a standard". It's just a Microsoft technology.
.NET is a framework. In short, it simplifies development. It makes programming with SOAP, COM+, etc. a lot easier. You're not limited to one language, you can use Python or Perl or C# or VB and plenty more languages to create .NET applications.
.NET service but I don't think it'll take off because it's kinda complicated for administrators to set it up, you have to get permission to use it, etc.
.NET is not that amazing. Well actually it can be amazing if Broadband and Wireless internet connection became mainstream but that's not gonna happen soon.
"and it is going to have on one great big server: all the data about me that the CIA(or any advertising agency) could ever want"
That's passport, it's a
That's MS marketing at work,
"This is only partially true. From a home user perspective .NET is little more than useless garbage. Renting software"
Uhh, he said to look at it with your blinders off.
Since we're into car analogies, let me explain in simpler terms...
Miguel is saying the new Ford Mustang is pretty cool.
You are complaining because Hertz rents Ford Mustangs.
Miguel's decision to embrace technology that exists as only a fraction of an IEEE spec, a few "Dummies" books, and a beta SDK shows his lack of judgement, nomatter how you feel about it. He may turn out to be right, but not because of any great wisdom or foresight on his part. He's gambling on something that's only been *vaporware* for a year and a half, and is just now being implemented.
Thank you for such a detail chroncle but since I worked for IBM I've heard a different version than yours. (and since I worked for IBM I may be biased, be warned. ^_^)
:)
:)
:)
It was not IBM refused to ship PPC with NT, it's Microsoft who refused to developed NT on PPC. In fact DOS/Win32 running on 486 core wasn't so bad at that time, may be due to some architectural difficulties Microsoft did not port their NT to PPC.(you are right NT is portable and asm is not, but PPC's asm is open enough for them, at least as far as I know)
NT can run on Alpha. I'm not sure whether NT5(aka W2K) can run on Alpha, but previous versions can. It's Microsoft who left Alpha, not vice versa.
OS/2 lost to Windows mainly due to the fact that Windows do not allow OS/2 ship with many Win32 components - that almost drove OS/2 out of Win-compatibility business. In fact IBM did strike back by releasing 'OS/2 for Windows' version, but lost is lost.
Microsoft then further extended their monopolization by penalizing PC vendors if their line of products ship with OS other than Windows. That's what you've been hearing in the trial.
We, at that time, always wondered "Can they do that?", but hell, IBM did that during 70's(in other market) so why couldn't they! Now we know it's illegal, heh, oh well.
but it's too late.
In conclusion, Microsoft chose the path of monopolization. Your post sounds like Microsoft was forced to do so, may be I'm wrong.
After this, it is kind of easy to reach to the conclusion that the ECMA standard has major deficiencies, that there is no way (apart from custom tool support) to tell if the code you are writing conforms to that standard and that Microsoft is most likely just paying lip service to the standards process, at least as far as the core .NET API's go. Java and Sun do a much more complete job of defining and sticking to specifications if the ECMA work is any sign.
Personally, I don't plan to touch .NET API's to develop open source software after this. My opinion is that Mono would be much better off if they develop their own cross-platform class libraries instead of using .NET API's. There is nothing preventing them from using CLI VM and multiple language support with their own class libraries. They are already writing everything from scratch, they might as well use their own design rather than playing catch-up to proprietary Microsoft API's.
"The deluded are always filled with absolutes. The rest of us have to live with ambiguity." - Aristoi, Walter Jon Willia