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MS: Use the Source, Luke!
McSpew writes: "The WSJ (via MSNBC) has an article about Microsoft's upcoming push to get universities to use .NET code in programming courses. Their code-sharing initiative is all about winning hearts-and-minds at the university level, where Linux and open-source rule the day. The article does a good job of explaining the issues and why MS may yet fail in spite of their push. I wish the article had discussed the reverse-engineering issues of needing 'virgins' who have never seen the product being reverse-engineered and how MS's newly broad distribution of its code makes finding virgins much more difficult."
Just pick a name from the roster of any CS course...
--riney
When these guys came to my campus a couple of weeks ago (CU Boulder) I think the majority of students were more interested in the free XBOX giveaway than the .NET. Although finally having a legit copy of XP Pro was a nice bonus as well :)
Who is John Galt?
At the recent SIGCSE conference of the ACM MS was there pushing the .NET handing out full copies of it and XP Pro as well as books on C# and things like that. I must admit I saw the add-on to .NET, the Live Wire product I think it's called, as a decent tool to teach non-cs majors an intro to programming course. Then I got home and talked about the product with some colleages and to my disgust one was using it to develop actual software.
It's one thing if a school jumps on board with this, but for the love of pudding, please mention there are other things out there, and what is sometimes just a teaching tool isn't always something for use in industry.
Wheeeee
Here is your diploma and FYI, M$ owns all of your future work.
Their code-sharing initiative is all about winning hearts-and-minds at the university level, where Linux and open-source rule the day
Yeah, I used Unix (not Linux) in programming courses when I was in college, but most colleges now-a-days use Win2K labs and are phasing out their Unix labs (same programming courses in my college are using Visual Studio's version of C++).
Sorry to burst your bubble, but lately Linux and open source aren't "ruling" at the university level.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Microsoft trying to talk to students about "the source" is like your dad wanting to "rap" with you about drugs.
Pat
First, in what course exactly would an instructor want to say "Well, here's a whole bunch of code from a commercial (or any) project. Study it." I agree it's good to have an example around for some things, but if MS thinks the Universities are going to create a course like "The .NET Code", they're dreaming.
Second, if I did want a large code example, I'd want a good example. I'd want to be able to point to almost any part of the code and say "That's the right way to do it." I've never seen any MS code, but I'm going to idly speculate that you couldn't do that with it. Probably MS isn't shooting for the .NET code being used as a cautionary tale.
This could prevent some students of getting some jobs in the future.
.NET source code is mandatory for some classes. Now, could a student refuse to take a particular class or ask for an equivalence because of that? If not, it's like if they signed a whole lot of people into non-compete clauses, without much benefit for them! I'm not even talking about Free software here. They could probably prevent you from working for a competitor (Sun, Apple, etc.)
Suppose I enroll in one of those programs where the exposure to
The use of "sponsored" material in classes has always been dangerous, but when it can influence where you can or can't work after you graduate, it's just plain Not a Good Idea (tm).
Translation: Microsoft hopes professors and students will improve their work, so it can be sold back to them at a grossly inflated price.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Why not let people with some programming experience already poke and prod at the source code?
.NET.
.NET is the only solution for all their web coding activities (I know not all students are like this, but honestly.. i remember what university was like.. 75% sheep). Not to mention bringing in a whole slew of .NET-trained graduates into the workforce.
Three reasons:
1) Control over how the universities use the code. Universities are notoriously underfunded, so any help coming their way from a company like MS is a godsend. I'd love to see the restrictions placed on any code developped in university labs on
2) Good PR. MS looks like a saint for helping out the struggling education system.
3) The student programmer is in just the right stage to be brainwashed into thinking
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
It seems somewhat plausible that Microsoft is concerned about the general lack of programming experience on their products that college students get. I know at all of the universities I ever went to, (three) and all the ones anyone I can recall asking about it went to, (more than three) the dominant programming infrastructure was Unix. As far as I can tell, this has only become more prevalent in recent years, with almost every CS student I know running a linux box at home to save the effort of having to sit in a lab to code homework assignments.
.NET stuff in order to RE it for purposes of Linux interoperability, though. Maybe that's another reason MS is pushing to have it's code displayed so broadly. So noone can legitimately RE it.
It is a shame that it will be harder to find people who have no experience with the
-il cylic
Defend Freedom
You can't swing a dead cat around without hitting a few dozen.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
They were called IS students.
This is a bit unsettling.
.net (or something else popular), they have trade schools.
A college or university is not, nor should be a place where flavor of the day propritary platform should be taught. The focus of a college should be to give the student a broad enough understanding of the basic workings of programming and computers that the graduate can have enough background to quickly adapt to any platform.
If you want to focus on something like
===
The Internet is generally stupid
From the article:
Microsoft historically has been extremely protective of its intellectual property and has vehemently opposed some tenets of the open-source movement. It has particularly attacked the "general public license"
(emphasis added by me)
I suppose in an article discussing m$ and open source, it was hardly necessary to check the acronyms out first. I assume it passed the proof readers as well. It just goes to show that dilignce is alive and well in the popular press today!
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
1. What the heck is it? Every time you turn around, it's something different. I suspect it's just another dressed up version of OLE/ActiveX in a pretty new wrapper. .NET, you'll be stuck with it, and it's not going to be portable to anything else. There are plenty of ways to write software that don't require you to give your first born male child to Micro$oft, and I'm going to use those instead.
2. It's a way to trap everyone into their code. If you start using
3. "It's Microsoft, so it's Evil" (TM). They want everyone to use it, so it must be bad. Look at their history of embrace, extend, extinguish. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out it's a Faustian deal, no matter how you do it.
--Mike--
heh. that's not good sense or waiting for established technologies. that's good, old fashioned entropy.
Just about all beaurocratic organizations (and universities are among the top of those) take forever to adopt new technologies and phase out old ones.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
They're setting up to kill Open Source in the future... not by winning hearts and minds, but by "contaminating" all those students...
MS Lawyer: "What? Product X functions like MS Y.NET? Obviously you had access to our copyrighted source code!"
Open Source Group: "WTF are you talking about?"
MS Lawyer: "Programmer Joe Collegekid over there, he saw our source in his college class. He obviously used it. Stop producing your software, or you'll lose everything you own! Oh, and give it to use, because we own all the copyrights on it!"
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/default.asp?UR L=/downloads/sample.asp?url=/msdn-files/027/001/90 1/msdncompositedoc.xml. Shared source license, but you can use it in classes and courses. So the push is definitely there. The sourcecode is for Windows and FreeBSD
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Features
- An implementation of the runtime for the Common Language Infrastructure (ECMA-335) that builds and runs on Windows XP and FreeBSD
- Compilers that work with the Shared Source CLI for C# (ECMA-334) and JScript
- Development tools for working with the Shared Source CLI such as assembler/disassemblers (ilasm, ildasm), a debugger (cordbg), metadata introspection (metainfo), and other utilities
- The Platform Adaptation Layer (PAL) used to port the Shared Source CLI from Windows XP to FreeBSD
- Build environment tools (nmake, build, and others)
- Documentation for the implementation
- Test suites used to verify the implementation
[This is mostly cut & paste from the MSDN page]A few semi-interesting threads have started about this on K5 including this one and this one.
In addition, most students are "going to have to learn multiple programming languages" eventually, says Rick Rashid, the head of Microsoft's research department.
::End Obvious Statements::
Take one real computer scientist, give them a computer with a compiler, a book on the real programming language they need to use, and a day, and they will be coding up non-trivial programs no problem. C/C++, Java, BASIC, Perl, Cobol, Fortran, APL, LISP, whatever. It shouldn't take a real computer scientist or computers science student too long to adjust and move on.
The theory of programming computers transends the language used.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Then why are you giving away source code? Isn't it that you want students to learn, and become hooked on, MS products? Isn't this just another attempt to extend the MS monopoly on operating systems? Do you really expect that college students will believe that Microsoft, the company that has exploited the American consumer and been found guilty of felonies, has suddenly become altruistic?
What strikes me about Microsoft is that they really have no clue! Giving away source code is not going to curry favor with college students who are given to idealism. They can see through the hype. They would rather contribute to society at large than become pawns of Corporate America.
Wake up Microsoft! No one with a conscience wants to help you extend your monopoly - we in IT are tired of seeing our ideas and talents used to bully ordinary people into spending inordinate amounts of money for inferior products. We want to work for positive change in society, and you aren't it...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
We have yet to find a single file from any of our customers that requires a newer version to open, which tells me that Office97 is the defacto standard for file exchange, and will be for a VERY long time.
You can get a legitimate copy of NT4 with 10 client licenses for $20.00 or so, and it's not hard to find Exchange 5.5, etc. Office 97, etc... are all cheap now. 8)
The future is not Linux, nor is it XP, the future is Windows 98SE, Office97 Pro, and NT Server 4.0.
--Mike--
Most University's are adding Windows workstations, but not the servers. You know what students are doing on those Win2k lab PCs?
85%: Microsoft Word (Sure beats tex for the average student)
15%: Telnet to the *nix server to code.
5%: Using in VB for their IS course in GUI design.
They still keep *nix labs for the serious geeks, and they always have SGI labs for the graphics stuff. Occassionally Macs. But the Pcs are there to fill the gap of cheap, nearly disposable clients. The real R&D is still on *nix.
In short, it's marketing, and good marketing in that the misdirection is well-concealed. But then, they know that the money guards in most companies respond better to pretty picutres and unsubstantiated graphs rather than real-world tests.
This newest .NET push is simply more of the same. At last, the people who know technology are being allowed to have some say in purchasing decisions (in my company anyway), and they're not deciding on MS as much. So, MS has to get to the people who know, now. Sadly, their reputation is so tarnished with developers and tech-savvy people, they have to catch them young, before the truth gets out.
Where is .NET anyway? Anyone using it in a production environment? Last I heard, it was pushed back because of security concerns. Again.
Do not touch -Willie
If you were going to teach a course around MS stuff, are there any University quality textbooks about MS Operating Systems and Products?
The main problem I see is that a given MS buzzword (.NET now, was DCOM, COM+, COM, OLE, blah blah blah) tends to have a 12 month or less half-life. Professors aren't going to like to have use modify a course heavily every time they teach it.
We're not here to supplant anybody else's operating systems or tools in the university, says Microsoft's Rashid.
This definitely belongs in the Most Outrageous Vendor Lie Ever Told? article
Stop Continental Drift! Reunite Gondwanaland!
depends on the lab. here at drexel, general purpose labs all have macs and pc's running win2k, but the student can setup an ssh connection to a unix system if they want to. specific labs owned by the depts vary depending on what they need. Art students, for example, have tons of adobe and other graphic software on their lab machines, all macs. Business students have win2k with business software.
But the CS lab has a bunch of sun workstations. All courses other than the freshman C++ and elemantary Data Structures course require use of those machines. Upper level OS courses require linux on the student's home machine so that they can do their own kernel hacking. The research labs in the CS dept all have Linux (and other open OS's) running somewhere, too.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
In fact, source access to the Java2 platform under the SCSL has onerous "contamination provisions" and I think using it in a computer science course is irresponsible because it may contaminate students for the rest of their professional lives.
What we really need is better open source, non-proprietary implementations of either language that colleges can use. These then give students access to tools they can use after they graduate wherever they work, and they can work with the full source code without selling their souls. And, besides, colleges shouldn't focus so much on just one language anyway.
If a school can get some nice tools for free, then hey! alright!
CS is not about tools, it's about concept and design and problem solving. Any good CS major knows how to develop software independant from any specific language. So if they want to learn about software using MS stuff, then go right ahead.
Just because students aren't forced to use GCC is not a bad thing.
So, the professors/administrators, who cannot be bothered to do the work of maintaining the campus computer network, come in and say "MS has offered us platinum chains and underwater blowjobs if we teach all courses in the .NET environment, so go ye forth and set it up."
.NET initiative is going to net (ahyuck, I made a funny) are the people in watered-down sorta-computing pre-business-school majors (Information Management, whatever) who don't actually do any programming or use the campus network. These schmucks, god how I despise them, are going to be all about .NET, and perhaps some poor fool is going to end up working for them. However, this is in-no-way going to alleviate MS' problem where the students who can actually code are using some UNIX derivative.
Whereupon the five guys in the basement of the engineering building (all campuses have such a building, with such a basement, with five slashdot readers in it - you know who you are) who actually maintain the campus computers say, depending on the rank of the personage and other political concerns-
1) "Run it by the chair of the department" (who is a crank with a zany axe to grind, 100% guaranteed.) Surprisingly, this works even if it has been run by the chair of the department three times already.
2) "Sir, we would start if we could, but these orders haven't been approved yet." (Have him sign some stuff, making the pompous blowhard think things will be "expedited" with his signature, then throw them away.) This is always the response if the prof. or admin. has officious looking documents with him.
3) "Fuck you, Dan." At a public university.
Regardless of what these five guys SAY, they DO the following set of things: {}.
And the students keep working on SPARCs, b/c the faculty don't have the wherewithal to push through an upgrade of the computers actually used for instruction.
The people that this
Just my $0.02 US ($3.00 Canadian)
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
While I posted above saying its great news that Linux made news by being Microsoft's foil on the front page of the marketing section of the WSJ, I can't help but come to the rather pessimistic conclusion that it doesn't matter one fly fuck what a single administrator says he will or won't do. Bullshit, I call. Unless you're willing to lay down your job(yeah right) you are going to do what you're told to do. If Linux is to be brought mainstream, it will NOT be done by the circle jerk of techies here on slashdot. It will be done by the future stuffed suits of the corporate world. So.....
You want to make a difference while you're in college? Convert two or three business/accounting/marketing majors to Linux. Set them up, provide free support, make them comfortable. Keep up said support. Recruit your geek friends to do the same. Do for the future stuffed shirts what Microsoft does for the present stuffed shirts. If and only if this is possible(no idea if it is) will it be possible for Linux to make REAL progress in infiltrating Microsoft's home world....the working world.
While Sun and Microsoft fight it out for the minds of computer science majors, another company has pretty much won the battle when it comes to engineering: MathWorks's Matlab has become the de-facto standard for computing in engineering and some areas of science and applied math. You can't exchange code with many others in the field unless you buy their software. Many research results are built on it and only reproducible using it. Oh, sure, it's cheap as long as you are a student or professor, but once you graduate, expect to pay many thousands of dollars even for a basic license, and many students graduating from top engineering and research labs are largely incapable of programming in anything else. The Matlab success story is a monopolist's dream.
Would I be correct that any homework that a student would want to publish after being exposed to the MS source code would be a violation of DMCA?
At the very least I imagine that students would be bound to a non-disclosure agreement.
The very language of computer science becomes compromised when you let MS in the classroom.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The RIAA has announced a new coursebook for law students "IP theft - a history". The coursebook examines the importance of Intellectual Property and the how the theft of IP threatens the foundations of our society.
Monsanto have announced a new series of videos for Biology undergraduates. Called "The ethics of genetic engineering", the series examines subjects such as how having patented gene sequences allows companies like Monsanto to help feed starving children in the Third World.
Disney-trained lecturers will be visiting art faculties all over the country in the coming weeks. The lecturers will be giving fun and thought provoking demonstrations about how to draw Disney-style characters. Before attending the lectures, students will have to sign a contract which stipulates that any Disney-style characters they draw in the future will be automatically copyright of Disney Corporation. They will also be encouraged to send any characters they draw directly to Disney, and not to show them to anyone else.
Environmental Studies students are all to receive a free study pack from ChevronTexaco Corporation. The study pack includes a text book "The Truth About Global Warming", as well as a t-shirt, stickers, felt pens, a colouring pad and a fridge magnet.
The idea was to teach us to program, not to condition us for a life under redmond rule.
That's funny. When I was in college the idea was to teach us to solve problems using computers in any language. I wrote code in PERL, Java, C/C++, and LISP.
The point of college isn't to learn to program in different languages, but to acquire and hone basic problem solving skills that you can apply to whatever language/tool/solution best fits the bill.
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
--Mike--
"...finding virgins much more difficult."
I have a hard enough time with this as it is. Damn you Microsoft! DAMN YOU!!!!!
--It's Pimptastic!--
--Mike--
Arstechnica has a very good article on what the heck .NET is.
In the lab where I work at MIT, we were given 2 high-end Dell boxes with NT on them. We purchased 5 IBM machines, Win98 installed whether we wanted it or not. Only one of these machines now has an MS OS still installed; Linux has nearly wiped out the competition here.
There's a Solaris cluster in the basement of our building, and an MS NT lab; four out of every five times I walk down that corridor, the NT lab is empty. The Solaris cluster is never empty.
#include "stdio.h"
int main()
{
printf("Hello, Microsoft EULA.\n");
return 1;
}
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Its a difference between people who just want to know how to use something vs the people that want to understand it. A shame they don't realize that if they understand how it works, they won't have any trouble using it, or anything like it, ever again.
But not only is both the department and university deeply rooted in Unix (especially for Comp classes), we're already incorporating Open Source directly in the curriculum. In a software engineering course I'm in right now, we're using Sourceforge to develop DrJava, a GPL'd Java development environment that is particularly useful for teaching beginners. We're seeing that open source and extreme programming (complete unit tests, rapid releases, etc) are a very effective approach towards building software-- and Microsoft isn't about to woo us away from that with money. I expect that any use of .NET here (if there is any) will be
strictly complimentary to our existing approaches.
The Mono implementation (http://www.go-mono.com) and yesterday's release (Mono 0.10) does provide pretty much everything that the Shared Source release does.
Get your bits now!
Miguel
From my brief review, it appears that they are primarily concerned with someone selling their code and patent problems. No mention of the GPL, although obviously several provisions in here are incompatible with any decent open source license.
So here it is:
MICROSOFT SHARED SOURCE CLI, C#, AND JSCRIPT LICENSE
This License governs use of the accompanying Software, and your use of the Software constitutes acceptance of this license.
You may use this Software for any non-commercial purpose, subject to the restrictions in this license. Some purposes which can be non-commercial are teaching, academic research, and personal experimentation. You may also distribute this Software with books or other teaching materials, or publish the Software on websites, that are intended to teach the use of the Software.
You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in any form for commercial purposes. Examples of commercial purposes would be running business operations, licensing, leasing, or selling the Software, or distributing the Software for use with commercial products.
You may modify this Software and distribute the modified Software for non-commercial purposes, however, you may not grant rights to the Software or derivative works that are broader than those provided by this License. For example, you may not distribute modifications of the Software under terms that would permit commercial use, or under terms that purport to require the Software or derivative works to be sublicensed to others.
You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after accessing the Software. However, this right does not grant you a license to any of Microsoft's copyrights or patents for anything you might create using such information.
In return, we simply require that you agree:
1. Not to remove any copyright or other notices from the Software.
2. That if you distribute the Software in source or object form, you will include a verbatim copy of this license.
3. That if you distribute derivative works of the Software in source code form you do so only under a license that includes all of the provisions of this License, and if you distribute derivative works of the Software solely in object form you do so only under a license that complies with this License.
4. That if you have modified the Software or created derivative works, and distribute such modifications or derivative works, you will cause the modified files to carry prominent notices so that recipients know that they are not receiving the original Software. Such notices must state: (i) that you have changed the Software; and (ii) the date of any changes.
5. THAT THE SOFTWARE COMES "AS IS", WITH NO WARRANTIES. THIS MEANS NO EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY WARRANTY, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR ANY WARRANTY OF TITLE OR NON-INFRINGEMENT. ALSO, YOU MUST PASS THIS DISCLAIMER ON WHENEVER YOU DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE OR DERIVATIVE WORKS.
6. THAT MICROSOFT WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES RELATED TO THE SOFTWARE OR THIS LICENSE, INCLUDING DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT THE LAW PERMITS, NO MATTER WHAT LEGAL THEORY IT IS BASED ON. ALSO, YOU MUST PASS THIS LIMITATION OF LIABILITY ON WHENEVER YOU DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE OR DERIVATIVE WORKS.
7. That if you sue anyone over patents that you think may apply to the Software or anyone's use of the Software, your license to the Software ends automatically.
8. That your rights under the License end automatically if you breach it in any way.
9. Microsoft reserves all rights not expressly granted to you in this license.
Bleh!
My school is in the process of moving all programming for its CS classes back to Unix. When I asked a professor why, the answer I got was, "Frankly, trying to turn Windows into a decent educational software development platform is about as fun as jumping naked into a pit of rabid wolves."
Having tried to do some homework for advanced classes on the Win2k workstations in the computer labs, I can only agree. . . with the minimal access student accounts get on the workstations, activities as simple as getting third-party libraries to work sometimes have their difficulty ratings upgraded from "routine task" to "black art."
What has made Matlab so entrenched and valuable is the network effect: some people are using it, and therefore other people have to use it, too. This does demonstrate something about the "commercial viability" of free software: it can be highly profitable to establish a standard by giving away free software and eventually making the project proprietary and start charging huge amounts of money for it. That's a lesson everybody should learn--before they start using "free" software that is somehow enmeshed with commercial interests or comes with non open-source compliant licenses.
Let's face it, their goal here is a "secret" shared by *every* CS college graduate. Then those graduates are potentially "polluted" from ever participating in Open Source development. Presumably the mechanism would be one or two high-profile court cases, to make an example and scare everyone else.
At least this is the conspiracy theory, which may have some merit.
But look at the flip side... When you start sharing a "secret" that widely, doesn't it start looking like mis-using the work "Kleenex" instead of "Kleenex-brand facial tissue"? The Kleenex trademark was lost that way, and the Windows trademark appears to be lost.
Unless every CS course begins with a legal session, explaining how, "This stuff is *secret*, and will compromise your capability to work on any project Microsoft doesn't like in the future, and they can sue you @$$es off because you've seen it," this looks like a recipe to lose the license terms.
I was once involved in a proprietary memory chip design my company purchased for us to base our design on. Very early on, the lawyers brought the whole team into a room and read the riot act to us, explaining what we could and could not do, based on the "pollution" of looking at that design.
There was also a nifty term called "residual knowledge" that applied then, and applies now.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Incidentally UNM has placed 100% of its CS and engineering graduates for years, which makes me scratch my head whenever I hear of someone from CMU or other top ten unis saying they can't find a job after graduation.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I assume that both the Professor and the Student must sign Microsoft's license.
Hmmmm... If you don't sign you can't take an important CS class and if you do sign and later work on open source you'll be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life waiting for the Microsoft lawsuit alleging copyright infringements.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
This is not meant to be a flame.
So if Linux and open source "rule the day" at universities then why (when the students graduate) don't they apply that to their careers? One would think that if Linux and open source truely ruled universities for the last 5-7 years that there would be a lot more of it in today's business.
I know there is the server side of the story. But I rarely see a linux or open source OS running the servers of a company. It's usually a non-free Unix or NT/2000.
I know that people here preach the goodness of Linux (of which I mostly believe) but why can't the graduates convince that Linux is a very good alternative?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
This issue is pretty serious for OSS. Consider: While all the jaw-jacking about MS is typically justified in their stance on OSS, one thing is certain about the MS vs. Linux debate:
.NET, coral may likely be destroyed if the wave is strong and deep enough.
.NET and other MS-unique technologies have a good chance to convince the people who make decisions yet do not code--the school administrators. After all, this is a money argument, not a "mine is better" argument.
Microsoft could win it.
Imagine the software world as a big ocean. OSS is like coral. It's cooperative, works for the common good, shares its resources to build a community. As a result, a structure is built for the good of all.
Microsoft appears as waves in that ocean. None of these waves, paradoxically, are good for MS, the wave generator. Sometimes the waves are small and help to move the OSS coral's spores along to form other colonies (apps). In the case of the tidal wave known as
A wave is as strong as its organization. Microsoft has succeeded (and unjustly much of the time, but that's another topic) because it is very organized at a corporate level and can utilize resources that other groups, particularly disorganized cooperatives such as OSS groups, find hard to counter.
OSS is mostly organized at the software level, writing code. But code writing doesn't "sell" the work to the business--marketing does. And that's the front where Microsoft is working. Microsoft thinks, "Why debate the facts where we can just act like the 800-pound gorilla and flood the schools with free stuff to boister interest?"
Unfortunately, no one group or person appears to speak for OSS. Without a bona fide, consolidated group that fights MS at whatever level it wants to move to,
The OSS/MS fight is akin to hand-to-hand combat vs. carpetbombing. OSS can't fight without a general--an organized group that can move to counter MS and use its powers of hacking virtually ANYTHING into compliance or existence for UNIX systems without fee.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
I would focus on the "derivative works" provisions, which share some of the characteristics MS has characterized as "viral" in the GPL. Query what happens if in a few years, MS files a series of lawsuits claiming that various developers improperly created a "derivative work" of the shared source, without giving proper attribution to MS. Although it would be hard to prove that a particular individual had seen the code, given the uncontrolled access, note that it would be equally difficult for the individual to prove s/he had not seen the code. And MS would likely interpret the "derivative" language along the lines of the "one click ordering" and "hyperlinking" patent holders, claiming that anything using a distributed model was derivative of theirs. So in order to fend off the lawsuit, the developer would have to launch legal attacks on the "viral" part of the license: the derivative works definition is too broad and vague, this similar concept isn't really derivative, free public distribution negates the contractual nature of a license, etc. That is, the developer would have to make the very sort of arguments that MS has publicly proposed against the GPL.
Am I just too too paranoid, or is this rather a clever no-lose situation MS has created? If MS wins one of these lawsuits, it gets to tie up Jane Developer's project for years and then stick its name on it. But if it loses, the loss establishes a legal precedent that will help it launch future attacks on the GPL, the success of which attacks could possibly allow MS to thwart open source projects. And MS accomplishes this with at least superficial protection from accusations that it is wielding improper monopoly power - how can licensing provisions modeled on the GPL be monopolistic? And how can anyone criticize poor MS for lawsuits arising from the open release of their source code, when that's exactly the antitrust punishment the states were seeking?
I'm sure there are a lot more scenarios to explore here, and I don't purport to be a great legal expert on the GPL so I defer to anyone who is. But in any event, I hope that schools do not widely succumb to this until the implications have been thoroughly considered.
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
Microsoft, sacrificing Virgins? No... couldn't be.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Well... the .NET is supposedly based on open protocols so there shouldn't be a problem, right? But who can guarantee that one or more of these protocols won't be extended by MS and made proprietary and covered by patents and trade secrets? ``Just Say No'' is probably the best thing you could do when MS comes 'round bearing gifts.
Don't you wonder about the day when MS decides to take a bunch of recent college graduates to court claiming that they're using ideas that they must have seen while they had access to this proprietary MS code in college? I'd hope that the judge would throw the case out on its ear after commenting that ``You can't let whole college CS programs have access to your code and then prohibit them from writing code because you think they're using an idea that you let them see in the first place''. Unless they somehow make all the CS students sign NDAs. Which, if I were a CS student, would spur me to start the process of transferring to another school ASAFP. (Making a student pay a lab fee is one thing but making them sign away their right to write code and earn a living would be another thing altogether.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
At NTU in the UK, from where I graduated last July, students were forced to use Windows, including Microsoft compilers.
There were rumours of an old VAX cluster - they turned out to be true. There was a cluster - it was offline and gathering dust.
There was one "student" Linux box, which anyone who expressed an interest could get access to - it was taken offline halfway through my first year, due to "lack of interest", despite what I heard from many disgruntled ex-users.
In the UK at least, be certain to check the type of network a CS faculty runs in advance if it matters to you; I found out too late that presuming big hunks of *nix goodness are going to be available is simply not safe.
I, too, would wish if this comment could be explained. If not able to explain, please mod it up so that it can be explained.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Well, that's a pretty strong metric for lawyer stuff... I'm really reassured, thanks.
cheers
I agree with the sentiment that a college or university should give students a broad education, however, with the exception of liberal arts colleges, this doesn't seem to be the case. A four year degree in business is nothing more than vocational training for working in a beaurocratic organization. A four year engineering degree produces cookbook engineers who can't problem solve. And a four year IT/CS degree is vocational training for programmers.
Any real learning about CS is only at the 400 or greater level, and limits the students to only one year of real learning. The rest is training to work in a Dilbert shop.
Do students go to college to learn or to prepare for a job? If you are honest, you will admit that 95% of the students go to college to prepare for a job - and that is vocational training.
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha
>Microsoft hopes professors will use the code in
>computer-science classes, and students will modify
>it in the lab and even suggest improvements.
Oh my. They're trying to embrace, extend, and extinguish the GPL.
:)
Sounds a lot like the RandOS to me. :-)
> Its a difference between people who just want to know how to use something vs the people that want to understand it.
No, it's worse than that. It's the difference between people who want a certificate to show a prospective employer that *says* they know how to use something versus the people that want to understand it.
Chris Mattern
A new job requires me to use MS development "tools." In a half-hearted effort to get up to speed, I went to Fry's to look at the development offerings. I was, in particular, interested in grabbing a copy of Visual C++ 6.0 Learning Edition, since it was cheap at $100 or so (there's no way I'm spending $500 on the "Professional" version when Linux/*BSD's tools are better and free).
What I found instead was Visual C++ .NET for $109. I read the box very carefully, trying to understand what exactly I was looking at, but so far I've been unable to figure out what the package actually is.
So can someone tell me: Is Visual C++ .NET a native x86 compiler suite that contains .NET support (which is useful); or does it rather compile C++ code to the .NET Common Language Runtime (which is not useful at all)? Naturally, Micros~1's Web site is of absolutely no help in answering this question.
Thanks,
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
all about winning hearts-and-minds
Brainwashing.
We are also working to "win the hearts and minds of the muslim world" to get them to stop hating us. Maybe if we would stop trying to brainwash...err..win everyone's hearts and minds...
Resistance is futile
I'm a 2000 man.
So can someone tell me: Is Visual C++
It can do both.
I'm a 2000 man.
Why not? They screw everybody else.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Most engineering students would happily avoid mathematics, since the money is elsewhere, but without that knowledge they will not be able to do their jobs any better than someone that has never been to university. A basic education at least as broad as your expected profession is very important - training for a specific position in a specific company may ensure that you'll be driving a taxi once technology or economic factors move on.
That is hardly true.
Business departments tend to run Windows. If they're big or old enough, the probably have come IBM minis too. A lot of departments are likely to use MSWin. Computer science, however, is not one of them. Serious CS departments are still big on *nix, whether it's PA-RISC, SPARC, or Linux/FreeBSD on Intel. Free Software has a HUGE advantage there - there's no substitute for having the use of the source, when you learn to program.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.