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Microsoft WiX Code Released to SourceForge.Net
nberardi writes "On Monday, April 5, 2004, as part of the Shared Source Initiative, Microsoft released the source code for the Windows Installer XML (WiX) developer tool to SourceForge under the IBM Common Public License or CPL. The WiX project is the first Shared Source Initiative to go "public" on Source Forge rather than a Microsoft site. It is also the first to use an externally created Open Source license. Microsoft supports the idea that a software developer should be free to choose how they license their work and for the goals of WiX, the CPL was the right fit. Is this another ploy from Microsoft to not look like the bad guy, or do you think they are embracing on the Open Source movement?" Slashdot and SourceForge are both part of OSDN.
Maybe they are releasing it because they realize it's worthless piece of shit that no one in their right mind would work on for more than 2 seconds.
That being the case, they don't lose anything by effectively throwing it away, only not in the trash but in sourceforge. In the meantime they pump up their Open Source happy face and hope to save a few bucks from the EU.
I agree with much of what was said, that Microsoft is just a shitty company doing shitty things. If they were a cellular phone company I would not buy their phones. And I don't buy Nike either.
They need something more along the lines of redemption before they can be trusted. But considering that they only exist to make money, I don't see that ever happening.
the Borgs were assimilated by penguins?
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
The CPL is not an open source license at all, as can be witnessed from its use on Eclipse. Use the GPL of the LGPL where appropriate (or BSD at a push) or nothing. I'm rather suspicious of the use of the CPL by IBM in Eclipse.
The lack of a GPL avenue for Eclipse has really halted its use within many open source projects of all kinds that are primarily GPLed. Notice that Eclipse has not been integrated into any desktop environments at all, even where the licensing is not a problem. So will be the case with this meaningless bit of tosh.
If this doesn't include windows O/S source code, or some other major piece of software's source, it's kinda moot to even anticipate that M$ will be moving ANYTHING of real value to open source. For example, who's to say that the source here looks anything like what M$'s other projects' source looks like? They probably hired some OSS people to do it in the first place (anticipating an OSS release one day), so that nothing internal would get out.
On that note, what would you expect to see if you could see Win2k3 source? As I recall, win2k was something like 35 million lines of code -- good luck compiling that! It probably looks like any project that size designed to cope with so much -- tons and tons of patches, kludges, and other WTF's. The biggest testament to how hard it is to write/maintain something like that is that no one else has made a win32 o/s clone that sells, to my knowledge.
stuff |
There are many differences:
1. Konqueror can be removed without taking the entire system down. On Windows, you can remove the shortcuts for IE at most.
You can easily remove IE. I can name five free utilities to do it off the top of my head.
2. KDE and Linux don't have a monopoly. When you're a monopoly, the rules change (why do people *still* don't know this after all these years?).
I already knew that. It doesn't change the fact that there is no difference. Does it mean KDE will remove its integration once it reaches a certain percentage of acceptance? I doubt it.
Yeah that's great. How much % market share does Firefox have again?
What does that have to do with anything?
And that's the problem. As competitor, even though you can exist, the chance that you get a big enough market share is almost zero.
Why? Again, nobody is holding a gun to your head to use IE...are they?
For example, you're the developer of BonchBrowser. BonOffice is smaller (only 500 KB!), faster (renders 10 MB HTML in 2 seconds), uses much less memory than IE (1 MB only), is 100% standards compliant, has popup and ad blocking, is secure, etc. etc.
Can you get more than, say, 40% of the browser market share? I don't think so! IE is already installed on all Windows computers, people will not switch to BonchBrowser even if it really is better than IE.
Absolutely, 100% wrong. If BonchBrowser is better, people will switch. As it is, Mozilla is slower, bloated, and doesn't have as simple an interface as IE. And with IE coming out with pop-up blocking, people will have less reason to switch because for most people, Mozilla doesn't offer enough advantages. I'm sure you think it does because you're a Linux guy, but the entire rest of the world is a little different than the niche that is Slashdot.
As competitor you simply has no chance to beat them no matter what you do, simply because MS has a monopoly.
Netscape is what killed Netscape. Stop buying into the victimhood mentality and accept it.
1. First they laugh at you; 2. then they ignore you; 3. then they fight you; 4. ???? 5. then they embrass you; 6. then they say they did it first? 7. then they win!? 8. profit! - OR - 4. then you win ? 5. profit! Where are we at!? Who would have ever tought that Microsoft would have released software on Sourceforge? Just a guest: How many FOSS projects will "instantly" change from SourceForge.net to Savanah.gnu.org just to NOT reside their project on the same server as Microsoft ? =P
Windows Installer has many benefits
None for me.
Windows Installer supports installation rollbacks, so failures restore the system exactly back to the state before installation began.
Which is crap. I don't need that. I'll remove that is to be removed thank you. I don't need megabytes of bloat on the harddrive with copies of everything that went before.
There is also built-in package repair because Windows Installer keeps track of installed components.
Which always amounts to reinstall everything and reboot.
Your statement that Windows Installer adds a ton of crap your C drive which are not related to the actual program being installed is also unproven.
If you don't know this simple fact you are not really competent to comment at all. I track installs, and i noticed it everytime they use the bloatware installers such as Installshield.
If you want small and fast installers with tools such as Inno Setup, by all means go ahead and use them, but they do make things more difficult for network administrators.
Ghost a standard image and install from there, no need to uninstall anything.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I don't know about all the other MS apps but according to a friend of mine (who's a Wine developer), IE preloading libraries at Windows startup is an urban myth. IE loads so rediculously fast because it's just written with startup performance in mind. Some people at MS are very skilled.
It would be nice if more open source apps can be optimized more.