Slashdot Mirror
Josh Ledgard On MS's Future Open Source Efforts
prostoalex writes "Josh Ledgard from Microsoft, the developer responsible for open-sourcing WiX and WTL, is looking for opinions on what Microsoft should do next in regards to the open source movement that he himself established within the company. "Would you have interest in working on these types of projects with Microsoft? If not, what could entice you? If so, what would be your motivation?", asks Josh." Update: 08/24 19:04 GMT by T : As Ledgard writes on his site, "I am NOT the person responsible for the WIX/WTL projects. I cite them as examples and am working with people who where responsible for those projects to enable more of the same for the groups I work in." Sorry for the misattribution!
the world will be better off without MS
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I think the best thing all developers can do is turn their backs on Microsoft and only target *nix platforms for any new development.
It's best for the client, best for the industry and best for us as professionals in the long run.
Microsoft is untrustworthy and by now is almost irrelevant.
Rather than listen to promises from Microsoft, I prefer to steer any project I am responsible for towards something that will benefit the USERS, not Microsoft.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Don't you need to pay for office to get that COM object?
Yes, that's true. But you have to pay for your PC too, does that mean that Linux isn't really free?
Or pay bigtime to be allowed to distribute it?
I don't know about distributing it - you just list Office among the requirements for the application. It's been a long time since I've seen a Windows PC without Word and Excel at least.
Lastly, why did you put "open source" in quotation marks?
'Cos it means different things to different people. Want some MS source code? Just look in Visual Studio, the code for MFC is right there! Go ahead and read it and modify it and whatever you want. But that wouldn't meet many people's definitions of "open source".
Isn't there some BillG anus licking convention you should be at?
Agreed.
Johnny come lately to the open-source party that IBM's using to eat your lunch with. Mmm, sweet irony.
Be warned geeks. There's a heartless money grubbing corporation behind this innocent-sounding appeal. They lie.
If they're serious about open-source, they know where to go:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
This smells more like "Is there anything we can do to get buy-in from the Slashdot crowd?"
I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.
If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.
To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. I mean, this is an article about email disclaimers, right? The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx. WTF?
Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.
More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one.
Still not convinced? This is what twitter considers "humour" while going about his daily "M$" routine.
More? Bad spelling in astounding conspiracy theories, more offtopic FUD and uninformed "I'm right, look at me" rants, promptly proven wrong. Worse even, twitter wants to be RMS, apparently (that first one is a winner). I mean,
twit, twit. i thought we had agreed that you would refrain from offering your opinion on anything that approaches technical issues. you know absolutely nothing about 'code' and have proven as much numerous times in the past.
the rest of your smegma-laden rant is nothing new (actually you always say the same tired shit "big dumb company" "dishonest" "M$" "Windoze" and so on), but we'd appreciate it if you stopped pretending you have any technical skills whatsoever.
thanks.