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Race to Linux Project Announced
An anonymous reader writes "According to Internetnews.com The Race to Linux project was announced Wednesday at the recent Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. The challenge: port an existing ASP.NET application to Linux using any cross-platform tool of choice, including Mono, Grasshopper and PHP. (Mainsoft offers tools that let Visual Studio users build applications that run natively in the Unix, J2EE and Linux environments.) Yaacov Cohen, CEO of Mainsoft stated: 'Linux is too big and ubiquitous to ignore.'"
``if Microsoft really is a software company, they should get their products working on everything, who cares about the OS the customer chooses''
Well, Microsoft does, and they very well should. If people can run MS Office, Exchange, etc. on better systems than Windows without jumping through hoops, businesses and schools may well decide they don't need Windows anymore. That would kill one of Microsoft's two cash cows. Since Office - the other cash cow - is already starting to lose popularity, that would be a very bad thing.
I seriously think that Microsoft is currently at or over their peak. Their flagship called Windows has made it to the ocean called 'Internet', but is found not to be seaworthy. Malware is penetrating it at an alarming rate, and it's only a matter of time before it will sink. It remains to be seen if their next OS will be any better. At the same time, their Office software has about reached the point where no new features can be important enough to attract many new customers, and since they have pretty much the whole market, they can only go down from here.
In both markets, they are receiving competition from opponents that they can't kill. Open source projects just won't die while there are still people using them. Right now, open source is still all potential and no real growth in the market that Microsoft is in. However, with cross-platform products like Firefox and OpenOffice.org slowly creeping in, it is only a matter of time until the benefits of jumping ship from Windows to Linux overcome the resistance, and then the self-sustaining system of platform lock-in will come crashing down.
Whether or not Microsoft actually loses most of their market share, the truth is that they will be forced to innovate and forced to compete, both of which eat into their profits. The days of them being a virtual monopoly are numbered.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Funny, I thought that the idea of companies was to make money.
Supporting your major applications on a minority platform where a large number of the users have an irrational hatred of your company anyway?
Why the absurd claim that by not supporting every single minority OS out there, MS are not a real software company? That's like claiming that dogs aren't animals because they don't wqear contact lenses - the two ideas are completely different.
Looking at it the other way, code should never be GPL'd. A real developer wouldn't care about the license the user of the code wants to use.. Who cares about the license the customer choses, you should support it regardless.
Of course, with the OSS community being a 1 trick pony, I wouldn't expect anything else.