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Open Source Code Finds Way into Microsoft Release
linumax tells us eWeek is reporting that Microsoft, for the first time, has included open source code in the release of one of their products. The Complete Cluster Edition of Windows Server 2003 will be including the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library. From the article: "MPI is key middleware that was designed by a consortia of all the supercomputing vendors in the 1990s to allow the easy portability of code. It abstracts away things like low-latency interconnect, and our focus is making it super easy for ISVs to move their code."
What about doing a: $ strings ftp.exe BSD Licensed software it's open source.
>Linux is not user-friendly.
It _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly.
Isn't microsoft always saying that open-source software is OBVIOUSLY inferior?
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Practically all MS source code is, of course, proprietary, closed, hidden, unknown to the public (and to most Microsofties). So who knows how much "open source code" has "found its way" into MS releases? We can say with more confidence that Microsoft has opened source included in this release, an unusual act for the proprietary giant. Of course, they got the tech, and probably much code, from the "1990s supercomputer consortium". So they might be obligated, "morally" if not legally, to release that source. Whatever's pushing them to open their code, I hope this works out for them, and therefore for us. So eventually "MSOSS" is not unfamiliar, but redundant.
--
make install -not war
Windows has included open source code for a long time. And not just C:\windows\system32\ftp.exe (run strings to that file), why is then that several microsoft products haven been affected by zlib vulnerabilities, uh? Just read the fu***** license, it's all there.
There was the NT 3.x TCP/IP stack, but that's less relevant because MS bought a 3rd party stack and bolted it to the OS (funny how /.-ers obsess about FTP.EXE when the whole darn stack was BSD-derived).
Then there was SFU, which actually shipped GNU tools, and MS even distributed source for the GNU tools they modified.
Go somewhere random
In addition, minesweeper has been replaced with a full version of 3dlab's Duke Nukem Forever...
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
If you get Services for UNIX (a free download now) you'll find it contains some GPL software, and notes this fact.
Also depends on what you mean by "open source" Microsoft has used a lot of BSD code, they just don't release the modifications since they are not required to. However even GPL code they've used some of, and they you can get the source (for what it's worth, it's just things like bash).
Ralph Giles of Xiph.org did an interview, where if I remember correctly he said that Microsoft, or rather Bungie, which Microsoft owns, used Ogg in Halo 2 and Speex in Xbox Live.
...2003's HDBSOD or Highly-Distributed Blue Screen of Death.
With previous cluster technologies, when a single server would blue screen, the cluster remained online, but with HDBSOD, the entire cluster blue screens, ensuring timely, highly-reliable, redundant creation of crash dumps.
Free for a limited time only,all you need to do is spend $5000 on a per processor operating system (minumum order 10 units) and we will give you, absolutely free 1 THOUSAND lines of computer code for you to use in any way you like ! imagine that
operators are standing by for your call, dont delay for this fabulous offer
Open source? Interesting innovation on microsoft's part ... maybe they should patent it.
I've done only initial programming in MPI for a distributed systems course I took, so keep that in mind. What I think MPI is big for is how popular it is. MPI is a very open standard, has been adopted for a long time, and is used in quite a few research projects because some implementations are heavily optimized. Some of the bonuses of MPI include the ability to make groupings and do group-messages (with all sorts of abilities to combine/redirect group messages), blocking/nonblocking sending receiving (standard really), and its pretty easy to program in. It took me about two days to get a good feel for it and start designing some built-in features the hard way for the assignment, and it worked very well.
You should also note that Wikipedia calls it the "de facto standard", which I agree with (at least from a research pov).
Well, at least they're being honest.
Even if it was, this move is great hope for the open-source community. Many people will see that the IT industry is going the direction of open standards, open specifications, and open-source code; more people will get to appreciate the advantages attached to it.
Even if it were a devious trick, does it matter?
My Blog.
I get the feeling Microsoft is a little schizophrenic about OSS whenever I see this sort of thing. Aside from the (frequently pointedout) inclusing of BSD networking components, Microsfot has a couple other dealings with the OSS community that didnt invovle bashing. One of the stranger things I've come across has to be Allegance, a MMO-like space sim that Microsoft Open Souced after it tanked commercially. Appaerntly people still play it.
Microsoft has always said that it has no problem with the BSD license (which is what this code is under). They've even suggested it for people looking to develop open-source projects. It's not like the code got in there without their knowledge and now they're going to have to open source windows.
.formulates a plot.
Hmm. .
Does the licence of the OSS software allow for distribution in this context?
If yes, then what is the big deal?
If no, then somsone needs to slap their pee-pee's.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It's BSD, not GPL. They can do what they want with it.
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that the argument about quality and such of OSS is no longer valid? If MS keeps using F/OSS, doesn't that actually validate the quality and value of F/OSS?
The more F/OSS code that is included in MS products, the more they take on the RedHat business model? Or am I just not seeing things the right way?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I'm sure I remember a LUGRadio interview with someone from Xiph who said that DirectX (or was it Xbox Live, or both?) uses the Speex codec to compress voice data for in-game chat.
Oh, here we go: Halo 2 and Xbox Live use Ogg codecs.
You might want to write to the University of Chicago to tell them that their code was stolen. Presumably they are wondering where all their copies went, and now that the culprit has been identified they will want them back!
It should be noted WMP10 uses the OGG libraries. OSS usage by MS is nothing new.
This is an urban legend which probably stems from Microsoft buying Hotmail (which was run entirely on FreeBSD) and the subsequent migration iterations. See this article from someone at Microsoft for explanation, assuming the article from kuro5hin is reliable :).
Funny how the windows vulnerabilities and the vulnerabilities of Zlib appeared at the same time.
http://saveie6.com/
> I believe they obtained a special license to use
> it how they wish. So it's not an example of
> stealing code under the BSD license.
The special license *is* the BSD license. It pretty much says you're allowed to do what you want with the code, including putting it in your evil and bloated OS.
http://savingiceland.org
OK, I read TFA and they are using an open source implementation of MPI2 (MPICH2). Maybe the summary should have mentioned that... but I guess unless you're a cluster guy like me it doesn't really matter which MPI they used.
Huh? The BSD license makes no demands other than posting a copyright notice. Thats why we have BSD vs GPL license flamewars all the time.
... but I think I better post instead :o)
Ignoring the BSD tcp/ip stack (which practically every OS uses some version thereof) and the ftp/telnet apps, and SFU (MKS utils and Interix subsystems)
M$ Doesn't dislike Open Source, they just don't like the GPL and its viral nature. I happen to agree to that too. Every newbie seems to release (or at least seemed to a few years ago, when they made their statement) their favourite program to the world under the GPL.
Previously these programmers would have released the code as shareware or public domain. But I've seen folk release 'trivial' (or just plain shite) software as GPL which I find laughable.
Anyway I'll stop there before I start foaming at the mouth. Nurse! Medication Please!
mmmmm nurse!
TIBCO, according to my readings of "Enterprise Integration Patterns" (Hohpe-Woolf) is more akin to BizTalk and at a much higher level.
The traditional sense of Open Source is the Open Source Definition, much in the same way that the traditional sense of Free Software is software that provides the FSFs list of essential freedoms.
zlib meets all the points in the Open Source definition and can therefore be called Open Source. So can any public domain software.
Finally Microsoft admits it -- Windows has Open Sores.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Microsoft has always embrased open standards. They "embrace and extend." They have DHCP servers...sure some old versions of Windows don't obtain DHCP leases correctly, but they've been patches and fixes here and there and everything seems to work.
.NET client to communicate with nuSOAP for PHP about a year ago...worked fine unless you wanted to send an array).
.NET Framework?
ActiveDirectry is a standard X.500 protocol...with a couple of interesting extras which the Samba team is still trying to work with.
SOAP, well to be honest I never liked SOAP...or XML, but Microsoft uses it and it sorta works with other SOAP implementations...sorta. (I tried using a
The fact is with any open standard, you're gonna have problems with getting the implementations correct between ever device, OS and embedded that implements it. But back to the point, I RTFA and, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like they're just supporting another open standard like they've done so many times before. How is their support of MPI different than how they support SOAP via the
SumDog
Well my Fedora desktop has a flying pig screensaver. So I guess you're right :)
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I've done quite a bit of MPI programming using the MPICH and MPICH2 implementations. MPI itself is nothing more than a specification that addresses issues with sharing memory between processors, whether they are in the same 'box' or connected through some fabric like Ethernet or some of the high-speed interconnects.
;-) ).
/.er's experience with such things.
The specification is focused mainly on the syntax of the API to make Fortran, C, C++, and Java (?Not sure if Java is actually part of the spec yet) codes compile and operate smoothly across different MPI implementations like MPICH or LAM, to name a couple (I've never run into an MPI implementation, personally, that has screwed with the standard. All my codes have always compiled and functioned cleanly across multiple implementations (after extensive debugging, of course
MPICH and MPICH2 provide many different "drivers" to allow its use over 100Mb/GigE ethernet (ch_p4), Myrinet (provided by Myricom, ch_gm), Infiniband, ccNUMA or NUMA-like systems (ch_shmem, or lock-free ch_shmemlf), and drivers for globus systems.
With interconnect fabrics like ethernet and low-latency Myrinet and IB, Message passing typically involves passing actual data between hosts across this fabric and the ch_p4, ch_gm drivers handle this transparently (this part of the setup, selecting the driver, is a function of your Administrator and not the developer). On large memory SMPs, MPI may pass addresses or references rather than the actual data, taking advantage of the fact that the hardware is designed to allow any single CPU to address any region of memory rather than flooding the memory bus with unnecessary transactions.
Take parallel video rendering for example, where we might be simply gzipping each frame... on a cluster-style interconnect, each host must have a copy of the frame it is operating on so it must be passed along the interconnect to the host before work is done (or it can be read by each host from the original file, if that file is shared across the cluster or copied to each node. This becomes very I/O bound and suffers from the slowness of hard disks). On an SMP, a pointer to the beginning of that array may be passed to the thread or process trying to do the work, while the segment of that video is stored in RAM.
Being able to share memory in such a way allows fine-grained calculations like very-large-matrix operations over slower interconnects AND SMPs (though your performance on the slower interconnects will suffer because of the bandwidth or latencies induced by the interconnect).
As well, MPICH at least, provides excellent support for debugging parallel applications through the mpirun_dbg.* commands. It uses your favorite debuggers whether they be gdb, ddd, dbx, or totalview.
MPI in a nut shell, provides for the easy creation of multiple process threads and facilitates the sharing of data between each thread to enable parallel processing regardless of how your CPUs and memory are connected. Don't know anything about TIBCO though, nor have I ever heard of it... Sorry if this was too much or too little info. I'm not really aware of the average
From a company that has used Licensing and discount agreements to suppress competition....Hmmm.. from a company that are leaders in marketing hype... hmmm... from a company that has had numerious anti-trust cases against them....and being found guilty..
Yeah, I'd imagine anything that effectively counters that bully methodology would have to be preceived as something bad to the bully. bit flipping the connotation of viral would be what? Unstoppable counter measures...
Viral to what? Seems enough of the right parties are taking it up that the term viral is in fact just a connotation from teh POV of the bully. Who, BTW has even tried to come off as the little guy, like uh excuse me.... little as being the richest man in the world at one point?????
NO! I'm perfectly aware of the connoitation "viral" being attached to GPL by MS, and not OSS in general....
So how does it feel to get back at you some of the BS you have put out?
Trust me! MS called OSS viral..... When it suites them...
Seeing those not liking put on them. what they put on others. Now thats Funny!
(Also, MPICH sucks when used with multiple devices - you have to compile it with the device(s) you're using, and can only configure it for one device type at a time. So if you're planning on using a mix of Infiniband, Globus and Ethernet, forget it. It won't work.)
Probably the best MPI library out there is Open MPI, which supports the MPI2 standard, supports MPI threads and progress threads, is much more optimizable for different platforms and was developed by groups ranging from Los Alamos Laboratories (yes, the nuke place) and the LAM/MPI development team.
Ok, you have a choice between two implementations. One is slow, has a poor release cycle and has been forked numerous times (MPICH, MPICH2, MP-MPICH, Globus MPICH, GAMMA MPICH and MVICH are all forks off the same code-base). The other is partially written in assembler, is developed by a broad consortium of MPI experts and is unlikely to fork as the maintainers are really good about integrating new code. Which would you pick?
I am also concerned about Microsoft's history of "Embrace and Extend' - are they planning on breaking the MPI-2 specifications for their own purposes? I can't see any value in them doing so, but I don't see any value in 'Embrace and Extend' anyway.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's like you finally convince one of your friends to come hang out at a nudist beach and then you point at their genitalia and laugh.
:-)
So maybe they're warming up to the idea. That's cool. We don't have to make them uncomfortable.
Send them a beer and say "Bully for you!"
Direct away from face when opening.
So it's not an example of stealing code under the BSD license.
No, but this is such an example.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
for "most of your own citizens murdered by government?"
Just go look at East Germany today and you can see how well they were doing in the 1980's.
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