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No Respect for Windows Open Source
man_of_mr_e writes "Shaun Walker, one of the founding developers of the DotNetNuke Portal/CMS has written an interesting piece about Open Source software on the Windows platform. "It's hard being an open source project on the Microsoft platform. Because no matter how hard you try to exemplify true open source ideals, you will not get any respect from the non-Microsoft community." He also says "There are Open Source zealots who believe that unless an application is part of a stack which includes 100% Open Source services and components, that it can not claim to be Open Source. [...] But does this "stack" argument actually make any sense?""
ASP is a language-independent framework. While VBScript is popular, there are two languages shipped by default, JScript being the other. You can also install other components to allow you to use other languages, such as ActiveState's PerlScript. In this particular case, it's VB.NET, which (I believe) is substantially better than traditional ASP VBScript.
With all due respect, that particular complaint doesn't mean much when you are converting it to Perl and PHP, seeing as that's the way a good portion of the rest of the world feels about those languages too.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
(Meh, sorry to those I modded up, but I need to say this.) The article is (possibly intentionally) vague on what they mean by 'Windows OSS projects.' If you read into what DotNetNuke actually is, you'll discover that it is a Windows-only OSS project built on the .NET framework, and that they appear to be partly sponsored by Microsoft itself. The article is referring to Windows-only OSS projects, not OSS projects with Windows versions.
Though I imagine projects like VLC, Freeciv, and Gaim occasionally have someone whining about their supporting windows, that's not what this is talking about, and frankly, where DotNetNuke is concerned, I'm with the 'zealots', despite having nothing against proprietary software. OSS has built up a strong reputation for being cross-platform, so an OSS project that's for Windows-only and is dependant on Microsoft technology is understandably going be frowned upon by OSS purists. Windows-only OSS developers are, arguably, not helping the OSS communities much, and they are especially detrimental to the spread of Open-Source and Open-Source-based operating systems. It's not showing Windows users that they have something nifty that they could still have if they decided to try linux or get a Mac, it's just further miring people in the Windows platform.
Now, are these people against DotNetNuke still looking so much like zealots, or are they perhaps starting to look more like people against Microsoft who see this as yet another boost to Microsoft's power?
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
Since XP, technological measures have been in place (DeActivation) that can separate you from your applications (not to mention your data) at any time, through wilful act of the vendor, or fault in the system, and this is regularly experienced by customers of M$ and Adobe.
It seems obvious that portability is part of the spirit of freedom as expressed in free and open source software. If your code can't migrate from Windows - then it's going to be taken from you and your users sooner or later.
you had me at #!
To resolve this issue make sure you can run on http://www.reactos.org/
The article is incorrect in saying "at this point in time DotNetNuke runs on ASP.NET, a services layer which is only available for the Windows platform - a situation which the Mono project is trying to address." ASP.NET is indeed available on other operating systems using Mono's implementation. In other words, the Mono project has already addressed this issue. While running ASP.NET applications with Apache and mod_mono isn't as easy to configure as, say, mod_php or any old CGI application, it's possible and not very difficult for anyone with experience configuring Apache and compiling Apache modules -- comparable to setting up FastCGI.
Mono's XSP, a small, simple web server, works great for serving up ASP.NET applications.
While .NET programs can be portable between Microsoft's .NET Runtime and Mono, just as software written in many languages can be portable between Windows and Linux, it's also possible to write software that only functions properly in one operating system or the other.
Well, that's not quite true anymore. KDE 3.x is based on Qt 3. Version 3 was never released under an OSI-compliant license, so there was no legal way to port it, short of porting the Linux/GPL version of Qt 3. That was in progress for a while.
Trolltech has since released Qt 4 for Windows under the GPL. That means that there are no longer any licensing issues preventing anyone from developing a Windows port of KDE 4. The core KDE libraries would have to be ported, but the underlying Qt libraries are already available and Free.
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I suppose this would be as good a place as any to mention the wiki I started, Windows for Linux Users, which attempts to gather up some software that is useful for long-time Linux users who are for some reason constrained to use Windows. I know I had a terrible time getting the environment to a point where I didn't want to smash the computer because focus wasn't following mouse and a bunch of other little annoyances.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/