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Microsoft Port 25 interviews Miguel de Icaza
Ben Galliart writes "Microsoft's Port 25 blog, the voice of MS Linux Labs and a spin-off from the MS Channel 9 blog, has an interview with Miguel de Icaza where they discuss the Gnome and Mono projects. It is a nice change of pace to see Microsoft go from attacking Novell and Linux to interviewing a Novell employee about a Linux desktop system. Port 25 has come under some fire since they can not always be trusted. Port 25 has on occasion put out FUD such as claiming Microsoft is doing more to improve security than any other vendor and a security guide attacking Red Hat for not providing security updates for Red Hat v9 despite that Red Hat ended support back in 2004. They have also released a password synchronization daemon for Red Hat, AIX, HPUX and Solaris that must run as root and makes several calls to strcpy() (which violates Microsoft's guidelines for doing secure coding)."
What the fuck kind of insane summary is that? Even for Slashdot, that steps over the line.
Maybe there is some validity in saying they (Port 25) are untrusted, but what excuse is it that Redhat ceased updates for v9 in 2004, a mere year after the product was released (March 31 2003). Seriously, is a single year of updates good enough? I think they actually have a valid point on that one at least, a year isnt long enough to even be considered stable server software in my book.
And he takes abuse from MS too:
http://linux.sys-con.com/read/124218.htm
Interesting bit of history there. It really disturbs me that Miguel is leading a column of FOSS enthusiasts into the maw of MS patent enforcement, especially when he could have used his talent on something unencumbered like Parrot.
The MSFT-employee-wannabe that you speak of is the father of the GNOME desktop. Without GNOME, QT might not have been open sourced in the first place. Without a man like Miguel to give GNOME a forward direction, we might still be using Motif. When your contributions to the open source movement become a tenth of what Miguel has done then your rant might have more merit.
.NET framework. If there is one man who has the objectivity to look beyond the zealotry to see technologies for their merits is Miguel. MONO is an excellent development environment for Linux. It bridges the gap between high performance but difficult to use languages like C++ and low performance high RAD languages like Python.
If there is one Microsoft technology that deserves admiration is the
My favorite thing to bash Linux bigots with:
OLE Automation.
(Or whatever they're calling it these days; I think it was absorbed into the ActiveX branding.)
Just about every Unix vendor had this dream of turning their entire desktop environment into a sea of programmable objects.[1] The one I got to laugh at was Sun, with DOE, although you formerly-MacOS-bigots got to see it replayed in AppleScript and OpenDoc.[2]
Well, Microsoft delivered. I can write a script (in my choice of languages) that opens up a Word document, finds any bold text at the start of paragraphs and then HTTP POSTs it to a URL. And if I feel really annoying, I'll increase the volume level on the sound device, and read it to you. In a page of code.
It's really amazing what you can script this way. OK, yes, there's a reason I'm typing this on a Linux box, and why I have cygwin installed on any Win32 box I care about. But through marketing muscle and a desire to create opportunities for small VARs, Microsoft let little software authors poke around inside big applications. And created some nice tools for those little authors to write code with.
Shame it breaks in such obscure ways.
[1]: ARexx doesn't count. That's just DDE.
[2]: Obligatory joke about whether "the" is optional at some point in hypercard syntax here. Apple has been getting better, though.