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MS No Cathedral, Open Source No Bazaar?

Posted by kdawson on from the says-the-high-priest dept.

AlexGr sends us to InternetNews.com for an account of a Microsoft VP demonstrating Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX product running on Ubuntu at AJAXWorld. In his earlier keynote, Brad Abrams had declared that, when it comes to AJAX, Microsoft is not the cathedral and open source isn't really a bazaar. He noted that ASP.NET AJAX is available under Microsoft's permissive license with full source code. "The Web is built on open standards and we at Microsoft believe that we have to enable those open standards," Abrams said.

5 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Either there's been a complete sea change.... by jimicus · · Score: 4, Informative

    at Microsoft or they're hiring stand-up comedians.

    This is the company that wanted to decommoditize standards and protocols, yet they come out with the line "The Web is built on open standards and we at Microsoft believe that we have to enable those open standards"

    1. Re:Either there's been a complete sea change.... by Professor_UNIX · · Score: 4, Informative

      By that logic, GPL isn't open source because I can't take the entire source and sell a rival product using it.

      Where did you get that idea? Of course you can take GPL'd code and create a rival product and sell it. You just have to redistribute your changes to the GPL'd code as well so that others may take advantage of it like you did of the original product.
  2. Re:Could someone explain me wth does that mean : by rfc1394 · · Score: 4, Informative

    what cathedral ? what bazaar ? what relation does any cathedral and bazaar have, what kind of metaphor is this, and just what the heck does that mean ?

    This is an (indirect) reference to Eric S. Raymond's seminal paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (actual essay is here), in which he talks about software development being done in one of two ways, by huge development companies in commercial environments, being similar to the way medieval cathedrals were constructed, versus open-source development in which just about anyone can get involved if they want, and that development is closer to the typical bazaars where anyone can walk up and put up a booth to sell rugs. It is this paper that was basically the cause of Netscape deciding to open-source its browser.

    --
    The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
  3. The Proof Is In The Pudding: Open Source DirectX by lotusleaf · · Score: 5, Informative

    Speaking of standards:

    * "Microsoft breaks with standards effort" 03-25-2003
    * "Microsoft quits W3C standardisation panel" 03/24/2003

    How about a free and open standard in gaming?
    * "Microsoft DirectX killing innovation" 03-27-2003

  4. Re:In a weird way, it works both ways by Score+Whore · · Score: 4, Informative

    XmlHTTPRequest was first used Outlook Web Access. In one step microsoft took the web from klugey JVM and form based web apps to asynchronous, dynamic, loosely coupled, non-modal web apps. If you even took the slightest amount of time to look it up you'd know this.

    Do you enjoy writing fiction and lies?