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MS No Cathedral, Open Source No Bazaar?
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.
Yes. Let us criticise Microsoft for not destroying their own business model in the name of Open Source. Anything short of self-destructive publication just isn't good enough. Curse Microsoft for not killing themselves off to appease the FOSS crowd.
The policy is known as "embrace and extend": in practice, it's "embrace and extend and break compatibility". The extensions seem to quite deliberately violate the existing standards: this has occurred repeatedly, with Kerberos (which required a serious patch in MIT's oritingal version to inter-operate with Microsoft's bastardized version), with DNS and DHCP (don't get me started on this one, I had to deal with it last week to show how easy it is to steal a Window's machine's hostname if you use Active Directory's built-in DHCP).
Nothing more need be said.
Everytime a Microsoft individual opens his mouth - in public, on a blog, wherever - he is a LIAR.
Period. End of story.
The Microsoft shills babble about XHTTPRequest as if it's mere existence was the total cause for the AJAX explosion. It's a joke. The whole notion lay fallow until OSS developed it.
There are tons of OSS AJAX toolkits around. Who cares about Microsoft's "permissive license" version?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
"The required setup is done less than an hour, and will require a (less competent) system administrator for maintenance in the long run."
Which is why it fails a day or a week later when Microsoft DNS screws itself, or some other random process screws the Registry - or some hacker blows Exchange out of the water entirely.
Besides which, the whole point is WHO developed said protocols (not counting the Microsoft proprietary ones - which were explicitly developed so Microsoft wouldn't have to build a proprietary model on open standards?)
Microsoft?
Yeah, right.
Not to further mention that you can't run any of these open protocols without buying a very NON-open OS.
Buzz off, Windows shill.
Is that "technical" enough for you?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Sure. It means that when the platform is the web, no one owns the platform.
You're trying to stop people from using all the open source AJAX implementations out there
I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion - Microsoft's AJAX toolkit is tightly bound to ASP.NET. How exactly are they going to "force" anyone to do anything?
Yes, because most of the servers on the web aren't Windows, damn it! Oh sorry, that quote was taken out of context.
LOL and all that, but if you missed his point about platform ownership then I can't expect you to grok that, either.