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Microsoft Donates Code To Apache's "Stonehenge" Project
dp619 writes "Several months after joining the Apache Foundation, Microsoft has made its first code contribution to an Apache project. The project, known as Stonehenge, is made up of companies and developers seeking to test the interoperability of Web standards implementations."Reader Da Massive adds a link to coverage at Computer World.
If only we had some history of technical partnerships with Microsoft to use as a guide.
Embrace - you are here.
Extend
Extinguish
How we know is more important than what we know.
Although it is nice to see code donated, they made a much bigger contribution earlier allowing all apache committers access to MSDN. This is full d/l access to all of their products for testing, etc.
Microsoft submitted the code on a napkin and specified inches instead of feet.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Corporations can not join the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Microsoft became a "sponsor" of the ASF last summer, but only individual people can join the ASF.
This is also not the first time Microsoft has contributed code to an Apache project, pulling one quick example out of google...
http://port25.technet.com/archive/2008/10/14/microsoft-s-powerset-team-resumes-hbase-contributions.aspx
-- The Hoss Man
Embrace - you are here. Extend Extinguish
I do believe "Embrace" was covered when Microsoft joined the Apache foundation. Now that they're actually adding code... that's represented by "Extend."
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Project Stonehenge!
Abstract:
Nobody will know why something so large and simple was created, what it's good for, how it's supposed to be used. It will face complete abandonment and isolation, only to be admired and appreciated by a handful of people once a year.
I keed I keed!
It's a lot easier to fix IE than to ditch IE and shoehorn Gecko/Webkit into the IE programming model. If developers miss their COM objects, there will be riots in the street. When I say easier, I mean for a company that would have to throw away a huge investment as well as have many people around who know so much about a product that doesn't behave like that any more. Plus, not invented here.
"News Flash: A business acted last night in a move that is expected to increase it's revenue. A spokesperson for the business did not comment on whether or not this move is expected to directly, or indirectly increase revenue. She only told us that it is a general policy of the company to act on behalf of the financial interests of it's share holders and employees".
*World Gasps In Shock*
1. Create protocols/formats/standards/specifications which are not inherently inter-operable. (Remember how buggy, incomplete and inaccurate OOXML spec was. Remember how Windows-specific the .NET and Silverlight specs are.)
2. Pick one of your competitors, give him (and him alone, not the whole public) code and/or patent-freedoms so that he can make an inter-operable software. (Remember Novell OO.Org plugins, Mono and Moonlight.)
3. Claim that the standard itself is clean and inter-operable by showing the existence of the above competitor's inter-operable implementation as "proof". In making this claim, take advantage of the fact that most people, organizations and courts make the mistake of not seeing any difference between the original definition of an inter-operable standard - "A standard whose specification is public, true to reference implementation and complete so that any developer can make a fully inter-operable implementation without paying any fees or signing any license agreements" and the twisted definition given by Microsoft - "A standard that has at-least one competing implementation besides the reference implementation".
4. As the claim gradually gets accepted, the "standard" becomes a de-facto standard and more people and government will adopt it. This leads to the death of 1) other standards and 2) other independent implementations of the same standard. (because the top implementations are not inter-operable with them)
5. Now you and your friendly competitor are the only ones in the business. After everyone forgets history, pull the plug and let your competitor die.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
Maybe that's what this is, too? Good press for them, while at the same time, they're doing more to undermine web standards with things like Silverlight than they have ever done to support them?
When did Flash become a web standard?
If it is one, what's so bad about competition forcing it to become better or die? Doing Flash programming used to be about as much fun as repeatedly slamming your junk in a car door. Now it's getting better from that perspective and I don't doubt that competition looming from Silverlight is some of why.
1: // Code Submission by // Our first "open source" code contribution to this thing called "an Apache project" // // // Copyright (c) 2008-2009 by // // // Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. // Use at your own risk. // Read the EULA. You have been warned!!! // All Rights Reserved
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12: System.out.writeln("All your base are belong to us.\n");
13: System.out.writeln("Have a nice day.");
Microsoft doesn't want to use LGPL software in their OS for obvious reasons.
Sorry, it's not obvious. Were it GPL, you'd have a point.
Consider that Apple uses Webkit in Safari, which is shipped with OS X. Why is that not a problem for them?
Microsoft has no way to be 100% sure that the code in there is written by the people who claim to have written it
Apple has already taken that risk. No one has come forward. The iPhone is getting pretty huge, and it has Webkit on it.
Google has also taken that risk. It's on Android. It's in Chrome.
Many apps use and embed MSHTML/Trident including htmlhelp, MSDN library, the GameSpy Arcade frontend...
So include Trident as a legacy version. Apps which support the newer library can use it.
But when Wine uses Gecko, these same applications don't seem to have any problems.
Many web pages, especially on corporate intranets wont run in anything other than IE
Those pages are abortions. No new pages like that should be built.
For the existing ones, they don't necessarily work with IE7, and IE8 is about to be released (or is it out already?), so I think making a newer, incompatible version wouldn't be such a tragedy.
nor do these other browsers support any kind of "protected mode" ala IE7
...except Chrome, which is splitting it out per-process.
What's more, given the environments we've seen these run on, I doubt there would be any real problem doing that. It's a rendering engine -- why should it care what user it runs as? Everything that needs to run outside the sandbox is chrome anyway, and could be carried over.
Basically its just not possible to replace MSHTML/Trident with gecko or webkit and not break a whole bunch of stuff that is VERY important to Microsoft customers.
You mean, like they did with Vista and UAC? Microsoft isn't exactly known for backwards compatibility.
At the very least, they could start shipping other browsers as the default -- and this takes almost no effort. People for whom the above matters can use IE.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!