Posted by
Roblimo
on from the extend-and-embrace-with-a-smile dept.
Alowishus writes "ZDNet reports that MainSoft, a Microsoft Partner and Windows source licensee is working on a Linux version of MainWin - a product that makes the Win32 API available on Linux, thus enabling cross-platform development. A demo version is supposed to be available in a few weeks."
318 comments
Re:the pot calling the kettle black - not quite
by
aclute
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· Score: 1
Right on dude! And I was listening to the Clash way before they ever got popular! The same with Green Day!
Why don't you use a product/like something because you actually like it, not what other people think.
First time I have ever heard the cry of "Sellouts" on/.
Almost came off as an intelligent comment
by
wiliano
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· Score: 1
The based on 30 year technology gave you away. In theory you are right in that having this technology for linux is good. It could bring more applications to linux. But at what cost? Remember, Microsoft is ultimately behind this. And even the most die-hard Microsoftie surely is aware that they're ultimately out for themselves, at the price of screwing over anyone/anything (I don't think of conspiracy theories, I just look at the facts). Yes, I realize they are a business and they want to make money. I just personaly agree with most of their methods.
Now take for example a company (like mine) that is developing a product on NT. We are using COM/ATL, but we have kept a lot of it cross-platform because we want to be open to have a Unix version. So instead of using CORBA for the distributed object aspect of the product, we go with MainSofts product (I'm assuming your claim of COM/ATL is true, and I have no reason not to believe you). Then, some time down the road Microsoft decides to either put a stop to this or raise the licenses incredibly high (if you don't think this is a very real possibility, you have been living in a cave... just read through some replys). Where does that leave us or any other company... "Shit, I guess we're going to only support NT. We can't backtrack and redo everything for Unix." Bottom line, if Microsoft wasn't who Microsoft is, it be a different story. Something good to come out of this is that vendors that already have an NT product could "port" it over. But I would be leary if starting from scratch and cross platform is important to you.
-Willy
Re:Almost came off as an intelligent comment
by
jafac
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· Score: 1
heh - my company had a DCOM-based program, and when we decided to port to Unix, did we look for a DCOM solution for Unix? Hell no. We yanked DCOM and reinvented a proprietary subset for our own use. Portable, far more stable, and much, much faster. No more coding around MS bugs, no more code-and-see to make sure it behaves as documented, no more service packs breaking things in our code.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-- These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
How Long Have you Been waiting
by
anewsome
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· Score: 1
I've been waiting for a usable version of wine for at least 3 years now. It's not any more usable for me now, than the first day I started waiting. How long should we be waiting? If it doesn't run the apps I need then it is useless for me.
Do you ever actually read the articles you comment on, JDube? From what I know of you both here and IRL, I'd guess not.
If you did, you'd realize that this project has little to nothing to do with specifically running Micros~1 products on your box. It's about running Win32 apps on linux. Now, if I cared to, I could come up with a long list of Windows programs that have nothing to do with MS.
I don't know what's worse -- when MS tries to make themselves look pretty by spreading their usual lies, or when linux users spout anti-MS statements that are just as unfounded.
"Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't they?" -- Scarecrow, from the Wizard of Oz
--
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
HP-UX IE5 is a *joke*
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You mention that the Win32 API has been ported to Solaris and HP-UX and is used in IE5. Well, I'm here to tell you that HP-UX IE5 is the world's slowest browser and that's official ! Why? Because the GUI has to tortuously go from Win32 calls through an API translation library and back out as native calls. Performance on a fast 64-bit PA-RISC workstation is incredibly bad - you have to wait 5 seconds for a window to refresh after pulling down a menu and releasing it, making the browser totally and utterly unusable. If this is the future that MainSoft have in store for us, they can keep it ! We need native applications, not badly kludged efforts like IE5 on HP-UX and Solaris.
Re:That's just plain Reverse FUD
by
Foogle
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· Score: 2
Okay, fair enough - maybe he has seen MainWin in action. Well, Gnubie? Have you?
Whether or not he's used the product is besides the point. The post was just a bunch of speculation as to whether or not certain features will be included in MainWin, as opposed to WINE. There was no basis for the argument or facts to back it up, just "WINE is open source, so WINE will be better". As far as I'm concerned that's not much of an argument. I like Open Source as much as the next/.'er. but it isn't the magic answer for every software product's ails. WINE has a long way to go before it'll be usuable in a general sense, and if MainWin is working alongside Microsoft on their product, then MainWin has an enormous head-start.
That said, you are correct: MainWin is not an end-user application, whereas WINE is. They can be used to server to totally seperate groups. Although, yes, WINE can be used for both:)
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Re:What about WINE?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
MainWin is a horrid bloated beast. I hope I never have to face it again.
You will see few linux applications. borland will probably cancel their linux projects, and corel the same. Companies would not want to develop 2 apps for 2 operating systems if one will run on both. You can see this now, corel are using WINE, so the same source code will work under linux and windows. You have to just look at history.. look at OS/2, that could run win16 apps, and because of this, companies just released the native windows version because it ran on os/2 as well. Also, if customers run both linux and windows, and run the app on both operating systems, do you really think for one minute they are going to buy the linux and windows version? Nope, too expensive. Yes, it may bring more apps to linux, but linux doesn't really need this. You need patience. It looks good at first, but if you look further, linux will be another windows platform. First quarter of 2000 is going to be good for linux with alot of applications released for it. thinking the MainWin will be good for linux, yes in the shortterm, no in the long term... Linux will probably fade away like o/s2 has. Do you think windows apps will be more stable than native linux apps, and as fast - probably not. Only native applications will run and full speed and be as reliable (Ie, if it crashes, linux won't go down). As for Internet explorer for linux, by the sounds of it, many linux users like IE, and would use IE in preference to netscape. This could do harm to mozilla.. if there is a small amount of potential users, and people get fed up because its late (i'm not fed up, i'm looking forward to it), Mozilla will be seen as a faillier, when its got a small user base - also woulldn't look good for open source. By i'm getting a bit off topic here. Windows can only get stronger if people use this application, linux will get weaker. You can see it through history... if you look.
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
MainWin / WinMain
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Sort of off topic I guess, but I just wanted to comment on the semi-catchy name; in C/C++ you have main() as your entry point into an executable. In Windows, you have WinMain(). MainWin? I guess this qualifies as either an FYI or a -1 Offtopic..
Re:MainWin / WinMain
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
> in C/C++ you have main() as your entry point into an executable. In Windows, you have > WinMain().
Blatant example of how Microsoft encourages people to write non-portable code?
its called XMMS
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
works the same, looks the same, even uses the same skins. check it out =)
The same people that got up in arms about 'questionable free' libqt will react similarly to any other closed applications programming interface. I could see something like this possibly dissuading K developers, but it won't even slow down GNOME or GNUstep developers.
> remember that WinAmp does a buttload more than x11amp
Maybe I am wrong, but have you recently visited the XMMS home?
It's a long time since x11Amp switched to XMMS.
MS Office for Linux
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
This is just MS's attempt to get Office for Linux out there.
Microsoft wasn't able to get IE running under Solaris because of their lack of Unix experience. This is how they did IE, and it was outsourced to boot. This is how they will do Office to.
I think, it is really time to become concerned about Linux future. Definitely, the long time development strategy is lacking. Remember, what happened, when Qt and GTK appeared? Tons of buggy and unneeded applications started to appear, because every kid, who has read one book on C++, decided to become "k3wl" and "code for Linux". With the appearance of Windows API it will get much worse. I think, that Linux should be split into two branches - one, supporting limited amount of extensively tested hardware, containing only stable native linux applications, manifestly open-sourced, server-oriented - a robust, free, extremely stable working tool. Another - supporting all modern and unstable hardware, all the "bells and whistles", non-open-source stuff and other BS - desktop-and-newbie-oriented. While all the commercial Linux distributions will tend to become the second type, someone should care about enforcing this separation. Otherwise Linux risks to lose a lot of people to other free operating systems.
I'm convinced that this was one of the nails in OS/2's coffin. Once OS/2 got good Windows support (pre-Win95), the incentive for developers to develop native OS/2 apps went through the floor. Why should they develop for OS/2? Develop for OS/2, it runs on OS/2, develop for Windows and it runs on Windows and OS/2. But without native apps, OS/2 became just a marginally better GUI. It lost all those stability and performance advantages that were its reason for existence in the first place.
Fortunately, this should only effect developers who are developing for profit. Open source developers aren't likely to change because they don't care about profitability. They'll develop on the OS they like. This could certainly effect how proprietary developers work, though.
BTW, Someone mentioned that "no one programs using the Win32 API directly these days". While this is certainly true, I must point out that Microsoft gives you the source to at least two important wrappers (MFC and ATL) with their development kit. MFC should run pretty much unchanged (Though why you'd want to I can't imagine). ATL would need COM, obviously, but I'd guess that that would be the next logical step.
Personally, I'm not much interested in this WINE stuff because it goes against the whole reason I put together my Linux system. I am sick and tired of the damn Windows APIs and Windows bloat. I have to suffer through it eight hours a day. I've no interest to suffer through it at home one minute longer than I have to.
--
The cake is a pie
Re:the pot calling the kettle black - not quite
by
/dev/kev
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· Score: 1
Read what I wrote again.
I'm a Linux user calling BSD users elitist, and I want to be part of that elitism (and probably could be, too, and would enjoy it immensely).
Linux could use some elitism to keep out the trolls, dolts, twits, marketroids, suits and just plain morons. (The ones who think they know stuff are the worst.) Seems like Linux is just too "hip" for that now, though. Hence my considering moving to BSD, where you can still get flamed for asking stupid questions or not RTFM...
OTOH, I could just wait for Linux to get passe, like Southpark is now - after the huge wave of mainstreamism, I find it's really just the original fans who watch it, rather than those who watched it because it was "cool" and/or for the shock value. Can't wait to be rid of those little turds, when they piss off back into Windows.:)
Good comments regarding Window Managers, Environments, and how open source/free software trancends any particular OS.
Is it possible that one day, we'll all be saying "Open-Source is essential" and actually wake up & realise it doesn't happen any more, given the rate at which non-free things are being ported?
No. This is tantamount to saying that the marketroids and suits can fool the geeks, which we all know is completely impossible - they're too stupid and we're too smart.
It can't happen because there are people like you and I and RMS and Bruce Perens and on and on, who actually care about the freedom of software "for the sake of it", as the suits would suppose. While these people exist, non-free software cannot win (at least not with these people), because you can't beat free software. That's the beauty of free software - you can't wake up in a world of non-free ports, because dedicated people will keep working on the free software, and once it's free there's (usually) no going back.
The suits may fool as many Joe Averages as they like into using non-free software, but they can't fool free software believers into using the non-free software, and they cannot beat free software except by joining them, and making their software free. And if they do that, well, who's won then?
>Hey man, read the MainSoft site. They've already got this product out >Linux version is just a port to another OS. I don't think it is >anywhere near as unlikely as you make it out to be.
If it doesn't support what people who run linux use which is Gnome/KDE, this software is *useless*, not that it's all that really useful to begin with. Don't expect it to amount to anything much. It won't attract the Wine userbase, and the ones don't care about Windows at all won't even bother looking at it.
Re:Don't place any bets
by
Cid+Highwind
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· Score: 1
>maybe MS is planning a move to buy TrollTech. >End of game.
Not really. TrollTech caved in a few months ago and GPLed KDE and the QT toolkit. If Troll gets bought out by M$, QT and KDE will still go on.
-- 0 1 - just my two bits
Re:Why do people love IE5?
by
L0rdJedi
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· Score: 1
Since the user (at this moment) chooses to use internet explorer, that's the target platform for web developers.
Most users don't choose to use Internet Explorer. Ask a user sometime what browser their using. If they know that (possible) ask them what version. They probably have no clue. Most users use what's given to them. In the case of Windows, that would be IE. We all use Netscape where I work because I set up the computers and that is what I put on them and that is what the users are trained to use. This is mostly because of all the security bugs that keep popping up in IE. That and yes, we don't like MS.
If the average user had a choice, IE would probably not have such huge market share.
Re:Nearer the Hardware Abstraction Layer
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I don't think it is a good idea. VxD come from Win3.1. I think it is a good idea to rewrite the code then use old technologie like that.
Why Microsoft is scared, and why they won't win
by
Zigg
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· Score: 5
What makes or breaks an OS? A short trip down at least the recent history of failed computers and those that stick around for the long run should show you.
It doesn't matter how wonderful your operating system is. It doesn't even really matter how stable, or how many features it has, or anything. No company, not even one as big as Microsoft, can create an OS and then create every application that will ever be needed for it. This requires inspiring a development community to develop for your OS. I submit that this is the reason that lesser-known, though probably superior, operating systems have failed and others have grown up -- by enticing or turning away developers.
Microsoft has virtually overlooked one part of the development community for quite some time now; the public domain/freeware/open source part. Admittedly, open source for Microsoft platforms is still next to nonexistent; most software with an open source license is also ported to UN*Xish platforms; but until Linux started taking off, the PD/freeware crowd was still going strong on Windows.
Now recently, many companies who previously sold software for Microsoft platforms almost exclusively have announced their intention to bring their applications to Linux. I firmly believe this is largely due to the precursor loss of the PD/free/open crowd. I know I've seen this pattern before. My best guess is that it follows the learning pattern of a programmer; whichever OS and development tools you can get your hands on without spending a fortune, you start to learn to develop for -- later in life, when you want to make money for developing, you still feel most comfortable on that platform.
In any event, Microsoft now sees too late the pending loss of their developer base, and is taking the completely incorrect route to recapture it. MainSoft's product will probably address the high-end, large-scale, mucho dinero market quite well. However, it won't do anything for the PD/free/open community, and as such it won't be anything more than a temporary win. If Microsoft was really interested in recapturing developer share -- which they absolutely must do to survive, they need to relax their ever-tightening grip and open everything up.
If I were running Microsoft, I would open up MainWin. Make it completely open source. I don't think it would be good for the developer community at all but it would definitely insure a win.
Re:Why Microsoft is scared, and why they won't win
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
But MS hasn't been ignoring the developers. It merely has a different agenda. The basic MS attitude is that all developers should work for MS, and anyone who doesn't should be harassed away from developing. Of course, untile they have been, all possible financial gain must be extracted from them. Thus we have the various versions of MS Access that are all mutually incompatible. We have VBasic, which is tempting, but causes one to become hopelessly subservient. We have VC, which is intended to entice C++ programmers into using a tool that destroys their ability to structure code while providing pre-scripted routines for accessing the MS libraries, we have VisualFoxPro, which took a basically open language and encapsulated it in a shell of MS spaghetti.. and then abandoned it (the version with Developer's Studio 6 still won't deal with long file names, only the munged DOS form). etc.
If you use MS tools for any length of time, you become crippled in the attempt to move elsewhere. They entice you by making it easy to do things, but you must do them through the tool. The code won't transfer from version to version. Sometimes the projects won't either.
Re:Extend & Embrace
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Even if this idea doesn't kill Linux, it probably kills Wine.
Well maybe, but maybe not: in fact it validates the goal of WINE. And there are a lot of developers that make knick knack apps for Windows that are interested in Linux but won't be able to pay the licensing on this thing. As a result, WINE may just get more interest than it does now.
This all assumes that WINE is closing in on having something that really works. If not, then there's no sense crying over the loss of something you never really had. MS is almost certainly of the opinion that this is insurance against proper Linux development kits from causing a critical mass in Linux apps; I think there's at least a 50% chance that they've got it backwards. This tool will bring more apps to Linux faster, validating Linux as a platform in the eyes of the public faster, which will get more developers and software publishers used to the idea of marketting & writing for Linux sooner. It's a catalyst. Once invested in a market, a company is more likely to make a committment to a full native app for that market, than if they had no app at all.
How about "Linux is OS independent"?
by
MattMann
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· Score: 1
I'd sorta like it if i could -- gasp, heresy -- run the linux kernel as a Win32 app.
yeah, I know, there's vmware, and yeah, I know, there's dual boot and all sorts of other things, but on many occasions I have to sit down at somebody else's machine running one of Microsoft's windowing operating systems, and I'd like to be able to unpack a little archive and run linux, and be able to assure the owner of the machine that all I did was put a bunch files in one directory and they can be deleted.
Then, they'd love using the various things I'd install and there'd be another linux convert.
BTW, all of those "other ways to do it" say to me: hey, most of this work is already done, just bring the pieces together. Anybody know of a reason why this might be too hard to do?
Re:What about WINE?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Wine comes with sources, is free and can run windows binaries on x86, but still has a way to go... Bye Uwe Bonnes bon@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de
Re:What about WINE?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Yes, I agree the Linux scene has in fact devolved. There are other better alternatives
The OpenBSD project produces a FREE, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. Our efforts place emphasis on portability, standardization, correctness, security and integrated cryptography. OpenBSD supports binary emulation of most programs from SVR4 (Solaris), FreeBSD, Linux, BSD/OS, SunOS and HP-UX.
I think that what it does is basically make C source code written for Windows be directly compilable under Linux and X (or almost)... Would be real cool, since the makers of some of the best shareware/freeware windows apps could easily port their programs to Linux... Considering the incredible ease of installation of recent distributions, availability of even more high quality software, the moment when not only installing, but running Linux will be easier than Windows may be coming Real Soon(tm)... Only thing still missing might be for the administration and configuration tools (linuxconf, YaST, COAS etc) to become even simpler and easier to use for laypeople. I can't believe how far and how fast the scene has advanced the last two years.
Of course, it would be nice if WinAmp would become free (speech) software too...
You know, that kid made like $25 million off that piece of software when he sold it to AOL. Remember that next time you think about freeing some code, kids!
--
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Money doesn't justify doing something that's inherently ungenerous. It'd be really nice if he'd have made the program free (speech + beer) instead. People could benefit from that code. And if he didn't have the 'rights' to release certain portions of the code (i.e. if they were licensed somehow from others), coders would gladly step up to fill in the blanks.:) That's just MHO. YMMV.
-- With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Re:What about WINE?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Except it isn't a better product in all respects. There is still the issue of control to be dealt with. Perpeutating this product essentially recreates the situation that many of us left Windows over: the effects of Microsoft (or other singular commercial entities) controlling applications programming interfaces.
We won't see shareware/freeware ported, since the cost of this package will almost definitely be quite prohibitive...shareware from big names like Id Software... err.. well, Id's already doing native Unix stuff... okay, shareware like WinZip and the like might get ported... and I'm sure someone at WinAmp would take a swat at it... but by and large, such a thing will almost definitely be priced out of the range of shareware/freeware coders...
Also, bear in mind that the Linux scene has "advanced" only in the opinions of some. For those of us whose primary concerns are quality, tight code and the free software ethic, the Linux scene has horribly DEVOLVED, not evolved. For those who are focusing on increased availability of productivity/multimedia/game/etc. apps and device drivers, yes, these are definitely the best of times. It all depends on where your priorities lie...
-- With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
> shareware like WinZip and the like might get ported... and I'm sure someone at WinAmp would take a swat at it...
Bad examples: both exists already as native free application on Linux (well, actually not clones, but they provide the same user interface and the same functionalities). Probabily, there would be little or no commercial interests at all in porting applications like these, because the free ones are most of the times already there. Let's call it "natural software selection": the better ones are used at large, the worst ones simply die, or are used only by a restricted number of people that have a good reason to use them. Surely, not an interesting target for shareware makers (which usually need a large user base to be motivated, or at least the perspective of having a large paying user base, otherwise they'd used a free license).
But then, was the win32 API designed with portability in mind? Is there actually the will to make/keep it portable? I don't think so. That's seems to me just a temporary patch, not a real solution.
Re:What about WINE?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2
I am very familiar with MainWin (I have to leave it at that due to NDAs) and I can give you a bit of a scoop. MainWin is a porting environment that implements Win32 in user libraries directly from licensed Microsoft sources. It supports COM,DCOM, MFC and pretty much all of the other MS technologies Windows programmers use making it easy to port C,C++ applications at the source level to UNIX. MainWin will never be distributed as part of a Linux distribution or used by shareware authors for a couple of reasons. 1) use of MS sources implies royalties on run-time 2) a development license is very expensive. I don't know what the Linux pricing will be like but in general the pricing is in the order of magnitude of $A*10^4. Like a competing product, Wind/U, these porting environments are excellent for porting commercial windows applications to big iron or unix machines. This is excellent since it will allow quick retargetting of Windows and MainWin ported apps to Linux, perhaps resulting in major productivity applications being ported to Linux quicker.
Your point about the Win32 API is a good one. However, in regards to the WinAmp bit-- remember that WinAmp does a buttload more than x11amp, and probably a buttload more than any other X WinAmp clones out there (there is at least one other, non?)... Just a note there. Of course, it would be nice if WinAmp would become free (speech) software too...
-- With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Re:What about WINE?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
OH damn, I guess I can't use what could be a better product because it's not open source. That's just plain stupid. Why not use what's best for the job? I'm not saying MainWin is better, it's just your attitude that your refuse to use it just because it's not OS. Yea, I hope major distributors refuse what could be a better product and enhance Linux sales. (sarcasm)
Re:What about WINE?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
So what? If nothing in that big fat long list of bulletpoints jumps out at you when making these sorts of comparisons, of what value is such 'bloat'?
With "kill", I mean that Wine will lose the functionality battle with MainSoft - no wonder, because MainSoft has the Windows source code and Wine doesn't. MainSoft basically has to recode Wine. Remember how Micros~1 recoded Netscape? You are right; proprietary Microsoft-Win32 libraries are a scary thing. But this is probably exactly what MainSoft is going to ship... and every distribution will be going to include it, just like they include Wine. Which brings us back to the question, how bad is it to support the Win32 API?
Linux is Hardware Independent
by
Witchblade
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· Score: 3
Well, this is something I've been wanting to say for a long time, and unfortunately maybe a moot point now: Linux can be run on non-X86 hardware. Okay, I know most of you know this, but from many of the comments to various announcements seen here it's obvious that many don't. The press orgy surrounding Linux over the past year has certainly ignored this fact
I've been running Linux on several PowerPC boxes for the last three years. My first impression of Linux was that I'd found the Holy Grail: I could run powerful applications at home on my PowerMac, on a friend's Dell, or a Sun workstation at school. GNU software and POSIX compliance made all of this possible.
The first inkling that fragmentation was going to occur in this wonderful new community was when id released the Linux port of Quake. The Linux world went crazy- those that could run it, at least. Suddenly the rest of us were shut out. It wasn't free software, either- which meant there was no ability to hack it for the rest of us. When they released the Alpha-based Linux port it was an encouraging sign, but the future was all too clear.
Now everyday there is a great new "Linux" product announced, most by comapnies that aren't even aware that an "Intel compatible processor" is definitely not a requirement for this wonderful opertaing system. If software based on Win32 APIs become the standard Linux applications, everything Linux was created for is over. The various productivity suites under development will be crushed by Office2000- authentic Microsoft bugs, security holes, and all.
What can be done? I don't know. Until the last year or so we used to stick together as a community. Now software is developed strictly for one graphical desktop, or worse one particular packaged distribution. I'm not willing to concede there's the imminent fragmentation the traditional technology press is salivating waiting for, but we s the Linux community need to start looking out for each other again, and fighting to make sure this wonderful operating system remains free from being shackled to one particular company (software OR hardware.)
Re:Why are we fighting over the OS?
by
Slimbob
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· Score: 1
I agree, the OS is going to take more of a back seat, as there are more kinds of devices out there that require a specialized OS. In that context, a good OS should strive to be transparent, not feature-rich and apparent. It should be designed and optimized to interpret cross-platform standards, like *ML and Java, and the higher-level features should be done in those languages, rather than bloating the OS.
This is really sick. I suppose now that wine has been so sucsful MS decides that its time to "Exorcize the Freedom to Inovate" and all that BS. Oh well having IE5 for linux may be nice
whoa. I think IE5 might already be available for *nix. I remembered trying to find the download page for a customer needing to repair his own installation (they have to do that sometimes), and was horrified to see that it is available for HP-UX and Solaris. I'm guessing it's binaries, but I can't be too sure. As I went to Microsplat's downloads just now to try and download something, hoping it might be a source tarball, a funny thing happened. I completed step one of two, selecting the download of IE5 for Unix, and upon clicking Next, got an error message saying "Directory Listing Denied. This virtual directory does not allow contents to be listed."
I'm using Netscape 4.61, and if I were that bored, I'd go over to one of my roommates' Win98 computers and try again on IE, but I'm not that interested.
L8r, Rojo^
-- <:
Re:Wine and this BS
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
ROFL! thats the funniest thing ive heard all day. maybe if you look around, you'll find the NT source there too!. get a fucking clue, dufus.
What part of IE dosn't suck? ActiveX is nothing but a huge security hole as is their independant and non-standard "implementation" of Java. I've never seen a DHTML page and I've never installed Shockwave and I don't think that I'm missing a damn thing. I have to use IE at work because the PHBs have standardized on it. But, half the time it won't pull pages through the proxy server correctly. It writes outside of it's own frigging window on this NT box -- software shouldn't even be able to do that. I would never use it on my Windows PC at home.
I certainly don't use it on my Linux boxes. (note the singular in the previous paragraph and the plural here.) Not even in VMWare.
-- I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I actually had a MainSoft rep call me about this product of their's. I told here I wouldn't even consider using their product unless a Linux version was available. That was, until I asked a few more questions. The redistrubable libs are *huge* (10 meg or so). I didn't even get into performance. It sounds like they did implement it The Right Way(tm), but they only license the technology from Microsoft. AND, get this, the royalities you pay are a *per seat* royality. The more you sell, the more MS makes. Can't beat that, eh? (NOT!)
mob
Wonderful
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Gee this is so great! Now yet another excuse for companies to avoid creating decent linux-native applications. We should be demanding real linux apps, not some crappy win32 layer...see IE on Solaris for a reference as to how that goes...
Re:Wonderful
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Screw that. This means I can continue to use BSD, which allows me to run BSD, Linux, and Windows apps. This software will probably work better than WINE, and even if it doesn't, so what?
Re:Wonderful
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
And the GTK layer is good?
get a clue, gtk is a rotten core, win32 aint bad its actualy quite decent. At least its not so fucked up as gtk.
I think that people are missing something fundamental here. Porting Win32 apps to Linux would not make Linux applications extinct. In fact, the groundswell of support for native Linux apps that we're seeing here indicates that. The Open Source movement can't be crushed so long as there are coders out there who are willing to distribute their source. So what happens when Office 2000 is available for Linux? Well, it still costs a bundle. One of the biggest reasons for the Open Source movement was to counter the overpricing of software by the big software companies, such as MS. So Office2K is now available on Linux. Now what? Well, it still costs more than most people can afford to pay out of pocket. So, then what? Well, hopefully, a gleefully stubborn but talented coder out there gets to work, and codes his/her own office productivity software, and distributes it for free. So maybe its not as pretty as Office 2000 for a little while, but people like me will use it, because it's either free or cheap.
Mickeysoft isn't going to put Open Source in its grave. We Linux enthusiasts out there are too bullheaded to let that happen. They might make it difficult, but it's tough to stop a revolution, even if you are Mickeysoft. People will still code, and still distribute their source, and with luck, someday Open Source, Linux-native apps will have to be ported to Win32 platforms, too. Don't look at this as a defeat, but exploit it as an opportunity to infiltrate.
Okay, so I'll finish the flag waving here, but let's face it: This isn't the end of the world, and if it's used correctly, it could mean that we take over Redmond. Hey, its possible. And wouldn't you just LOVE to see a Penguin flag flying outside the Mickeysoft HQ?
Actually i think solaris also has some kind of compability layer for linux binaries. You can run i386 linux bins on i386 solaris and the same for sparc platform.
Actually, this could be looked upon in an entirely different way: This product is a way for developers to get their products onto the Linux platform without much effort. When/if they realize a great demand for Linux software, I'm sure they will want to offer apps that don't depend on such emulation. --
There are even a few that works on win32 like gimp (that has a decent win32 version)
Where is this? I looked all over their webpage and didn't see it. The FTP sites I was able to get into only had Linux tarballs. If there is a win32 port I *really* want it here at work.
mcrandello@my-deja.com rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.
Yes, but how will the software companies ever know that they've had their product bought for Linux use. When people buy Windows software, the software companies figure it'll be used for Windows.
Microsoft has out-smarted us all again.
Competition:M$::Personal Freedom:Congress
Re:Wonderful
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
> Gee this is so great! Now yet another excuse for companies to avoid creating decent > linux-native applications. We should be demanding real linux apps, not > some crappy win32 layer...see IE on Solaris for a reference as to how that goes...
No, we should be demanding real portable, free (dom) apps, not real Linux apps. Programs that only work under Linux are almost as bad as programs that only work under Windows.
Demand "Linux apps" and you're most likely get some Redhat-specific RPM or something equally useless. What happens when Linux is obsolete? What makes you think it isn't?
I belive that there are realy few programs that work only on linux. Most of linux programs are open source, and run easily on almost every UNIX variant available. There are even a few that works on win32 like gimp (that has a decent win32 version)
And the fact that companies have to do a linux version would be a bless to those other osses out there since linux is very diferent from windows, so if a program has been port to linux it is probably well designed enougth to create another ports. A compatibility layer beetwen linux and other OSes (as I belive exists in BSD) is very easy to do, since linux is opensource and has a well defined API. -- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
--
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Re:Wonderful
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Hey, if it gets Linux on desktops, it's a good thing. I know you're thinking 'OS/2', but there's a diff...Linux is free.
Look at the big picture..if this thing sucks, then there will be a demand for apps on Linux. (at least from Linux-land). If it doesn't...then what's wrong with using it? I don't know about you, but I dont like Windows because its a big bloated unreliable hog...not just because its Windows.
"Better" sometimes involves more subtle issues ...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
This person for right or wrong has decided to use open source sw wherever possible even if it is not as "good". This is perfectly acceptable and in line with the inclusiveness that defines/.'ers.
I actually had a MainSoft rep call me about this product of their's. I told her I wouldn't even consider using their product unless a Linux version was available. That was, until I asked a few more questions.
The redistributable libs are *huge* (10 meg or so). I didn't even get into performance as the deciding factor was: they only license the technology from Microsoft. AND, get this, the royalities you pay are a *per seat* royality. The more you sell, the more MS makes. Can't beat that, eh? (NOT!)
mob
What does "World Domination" have to do with linux
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quarter
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· Score: 1
I think the real killer for OS/2 was that nobody would write native apps for it since it ran Windows apps. I also believe that Linux is not about world domination, its about having an operating system that is/has exactly what you want. And as long as there are geeks out there who love to build their own kernels Linux can never die. However, if "world domination" is what you want out of an OS then you must crush Windows. To do that, create an environment that makes it much easier to write native apps and drivers for linux, and tools that make it very easy to port them to windows. It's the applications that drive the OS and it was the way Bill made it easy for other companies to make money that made his OS the market leader.
MainWin uses the Windows source, as far as I know, wine doesn't.
-- -----.sig: file not found
Re:We need real Linux apps!
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TheTomcat
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· Score: 1
If you complain that Netscape is unstable, use Lynx.
Um. Do you use the web on a regular basis? Do you even realize what the web is all about? If Lynx was all we need, then why would we EVER have invented the web? Lynx is a glitzy version of a gopher browser for http. The web is about multimedia. Without graphics and sound, we simply have glorified ftp and gopher. Lynx _IS_ occasionally useful, but is NOT suitable as a dedicated web browser. Anyone who uses Lynx as their only web browser is really missing out on the whole web experience.
Re:Maybe it's not relevant to you,
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
If you ask AMD they will send you a free OSR2 or Win 98. Yes, really; I did it myself. You'll need at least proof of purchase for the chip, though, and your Windows certificate of authenticity or something similar (they accepted my CD key photocopied off the back of the CD).
Microsoft is likely willing to spend an awful lot of money on "market research". At this point, they are probably just trying to find out how viable a platform Linux is. The added bonus is, if they port Win32 now, they won't have to port it later if they find that they need to ship something under Linux. This is also a cheap way to test the FUD waters. After all a lot of people are thinking of porting apps to Linux. If MS announces that Win32 may support Linux "Real Soon Now", those plans may be de-railed by companies that don't want Linux porting to be a waste of their time...
My question is this, though: what underlying toolkit will they use. Will it be based on raw Xlib (good for speed), Motif (a lose just about all the way around, at this point), GTk+ or Qt (good, full-featured toolkits with powerful features "free") or GNOME or KDE (even more features than their underlying toolkits, but even more bloat to put the world's most bloated toolkit on top of). I think that at this point even GNOME is not in a position to be a simple back-end to a Win32 port (i.e. there is not a 1-1 mapping from all Win32 features to GNOME, yet), so there's going to be a lot of glue code no matter what. I'd hate to see Win32 apps released for Linux, and be 10 times slower out of the gate.
This will be fun to watch, but I doubt it will pan out as anything serious just yet.
Remember Bristol? They used to make (and I think they still do) a MFC compatibility library for UNIX. They ported IE3 to UNIX, and it was a disaster, so MS yanked their licence. Bristol took MS to court and won, so I think they have their license back. Anyway, MS turned around and licenced MainSoft with their technology, and Mainsoft is now making the MFC compatibility library.
Re:Don't place any bets
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
My question is this, though: what underlying toolkit will they use. Will it be based on raw Xlib (good for speed), Motif (a lose just about all the way around, at this point), GTk+ or Qt (good, full-featured toolkits with powerful features "free") or GNOME or KDE (even more features than their underlying toolkits, but even more bloat to put the world's most bloated toolkit on top of).
Can you say...none of the above? Not only will mainsoft "get" to port Win32 API (funny if the Wine group got a patent on implementing Win32 API on Linux first...), they also will need to implement such "innovations" as COM/DCOM, MFC, etc., as well as the bugs...er, differences in opinions about Win32 between Win9x/NT.
Plus, using GTK, Gnome or Qt means that MS has to license someone else's technology (maybe MS is planning a move to buy TrollTech. End of game.), which just doesn't happen. Will MS agree to use GPL licensed software (GTK, Gnome)? Not likely. I think that at this point even GNOME is not in a position to be a simple back-end to a Win32 port (i.e. there is not a 1-1 mapping from all Win32 features to GNOME, yet), so there's going to be a lot of glue code no matter what. I'd hate to see Win32 apps released for Linux, and be 10 times slower out of the gate.
Why? I wouldn't hate this. I'd just as soon use that otherwise wasted WinNT/Win9x license inside a VMWare virtual machine, or spend another $500 on a cheap P2-300 box just to run Windows.
Actually, from a price that was quoted in LinuxToday, I don't think that this is even aimed in the direction of small users. Only larger companies would be able to hope to justify the cost: " DDJ says it *starts* at $12,000, and Byte mentions that apps using MainWin have to pay a per-copy royalty. " It's rather clear why they haven't previously gone after the Linux market, and why MS wouldn't be disturbed if they did.
--
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Hey man, read the MainSoft site. They've already got this product out for several different OSes: Solaris, Tru64, HP/UX, AIX, and Irix. The Linux version is just a port to another OS. I don't think it is anywhere near as unlikely as you make it out to be.
Also, several versions feature the Stingray Objective Toolkit. I'm not familiar with this toolkit, and I have my own doubts about it.
OTOH, I think that this app is VERY highly priced. I was unable to find any pricing on the site, but it seems to be portrayed as a very expensive, highly-targeted app. --
Remember Bristol? They used to make (and I think they still do) a MFC compatibility library for UNIX. They ported IE3 to UNIX, and it was a disaster, so MS yanked their licence. Bristol took MS to court and won, so I think they have their license back. Anyway, MS turned around and licenced MainSoft with their technology, and Mainsoft is now making the MFC compatibility library.
Except that this is completely untrue. I did a little research (anyone remember search engines?) and found out that:
Bristol sued MS because MS wanted to renegotiate the contract. Bristol charged them with anti-trust, saying that MS didn't want people to port software to UNIX, now that NT had significant server market penetration
Bristol LOST. See this page for MS' spin on the loss. Bristol's site is strangely silent on the outcome of the case. No press release, and only one link to a story in a newspaper about it (and I can't get the link to load).
-jon
--
Remember Amalek.
Re:Don't place any bets
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Guy+Harris
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· Score: 4
Microsoft is likely willing to spend an awful lot of money on "market research". At this point, they are probably just trying to find out how viable a platform Linux is.
Microsoft may or may not be spending money on this; MainWin is a product of Mainsoft, not Microsoft, so all Microsoft may have done is said "we won't yank your license for the Windows source in MainWin if you do a Linux port", they haven't necesarily contributed money or other resources to this.
(It is interesting to note that they don't already have an x86 UNIX in the list of platforms on which MainWin is available, so, if they port it, Linux may be the first UNIX-that-runs-on-a-PC on which MainWin is available.)
My question is this, though: what underlying toolkit will they use. Will it be based on raw Xlib (good for speed)
Probably. I don't have IE-for-Solaris (the port of which was done with MainWin) handy, but I don't remember it being dynamically linked with any toolkit libraries (although I also don't remember whether it was dynamically linked with Xlib, so that doesn't by itself prove anything). The UI of IE-for-Solaris is somewhat Motifish, but looks different enough that it's unlikely to be Motif. I suspect it's neither GTK+ nor Qt, either - I seem to remember the bevels on the scrollbars being narrower than those of Motif, GTK+, or Qt.
They're extremely unlikely, I suspect, to use KDE or GNOME - not all Linux systems necessarily have those, and they don't require either of them for IE/Solaris, so MainWin doesn't require them.
Re:Don't place any bets
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IntlHarvester
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· Score: 1
So, it's such an inevitablity that Microsoft will be porting to Linux that we're already worrying about what widget set they will use?
As far as I know, the only Microsoft product available on Unix is Internet Explorer, and they use Mainsoft as a kind-of-reverse WINE to translate Win32 to Unix calls. So, IE/Linux would seem to be a possibility, especially considering that Microsoft is positioning IE as a cross-platform product, and they make no money off of it.
Are you going to see a port of MS Office or anything else any time soon? Doubtful -- the Linux 'community' is hardly asking for it, and neither are the IT managers that sign Microsoft contracts. (And I'd think that SQL or Exchange would be the remotest of possibilities just for marketing reasons.)
Re:Don't place any bets
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2
MainSoft has a source agreement with Microsoft and they port the WIN32 API to native calls on the UNIX platform. All the display routines use Xlib directly.
There are several advantages to this strategy which I think makes it hard for Wine to compete with this.
1) True bug for bug compatibility with Microsoft's version of Win32. Don't laugh! This is important to Windows developers because they can work around (and sometimes even exploit) the well known quirks in Win32. Also, far less testing effort will be required on the UNIX side which is important as MainWin is primarily used to deploy Win32 applications on secondary platforms.
2) Developers can use all the high level MS APIs like COM, DCOM, MFC, ATL, ActiveX (and probably a few others I've missed...) Let's face it, no one develops using the Win32 API these days so a Win32 emulation layer without all the accompanying APIs is irrelevant for porting contemporary Win32 programs.
I think this could be a good thing for Linux as it will open up a whole bunch of new applications which could help it become more mainstream.
Personally, I don't think Microsoft is that dogmatic when it comes to operating systems. Of course, they would like to dominate everything on the desktop but in the past they have sold applications on other platforms like the Mac when it made good business sense.
Perhaps, they are starting to see Linux as a similar business opportunity and don't want to sit by and see other companies provide Linux replacements for their market dominating Win32 applications.
Are the Microsoft transcripts online anywhere, as far as you know?
Eventually the judge declined to seal the document, and the trial transcript wasnt edited either.
I'm particularly interested in seeing this document, as well as the op-ed piece that MS authored. Any ideas as to how I can get my hands on them?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Re:Don't place any bets
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Guy+Harris
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· Score: 2
and they use Mainsoft as a kind-of-reverse WINE to translate Win32 to Unix calls
Reverse WINE? Isn't that what Wine does - translates Win32 (and Win16, and DOS) calls to Windows calls, so you can run Windows apps on UNIX-compatible x86 OSes, and compile source for those apps to make UNIX apps?
(And I'd think that SQL or Exchange would be the remotest of possibilities just for marketing reasons.)
Maybe Exchange, and maybe Outlook - it depends on whether they'd want to force folks with UNIX-compatible OSes on their desk to switch to Windows so they can read mail from an Exchange server, or whether they want to let UNIX systems read from an Exchange server on NT (rather than, say, some UNIX-based mail server).
Re:Don't place any bets
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 3
MainSoft is member of the WinSource NT-source-code licensing program - this means money from Microsoft and 'Platinum level' support from Microsoft (which money cannot buy). MainSoft also probably is in the First Wave program - but it is usually top-secret, only high executives know about it usually. You are required contractually to deny even the existence of First Wave. First Wave gives even more money, at the price of *serious* dependency on Microsoft. Under a First Wave contract, Microsoft also has access to all the code and IP produced by the company. It also means that the company has to use Microsoft's JVM, Microsoft's Explorer browser libraries. First Wave contracts are reviewed frequently, and if you are not cooperative enough (eg. to write seemingly independent opeds to major newspapers in support of Microsoft's key legal positions), First Wave can get revoked and the money source is turned off. Microsoft wants to 'seed' the Linux->NT porting market, but the price is complete dependency on Microsoft's license. (which can be revoked/made uneconomical at any time by Microsoft) Being in bed with Microsoft does mean money - initially at least. It also means becoming a whore and you'll have to be ready to give up your dreams. (but if this is fine to you then OK)
Re:Don't place any bets
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"MainWin offers both Motif and Windows look, giving the MainWin developers the freedom to choose the look and feel most appropriate for their UNIX end-users. Alternatively, the developer can let the end-user choose the look and feel of the application using one or two environment variables at a command prompt."
Run away! Run away!
Re:Don't place any bets
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 4
There are references to it in the DOJ vs. Microsoft lawsuit, Gordon Eubanks, former Symantec CEO denies that Symantec is in a First-Wave relationship with Microsoft: [transcript excerpt, 1999.06.16]: "I DON'T KNOW ABOUT THE FIRST-WAVE PROGRAM, AS I TOLD YOU" [...]. Then Boies submitted the Symantec-Microsoft First-Wave contract into evidence, which was signed when Eubanks was CEO:-) Microsoft counsel protested violently: [transcript excerpt]: 'THESE DOCUMENTS WERE PRODUCED BY SYMANTEC, WHICH IS NOT REPRESENTED HERE BY COUNSEL AT THE MOMENT, BUT IT'S MORE HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL. MICROSOFT REGARDS THIS DOCUMENT AS PROPRIETARY INFORMATION WHICH IS NOT IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN.' Eventually the judge declined to seal the document, and the trial transcript wasnt edited either. Then Boies continued to evaluate how the First-Wave relationship affected Symantec: [transcript exceprt]: "THEY ASKED ME TO WRITE--IF I WOULD BE WILLING TO EXPRESS AN OP-ED PIECE ON THE OPINIONS OF THE INDUSTRY." [...] Boies: [transcript excerpt]: "AND, INDEED, MICROSOFT ACTUALLY PREPARED THE FIRST DRAFT OF THAT OP-ED PIECE FOR YOU, DIDN'T THEY, SIR?". which turned out to be true.
MainSoft also probably is in the First Wave program - but it is usually top-secret, only high executives know about it usually. You are required contractually to deny even the existence of First Wave. First Wave gives even more money, at the price of *serious* dependency on Microsoft.
This is very, very intriguing.
What other companies are suspected to be First Wave shops? And where can I read more about this tactic(which I haven't yet decided is predatory/evil/whatever, so back off/.'ers;-)
The part about writing op-eds--this seems really interesting. The story behind the story...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Maybe it will be good, maybe it will not. Imoprtant is that this seems to be completely different approach than the one Wine is using. With Wine you don't have to recompile your app to make it working on linux. As far as I understand, you have to do that with MainWin. Therefore it is mostly solution for the developers who want to port their stuff to Unix, rather than for Joe SixPack who just wants to run Photoshop on linux.
Well, if I had a license to the Win32 source code, a Linux port would be a high priority because the easiest way to get rich is to be bought out.
Unless a nearly 100% compatible Win32 on Linux is something Microsoft feels ready for, this won't see the light of day. If MS feels ready for Win32 on Linux, then we'd better watch out.
-- Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
MainSoft for linux? no thanks.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
now imagine if MainSoft/Microsoft do the same crappy code on linux, microsoft will know how to tell the world how linux is shit for running apps. 'nuff said.
Re:Netscape's ugly & old-looking.
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owain_vaughan
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· Score: 1
IE's fast & well-integrated with the OS.
And that's a Good Thing??? OS integration is bad, bad, bad
Netscape's look hasn't changed since the dawn of time..er.. a couple years ago.
If it ain't broke.....
Bitch & moan all you like, but it just shows how you'll use & love any piece of crap as long as its not Microsoft.
Erm, that's not my reasoning at all. Netscape just handles standards better - No matter what the IE docs tell you. As a web developer in my previous job we had no end of hassles getting a new web site to work even remotely well in IE. The JavaScript, frames, MIMR type handling etc just didn't work! (BTW, I didn't design it:)
You'll love this: I even use IE on my Macs...why? It looks cooler.
Even if it does pervert all web standards known to man!!!
God forbid someone express their own opinion that goes against the Party Line..
As I've already said, Netscape is simply better than IE, regardless of what it looks like - this is completely independent of any Anti-MS feelings.
If we want to be taken seriously out there in the world, ya gotta learn how to get along with other people.
I couldn't agree more. This is a lesson that IE fanatics would do well to heed - just because a HTML-impaired page looks good on their browser doesn't make it a standard!!!
It's closed. It's endorsed by MS ( Indirectly ) and it will probably work properly since the easiest way to emulate a monster like Win32 is to look at the source.
SoftPC for the mack was also built by an NT source code licensee.
-- --=
Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Re:Why do people love IE5?
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owain_vaughan
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· Score: 1
Most people are not webdevelopers so they use a browser that works for them.
But that's just the point - it doesn't work on some rudimentary web sites, but there are some that are deliberately engineered to handle its quirks.
Non webdevelopers don't care about the mime output of cgi scripts. nor do they care about javascript.
Yes they do when the site doesn't work because of the crappy implementation of those two facilities.
"Why trust MS to implement standards properly.." Netscape hasn't done any better
I think it has - I'm not saying Netscape 4 is perfect, but it's a damn sight better than IE.
(excluding mozilla which will take another few months to appear). The 4.x version of their browser can hardly be called standards compliant. But standards are only relevant to web developers not to users. Users expect their favorite webpages to just work they don't care how they work.
But that's just the point - their 'favourite' web pages won't work because of the half-assed way IE handles frames, JS etc......
This is something MS used to their advantage when developing IE. While netscape was fooling around with the 4.x generation of their browser, IE created IE which from a users point of view is faster, more stable and prettier.
Can anyone say 'Style over content'? What it looks like doesn't matter in the slightest. Whether it handles simple web standards is more important.
And my pessimistic guess is that they will use the same thing again to outcompete mozilla. Nobody outside the webdevelopers community cares about standards.
They do when things don't work!!! Without standards you'll just end up with a proprietary MS-web - sure MS users can view it, but with the proliferation of set-top-boxes et. al that don't use IE, MS will be forced to comply to the standards...
MS is compliant enough for most users.
I agree. But claiming it is superior is another matter altogether!
Bristol actually won part of case, but got no $
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2
Bristol actually went ahead and sued Microsoft (and lost the case badly)
FYI,
Bristol won the unfair trade practices case, but MS successfully convinced the jury that Bristol had stopped functioning as a company partially with the intent of making it look like Microsoft crushed them and needed to be punished (by making Bristol exceutives rich). MS argued this behaviour shouldn't be rewarded with a huge judgement, and the jury agreed awarding Bristol exactly $1. Also, the jury found MS had not violated antitrust laws, so the award was not tripled.
Okay, to summarize: OS, irrelevant; programs, reason for having a computer; anything that blurs the distinction between one OS and the next (or makes the OS distinction a distant second to program usability), good news indeed.
Allow me to offer a different angle on the subject. The ultimate goal of Linux is to be irrelevant.
Now, this is possibly a misleading statement. The Linux as an OS is not irrelevant to enthusiasts and developers working on Linux. Certainly, there is always development to be done - new hardware to support, new concepts in computing to implement. In this light, Linux is the focus.
However, to those who are "computers as a tool" folks and are more interested in the applications they need to run, the Linux OS isn't specifically important. They want the OS to be pretty much secondary to their being able to use specific tools.
Linux provides this kind of environment.
Linux is able to be "irrelevant" in two ways - via its development model and its ability to be customized.
Lets look at the Linux development model first. Features make it into Linux distributions based on the merits of that feature. Features that meet a great demand, and have technical merit, often get the most support. Features that don't meet either requirement tend to be abandoned. The Linux environment is developed based on workable technologies and applications; there is rarely any other consideration.
In contrast, commercial developers are often pressured to maintain an OS' market. Often this takes the form of marketing agreements and requirements to support specific technologies. This leads to technical decisions becoming dependent on marketing requirements. Eventually, the applications you need are developed based on the requirements of an OS. The OS becomes the focus.
The next issue is that of customization. Different people work in different ways. Being able to make an environment behave in a way that makes you productive is important. Customization allows you to generate that environment even if your requirements are different than your coworkers.
One of the most visible aspects of one's computing environment is the graphical user interface. Within Windows, you are expected to use the default GUI. Applications are designed with these conventions in mind. They also occasionally make use of hidden hooks within the default GUI. Meanwhile, Linux uses the X Windowing System. X allows users to use whatever window manager they wish, thus having the ability to completely customize the "look and feel" of their environment. Furthermore, applications are designed to work independently of the GUI environment.
There are exceptions to the points in the above paragraph. For example, there are 3rd party alternatives to Window's explorer shell. However, those alternatives aren't 100% compatible. And in the Linux environment, some applications are dependent on desktop environments such as KDE or Gnome (which in turn are compatible with numerous window managers). However, that being said, I think you will find the philosophy of Linux lending to customization much easier than Windows (or many other commercial, proprietary environments).
In the end, you have to use what works the best for the task at hand. Linux is not always the answer. That's why dual-boot environments are fairly common.
However, if you are interested in an environment that is designed with the user in mind and is able to be configured according to your requirements, you owe it to yourself to look into Linux or another Open Source OS (such as the *BSD flavors). Support projects that provide the functionality you need to these OS'. Demand that functionality from your vendors.
Sure. The OS should be irrelevant to functionality. But that doesn't mean the OS is not important.
Looks like Linux will be getting a real browser
by
TummyX
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· Score: 1
IE5.
Seeing as MainSoft are the guys who 'ported' IE5 to Solaris with their win->unix tools.
Re:Good or Bad?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I'm glad you are therefore helping to update and write new API documentation, instead of just whining about it.
Aren't you the smooth talker! I nominate you as head of Linux developer recruiting.:) Hey, how about the people who wrote the API in the first place document it in the first place? Just a thought.:)
A browser shouldn't give you any leeway in html code. It should followed standards to a t. Sure IE currently supports more standards, but what good is it if it doesn't care if you don't have a closing tag or if XML namespaces is handled totally wrong.
As from personally experiences IE 5 is slower and crashes on my computer more than NS.
No dude, you have not used it lately. What are you trying to get work? MS Office - yes it works, even 2000 And with Corel donating developers to the WINE project, things have been moving along faster than before Wine has its bugs, but development is constant, and things are moving forward very progressively best of luck to the wine crew
-- -----Transmission Complete-----
If you want to email me...Don't
This makes a lot of sense. OS/2's big claim was that it ran Windows Applications "better than Windows". But, I think, people then think "why not just get Windows if running windows app's is what we want". With Window's source running rampant I am suprised that someone hasn't put it out on the net where everyone can grab it. assuring you that your code will run on UNIX exactly as it does on NT. Yeah, crashes alot and runs slow
Re:Standards
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Standards ? You talking about Standards ? I dont know much about HTML and DOM, but as far as HTTP goes, IE does a much better job than Netscape. IE had support for HTTP keep alives since IE4. Netscape didnt know a keep-alive from mozilla's butt! Aside from that, the fact that IE is componentized - you can access all components of IE ( HTML renderer, XML parser, Script parsers, Protocol Handler ) etc from your code. It offers more features for developers than Netscape.
Wine doesn't have the windows source code
by
Mojojojo
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· Score: 1
Everyone is complaining about, "why didn't they mention wine", well there is a fundamental difference, wine doesn't license the windows source code like these fools do. wine is good, but they've been getting to the point where there's only so much you can reverse engineer. This will probably be a way more evolved program, if for nothing else, they're a microsoft code licensee and partner. I'd rather see this go into the wine work, don't get me wrong. I also think they'd be better of teaming up with wine, that way the community would endorse it too, but whatever.
This will probably take off some of my Karma and give me a bad moderation, but what the hell..
I go to school with both jdube/Boolean, and CrayDrygu. Its interesting to see the relations between people in real life, and in the online world.
Cheers to those who have read the article, and posted serious comments based on the facts!
...And btw, CrayDrygu usually has the facts right. Hell, he usually corrects my mistakes. And jdube/Boolean seems to be the leet Debian user heh. Who are you going to listen to, the linux user, or the mostly correct one?
Re:That's just plain Reverse FUD
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pb
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· Score: 2
Many of us have seen what MainWin does, dude.
Microsoft used MainWin to make Internet Explorer (4 and 5) for UNIX. (i.e. Solaris and HP/UX)
It's huge, it's bloated, it often doesn't run. I've only tried it on Solaris, but it only works on certain versions of Solaris, requiring some patches. I'm not impressed with any porting library that needs kernel patches to run.
Compare this with running Internet Explorer 3 for Windows 3.1 under Wine: fast, light, doesn't die immediately, views slashdot over ssh (with some problems -- inverts truecolor images? (recent Wine bug)).
Now, let's compare the products. MainWin is very expensive, professional, proprietary porting software. WINE is completely free, anarchic, completely alpha-level software. So why does it run Internet Explorer better?
I think MainSoft needs to fund Wine development. Since it's completely free, they can steal it and call it 'MainSoft'. I don't care that much, as long as Wine gets better and MainSoft doesn't get any worse. Besides, it'd be cool to see Wine running on non-x86 architectures, too.;)
Anyone who ses?s this tech coming to the linux world a bad thing is blinded by there own linux cult paranoia.
I hope I'm not paranoid if I say it's a mixed blessing. I see good points:
Increasing application base
Paving the road to portable applications
However, I also see bad points:
Less motivation to ensure portability
Closed source and expensive liscensing
Encouraging use of expensive, closed IDEs
I hope we don't see more developers moving excusively to a Win32 environment. The more developers are familiar with multiple environments, the better they can choose the right environment for the job. Does that make sense?
...linux is a collective piece of betaware...
Betaware? Now, Linux is still in development (much like Windows), but it's not in beta. The development progress for Linux and other open-source software is much more... um... open, than that of closed programs. You can download the development version of a program, but that's not the same as a beta version. "Beta" usually means that a final release hasn't been made, and that the software may still be prone to crashes and numerous bugs. As far as I can tell, Linux hasn't been in beta since... the 1.0 release.
...built on 30 year old tech...
That is to say, technology that's had three decades to prove it's worth, and grow to fill the needs presented to it. UNIX isn't on it's way out... not yet. In fact, I hear all the time about how Linux (at least one UNIX) usage is growing! It seems you're implying that by not being new, something is second-best. Did I misinterpret that?
...that is not suitable for most desktops.
This part is much more debatable than the last bits. Over it's three decades, UNIX hasn't penetrated very far into the desktop. That's changing now, however. As more people see a need for UNIX on the desktop, it will grow to be a good, useable system on the desktop, just as it's a very good, useable system on the server. Personally, I think Linux is doing just fine on my desktop- I like the control it lends me over my computer. Much more flexible and useable than Windows.
...unless they get more things like mainsoft catering to it, it?s going to burn out and die.
What are your goals? World domination, or will you settle for a system that _you_ can use? For now, I'll just settle for a system I can use, which I have right now. No Win32 implementation required. That may change, at which time I'll be part of the demand for this product- or it's competitors. I don't think the lack of a Windows emulator will cause Linux to whither away. It was, from the beginning, made to be a useable system, and doesn't need this to be useable. All they're doing is inceasing the useability. That's all good... except for the part about expensive licensing and closed source. If anything, that only serves to decrease useability.
I'm glad you are therefore helping to update and write new API documentation, instead of just whining about it.
I don't want to write API docs, I want to write programs. I don't want to document the programs I use, I want to use them. If it is easier for me to use program A than program B because A is better documented (despite B being better otherwise), I will probably use A.
I don't want to deal with it, I just want it to work. It's the same reason I use Linux instead of MS-Windows. It just works. ---
Surely there's nothing undocumented when you've got the source?
-- Jeff
Na, that is an admission of failure.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
See Bill G. sees himself as a visionary. For them to produce a MS-Linux they would have to claim they invented Linux in odder to stop the brain locking cognitive dissonance from setting in. Since it is impossible for them to have created Linux the way they invented the internet, chances are they will avoid it.:0)
I agree that we need more native Unix programs across a variety of domains. Furthermore, I hold that many of what we think we have now are not Unix programs. They're actually "Winix apps", which is quite different from a "Unix program".
A "Winix app" is a program that happens to run under Unix but doesn't fee like it. All the social cues are wrong. It's like a hard-core Apple Mac user being given an MS-DOS program that has been ported to his system, where "ported" means no more than making the code run. It's still not going to work for him. And he'll hate it.
What are the the Unix cultural cues that are missing from Winix "apps", or Windows cues that are present in Winix "apps" but missing from Unix programs? It's a lot of little things. Here are just a few:
Trying to be all things, not one thing, and thereby ending up being huge and bloated, not small and functional.
Not being usable as a tool called from other programs, nor being able to call other tools using this programs.
Requiring a bitmapped display with bus-speed updates for proper operation, making them useless over a modem connection or on a vt100-style terminal.
Can't be run in a batch script or cron job, because it can't be automated.
Not having keyboard support, or good keyboard support, for basic operations.
Relying upon the mouse for too much when the keyboard would be more efficient.
Not having regular expressions for searching. You're lucky if you get a case-sensitive string comparison.
Not having any manpages even though these are basic commands, and all commands must have manpages for searching and indexing and printing.
Being forced to learn yet another set of unsearchable, unmemorizable, unsortable hieroglyphics (iconic ideograms) rather than alphabetic commands.
The ubiquitous "toolbar" at the top of every program.
Lack of config files in simple text formats for easy parsing and generation by other tools.
Inability to configure out the eye-cruft, or to avoid the seven levels of mouse clicks needed to get to a particular selection. There's no ease of long-term use, only short-term use.
Complete ignorance of the user's preferences from stty settings for interrupting, line editing, etc.
General disdain for shell globbing conventions, especially tilde expansion.
If you run Word Perfect under Linux, it's still not a Unix program. It's a Winix "app". It doesn't feel like Unix. xv is a Unix program, but ee is a Winix "app". KDE and CDE mostly comprise Winix "apps", not Unix programs. Netscape is a Winix "app", not a Unix program.
Linux users in particular seem to be happy with Winux "apps". Even more frighteningly, they seem happy to crank them out from scratch. I'm not completely certain I understand that phenomenon. Perhaps this is because they never really got into Unix programs in the first place. These things certainly aren't Unix friendly.
I don't see the mindless porting of Windows "apps" to Unix systems as being particularly useful to Unix people. The resulting "Winix apps" will never be proper programs and tools. They weren't designed that way. They may well appeal to the mindless masses who've been trained to accept a completely distinct set of cultural computing cues, and this strategy might get more non-technical users to employ the platform, but it does nothing to make happy those of us who are already comfortable with Unix. In fact, it often has quite the opposite effect.
This isn't Unix as Literature anymore. We're in the the post-literate age of populist pablum instead. But hey, that's both the price and prize of popularity. You're supposed to enjoy it. Well, unless you're one of those Unix types, that is.
Re:Winix apps are anti-Unix
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SBrauner
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· Score: 1
Not being usable as a tool called from other programs, nor being able to call other tools using this programs.
This is merely the definition of a stand alone application. It serves a different purpose than the traditional Unix app which is basically a tool. A game like Civ: CTP isn't going to be called as a tool. It's not meant for that. Same thing for various other apps.
Requiring a bitmapped display with bus-speed updates for proper operation, making them useless over a modem connection or on a vt100-style terminal.
That's right. Some programs are graphical. Some aren't. You're not going to be able to do everything you want over a terminal - and you shouldn't! The command line is good for some things, and a graphical display is good for others.
Can't be run in a batch script or cron job, because it can't be automated. Again, the tool vs. stand alone app arguement.
Being forced to learn yet another set of unsearchable, unmemorizable, unsortable hieroglyphics (iconic ideograms) rather than alphabetic commands. The ubiquitous "toolbar" at the top of every program.
Most winapps do have menus and keyboard shortcuts for commands. In fact, the commonality of the same commands in teh same places of windows programs (cut, copy, paste) means that the learning time required to use them is greatly decreased. The toolbar can often be disabled as well.
You do bring up a lot of good points, and if I didn't respond to a point, that meant I agreed with it. But how does the prevelance of these winix apps detract from what is Unix? If someone copies files from one directory to another in KDE instead of using cp, what does it matter? Unix isn't losing it's functionality by using GUI's, it's gaining. The trick is to do it correctly. You've made a lot of really good points, but I have to disagree with you in that I don't view something that's user-friendly, easy to learn, and graphical as something that's bad. If I misinterpreted your view, please let me know.
There's a lot of eliteist's who view the mass acceptance of linux as detrimental because they lose their select club. (I'm not saying you're one of these). I think that linux can move toward mass acceptance without requiring the user to operate at a minimal level of intelligence. Linux originated as an OS for programmers and I don't think it should lose that focus, but I do think that in years to come it can be flexible enough for your mom to use as well.
Shane Brauner
PS - Thanks for Perl!
Re:Why are we fighting over the OS?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Well I sure hope you sent a letter on company letterhead to Adobe and Autodesk requesting Linux ports of their programs...It's so easy to do. Why not do it? Posting a whine about it to Slashdot is no less effort and while you may not get a response immediately from those comapnies, complaining about it here is a guaranteed waste of your time.
More slahsdot FUD
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
1) MainWin is not an emulator.
2) "Expensive" is a relative term. Even it is $50,000, that is cheap if it leads to $500,000 is additional sales.
Think about it.
What?s up with the ??s
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Please tell us how/why you used ? in place of '.
Re:What?s up with the ??s
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
looks fine in my ie5 running on Windows. Unfortunately on my Linux/Netscape machine at home I frequently see this, especially here. I suspect it *must* be Microsoft's problem...
Yes. It's a result of them using a non-standard character set. In this case, it's IE's fault for not converting text in a form to the standard character set (ISO10646-1) before submitting them to the webserver.
The Source is indeed very usefull but generally, it is much more effective to have valid and up to date API documentation. This is what Linux is missing most.
Re:Cars and Roads
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
Well you comparison between Software and OS with Cars and Roads is pretty good, but it shows that you've not had an awful lot of choice.
Well its more like cars and countries, cos in some countries you get loads of gravel tracks while in others you get motorways, some with speed limits and others without and in some countries you even drive on the other side of the road.
Thats why you're fighting OS wars - it doesnt matter if youre driving a tractor, but for any faster car it matters quite a lot!
Re:Netscape's ugly & old-looking.
by
uradu
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· Score: 1
I beg to differ there, if you check carefully I think you'll find that IE5 implements more of the useful stuff in the latest HTML4 and DHTML specs. Especially the new text control in DHTML often works more correctly and predictably under IE. Of course, neither browser deserves too much credit, since full support is still far off.
I'm mainly using IE5 simply because it feels faster on my machines. I've used both Netscape and IE since versions 3, and IE has always been snappier as far as I'm concerned. True, IE5 has the extremely irritating disappearing BACK button feature, which sends me up the wall. Still, not enough reason to switch to Netscape. Besides, OE5 is head and shoulders above Messenger, which can't even check multiple POP3 accounts. So unless I feel that I'm truly missing out by not using Netscape, I'll poop on it.
MainWin will come out and very very likely be much better than WINE. But it will cause the open-source movement to rally around WINE, to show how far it has to go. Lots more effort will be put into it's development, and as a result, we will get a far superior, Open-sourced product than the one we have.
Bring MainWin on. I'll use it, until WINE Improves on all of it's features. And as open sourced recods have shown, it won't take very long.
Re:It's all about maintaining control of the API
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gblues
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· Score: 1
Because microsoft defines the API they are able to include hidden calls that only they know about. Some of these calls are simply faster implementations of other calls which are already documented. Others are unique. Either way it gives their applications an out of the box advantage over anything a competitor might develop.
I've seen various comments about the alleged "hidden API calls" in the win32 API that Microsoft uses to get an unfair edge over the competition. I think all these "hidden" calls are really just internal API calls being called directly, instead of going through the documented calls. Is it any wonder that old applications break when the DLL gets upgraded?
Instead of hating MS for using "hidden" calls, laugh at them for their poor coding methodology.
Nathan
Porting from Windows to UNIX
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I have ported a lot of code from UNIX (Solaris sparc and x86, DEC-UX, AIX and Linux, and even BEOS) to Windows and vice-versa. C being very portable, the only major difficulties when porting that I have encountered so far had to do with threads and file systems (I suppose IO and drivers too but I don't use them) for which I use my own set of functions which call the proper OS native functions as necessary. There are some other quirks like strncmp vs stricmp and things like that which are usually just a matter of placing a #define. What I hate the most when porting to Windows is going from a regular "make" setup to a Visual C++ workspace. Of course, I don't program much GUI stuff... Fortunately for Linux, Borland and Corel will have a great set of solutions early next year that will address this issue (GUI) and others. If X was way easier to program, there would be no reason for software not being ported to UNIX. I don't want to bother with a specific toolkit, especially when there are many equivalent, all more or less competing with each other. My point is screw MainSoft, it's for the lazy people who don't know/care about UNIX anyway. As for Wine, let's hope it's a temporary fix to the Linux application availability issue. It's obvious that it's just another attempt from Microsoft to bring developers from UNIX to Windows. Next thing you know, Mainsoft won't support this or that pseudo-important feature that Windows has.
I first ran into MainSoft when I needed a UNIX version of Visual SourceSafe. It appeared to do what I needed it to do (access repositories stored on a UNIX box, shared via Samba, between Windows and UNIX), and so my company bought it.
So I get called by a sales director, and we get to talking about this. (This was in April of 1999, btw.) I tell him that I'd -really- like to get my hands on a version for Linux, since that's where we were doing most of our coding. His answer was rather surprising... (Not a direct quote, but as much as I remember.)
"We haven't put any significant resources into Linux because we haven't had the demand for it. We would end up losing money on the porting. SourceSafe uses our MainWin library, and that's not ported right now, because developers don't seem to want to target Linux. We are, however, taking note of the number of requests, and it's quickly approaching critical mass."
Yes, I know, it's Marketing speaking, and Engineering is always a few months behind. But still.
He also gave some rather interesting insights into SourceSafe. He said that they got the source for SourceSafe 5 from Microsoft, and they ended up having to fix a lot of bugs in it. They did send the fixes back to MS. Anyway, they'd been promised the source for SourceSafe 6 a long while before they actually got it -- two months. They recommitted the resources they were going to use to do the port a couple of weeks before they actually got the source... and by then it was too late.
MainSoft has been one of the nicer companies I've ever had the pleasure of doing business with, actually. I do hope they succeed. (And they don't even, unlike MS FrontPage's Apache extensions, require root privilege to run!)
-Winged
A big offtopic, but not really
by
Foogle
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· Score: 2
What you just said was a decent argument in favor of WINE. Seriously, if I had no opinion either way and I read it, I would've been pushed away from MainWin. The original poster, however, just said "I think WINE is better. I don't think MainWin will work as well. WINE is themeable.", so you can understand why I didn't jump through hoops to download the newest version of WINE.
I'd love to see a direct app-to-app comparison of MainWin and WINE, both using linux-compiled binaries. That would be really interesting. You may be right, of course, MainWin might really suck cheese. Or, the MainWin team might introduce a much better product to the Linux world, and we might be pleasantly suprised. I guess we'll see.
And on that note: Does this give anyone else an inkling that we might be seeing an MSIE port to Linux soon?
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Why was this moderated down?!?
by
dwalsh
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· Score: 1
I have used Navigtor for 3 years, version 2,3 and 4. Nobody can deny that Netscape set a new low benchmark for software quality. They should be criticised for this. The moderation should NOT be used to veto things you don't agree with, and support those that you do. It should be used to elevate the well written, funny or well reasoned, rather than moderating "Linux rulez, Windoze droolz" up.
-- ${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Sorry, folks. I badly want Wine to work. It doesn't. It isn't even close to working. Yes, I know that 90% or so of the API has been implemented, sort of, but the remainder will take years at the current pace.
MainWin, on the other hand, works. It has problems, but lots of companies are shipping software that runs on top of MainWin.
Not only does it NOT work, but by the time it DOES work, the API will change. W2K anyone? How about every friggin time MS updates MSVC++? It ain't gonna happen. Not to dis Open Source, or anything, but the pace of OSS projects just can't keep up with big money. I know you can't hire 9 mothers and make a baby in 1 month, but MS has a shitload of cash, and a lot of developers.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-- These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Re:blah
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Um.. yeah.
Can The GIMP parse EPS files? No. Does it have adjustment layers? No. Can you make a spot color channel in The GIMP? No. Can you create a duotone EPS? No. Does it have the history palette or history brush? No. Can you save in CMYK? No. Color management? No (which, in all fairness, may actually be a good thing:). Layer masks? No. Does it have a pen tool? No.^H^H^HYes, it does.
The GIMP *is* a wonderfully kick-ass program. It is completely free, and if I was a decent programmer (which I'm not) I'd love to add in layer masks, adjustment layers, history palette, history brush.
Unfortunately, color management, CMYK, Pantone (tm) spot colors, and possibly opening and saving EPS graphics.. these things are intellectual property minefields and may never get added in, for reasons that have nothing to do with the prodigious abilities of the programmers.
Every few months, I download a new version of the program, and every time I'm pleasantly surprised at what's been added since the last time. The pen tool is the most recent example.
"Yes they do when the site doesn't work because of the crappy implementation of those two facilities"
But that doesn't happen. No sensible webdeveloper would produce a site that doesn't work on the browser with the largest market share. If those two features are a problem the solution is simple: don't use 'em.
"I think it has - I'm not saying Netscape 4 is perfect, but it's a damn sight better than IE"
They are both far from perfect.
"What it looks like doesn't matter in the slightest. Whether it handles simple web standards is more important."
Bullshit, as I pointed out, looks are all that matter. The average user is quite clueless about so called standards (I think the word standard is a bit premature when it comes to HTML 4.0 since no browser has fully implemented it yet). Since the user (at this moment) chooses to use internet explorer, that's the target platform for web developers. So in reality most sites work on ie. The few that don't are usually not so relevant. It's been a long time since I encountered "this site only works with netscape 4.x" or even "this site is best viewed with netscape 4.x".
"They do when things don't work!!! Without standards you'll just end up with a proprietary MS-web - sure MS users can view it, but with the proliferation of set-top-boxes et. al that don't use IE, MS will be forced to comply to the standards..."
Set top boxes at this point use far less advanced browsers than netscape or IE. Generally HTML 4.0 and XML are not supported on them. So I don't see how this makes a difference.
I'm not saying I like this situation but I'm realistic enough to recognise things as they are. I truly hope mozilla will make a difference.
--
Jilles
I've used MainWin by MainSoft
by
Jerky+McNaughty
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· Score: 3
We used it to port a relatively large (~300,000 lines of source) Windows app to four flavors of UNIX. MainWin is quirky at best, but did allow us to ship said product on those platforms and customers seemed happy. I personally found the apps to be considerably more memory hungry and far slower than a native X11 app, but that's to be expected.
At the time, the licensing fees were somewhat high (approx $4,000-$5,000/year for one platform, additional platforms were cheaper).
I was always surprised that they didn't have Linux support, but that seems to be changing. All in all, it's still far better to be a Good Programmer (tm) and separate your GUI from your core code and allow yourself to "change with the times" and rewrite only the GUI portion when porting to new platforms. Toolkits like this are usually for programs which are inherently tied to the Windows platform either because of poor programming ability or lack of foresight about where the system would end up.
Re:Why are we fighting over the OS?
by
phillipkh
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· Score: 1
I believe that AutoCAD had Un*x versions up until AutoCAD r13c4. I still wish they did though...:(
I really wish there were some nice 3D modeling and rendering programs like trueSpace and 3DSMax for Linux. I guess that is my rant... I don't like using Windows, but I have to for 3D modeling and CAD...:/ (And I don't really like Blender very much.)
I'm guessing that microsoft is wanting to stake an early claim in the linux application department. They're making tons of money off of their products like Office. If they could get office over to *NIX platforms, they'd have the entire market of office software.
Also, look at it from Gates' perspective. He wants to be the big daddy showing the world the wonders of computers. He sees himself as the man who brought the information age to the world. His apsirations for money and dominance are not as great as his belief in himself as the 'bringer of technology to the world'. He sees the trend toward linux and this move with MainWin will allow him to plant his big foot securely in Linux. Gates controls the mass applications. The applications become what people know and use, making the OS secondary. The OS is merely there to get the average user into their favorite app. If everyone is running Linux, but staring at MS products all day long, Gates still wins. He's still steering the boat of technology and that's what he wants.
Re:Maybe it's not relevant to you,
by
Starselbrg
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· Score: 1
The point of the article is that it doesn't matter what OS we are all using. I was trying to say that it matters to me. If I have to pay for an upgrade just because MS is not willing to fix a bug, there is a problem. I didn't say Win95 sucks. I said Win95 has a bug that MS will not fix, therefor Linux is better for me and my system. Therefore, the OS matters for me.
I don't know where you are coming from with this 6 month trial version thing. I don't know about you, but I need to use my computer longer than 6 months, and I don't want it rendered useless at the end of that time.
Oh, and your "RedHat is more expensive than NT" argument "is pathetic" as you would say. I just downloaded the 6.1 ISO, and for free. NT is not free.
P.S. Think before you post, and actually read someones comment before you attack them.
Re:They Live, We Sleep
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I thought he said, "I came to chew bubblegum and kick ass," not "I came to kick ass and chew bubblegum," somebody got a video tape to check that out? Seriously though, there's some good potential in there for spraypainting slogans around places that are chained to the M$ OS'es... "They Live: We Sleep..."
I wasn't sleeping. Nor were any of the other/. readers AFAICT
Personally I think this is the only thing that would keep linux a contender
Contender. A contender for what? Linux does what it does quite well and Windows (NT, anyway) does what it does pretty well too. What's the "goal" that is being sought here? Linux (note, I didn't say Red Hat) has no stockholders. When all the hype is swept away, it still does what it does and unlike Amiga, OS/2 or others, no decision will come from On High to "kill it." It'll just keep building and improving, probably largely independently of what Micros~1 decides to do.
Wake up and realize linux is a collective piece of betaware built on 30 year old tech that is not suitable for most desktops
Betaware. If betaware means software with bugs (I prefer the term defects), then, yes, Linux is betaware. As is Windows, DOS, Doom, Unicenter and any other piece of complex software. If you are trying to imply that Linux is less stable or has more defects than Windows, you'll have to do a better sales job than that as you've provided no evidence of such a claim, only invective.
30 year old technology. Any widely used technology (Linux, MVS, Windows, for example) is going to be based on proven technology. Windows NT is based on VMS. Linux is based on Unix, MVS is, well, MVS. All of these technologies are based on 50ish year old technology - the transistor. The transistor is based on 150ish year old technology - electricity. If you're trying to imply that somehow Linux is fatally flawed because it uses established methodologies, you'll have to jump in the kettle yourself or provide alternate examples.
Re:Why are we fighting over the OS?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Actually, OS is very very relevant. I used to be deeply into web design and graphics, but since I switched to Linux I'm more interested in coding. Coding is not fun on windows while Linux still lacks Photoshop (I agree that Gimp is rather weak in comparison).
Before we all go off M$ bashing, have any of you ever seen MainSoft's product? It's been around for a while, you know.
What MainWin does is make windows-developed applications work under UNIX OSes. They are not just runnable, they run exactly like they do under windows. This is a good thing for linux, because it means that companies (like mine, for instance) which must spend serious amounts of money to develop applications under WinNT or Win95/98 don't have to spend equal amounts of money to port those applications (along with all the specialized GUI features, like drag-n-drop, scripting host, etc.) to the various UNIX flavors. This means more applications that would normally never see the light of day on UNIX have the opportunity to grow into a real market there.
For my company in particular, this is a life-saving product. We simply do not have the extra resources to develop all that stuff on another OS.
However, that being said, I do feel that in some ways microsoft is trying to preserve its market by getting developers to choose M$ as a "common" platform. IMHO this won't work. We only use mainwin because we want to port a product previously targeted for the winnt market to the UNIX market. If we knew there would be this kind of demand on UNIX 3 years ago, we would have developed the product differently.
Re:Puhleeze people
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Anonymous Coward
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My company used mainwin to port our WinNT/9x Gui application to Solaris and HP. All I can say is that the developers did not enjoy it. They wished that they could just write it natively, and the libs make the application less stable, and pretty ugly too.
Re:Puhleeze people
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The Mainsoft product is implemented over X fairly directly, and benefits from thread-safe libraries, like late model X11 provides. However, you can't get rid of X in your application -- the Windows model just assumes that a GUI window is going to be displayed on a console. This also means some human has to click a mouse button when your application GPFs.
I can't recommend it at all for use as any kind of server app in a lights-out environment.
And don't get me started on the per-seat pricing for the clients!
Re:Puhleeze people
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
What MainWin does is make windows-developed applications work under UNIX OSes. They are not just runnable, they run
exactly like they do under windows.
Woo hoo! I've always wanted to see BSODs under Linux!
I don't know about MainWin, but Wind/U (which Allaire uses for the Solaris Cold Fusion port) has this wonderful thing called a "registry daemon" that takes up gobs of RAM. Frankly, I don't need this kind of Windows flummery on my Linux box.
Re:MS Stamping out Open Source?
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drewpt
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Maybe Microsoft can start learning how to handle competition without resorting to low-down tactics such as buying the new company over
That's what business is about! Don't sell out.
Re:This is not really a good thing..
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I disagree with the first part of your comment. Many people dual boot right now to play games or, in my case, use Photoshop or some other programs that Linux has no equally good replacements at this time. If we could run these programs in Linux, that's less dual-booting and no need to pay for Windows licence. Good.
Based on XLib
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Sorry to post AC but if the wrong people see this, I may get into trouble.:-)
Mainsoft's solution is very low-level XLib code. When my company looked into using Mainsoft as a Unix porting solution(at the time they had stuff working on Solaris 2.5.1+, AIX 4.3, HP 10.20, IRIX 6.3), we found a lot of problems with it because of the way it stressed X Server. Your machine had to be patched just right otherwise it failed to work(ie. crahs/hang up).
The interesting thing about Mainsoft's software is that functions very close to what it does on Win32 This means that there are by default two threads running(a guts thread and an GUI thread). Since the software is accessing X directly, you can make your applications exactly like Win32 or X. The registry is maintained on disk. Although WiGL was implement, OpenGL in general didn't seem to work all that well. Structered Storage worked great.
In the end we didn't use it because of stability issues. Out of the box, none of our machines worked correctly. Even after rigorous patching, which messed up two of the machines, it only partially functioned(OpenGL seemed to be their weakness).
I really do feel sorry for the Wine Team....Mainsoft gets all sorts of code and inside API directly from Microsoft that the Wine Team could never find.
Re:That's just plain Reverse FUD
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Ripley
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How do you know he has never seen MainWin? It has been a product for other versions of Unix for a while. From the MainSoft web site "MainWin currently supports: IBM AIX 4.3, HP-UX 11.00 and 10.20, IRIX 6.2, 6.3, and 6.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6. Support for DEC UNIX, IRIX 6.5 and Solaris 2.7 is in development and will be available in the near future." Elsewhere "MainWin allows you to recompile and deploy your Microsoft Windows application on UNIX platforms." MainWin is not primarily an end-user product. It is a developer product that allows developers to recompile their code into a native Unix format. I'm unclear on whether you have to ship shared libraries with a recompiled application. It is clear, though, that you can not take a Windows binary and plunk it down on a system with MainWin and expect it to run.
Maybe it's not relevant to you,
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Starselbrg
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· Score: 1
But it sure is relevant to me.
If you have been using all of the things that you need and they never crash and you never need to do anything more, than consider yourself lucky. I have never had so much luck with Windows.
If all of the apps that I need for Linux worked well for Windows--like emacs, TeX, an ftp server , bash, and telnet--I would still not use Windows. I just can't rely upon it. Linux never goes down on me. I can rely upon Linux.
Take for instance my situation with a K6-2 400. This chip has problems with Windows 95 because of something to do with a timing loop. The bug is well known and causes Windows to give a GPF one half the times it tries to boot. Microsoft has released a patch, but not for Windows 95a, which happens to be the version I have.
Essentially what they are saying is that if I am using 95a, I'm not important. So now, half the time I boot, I have to reboot. And this is just one example. Sometimes my mouse stops working randomly. Anytime I update drivers in Windows it's like running around in circles.
In short, we should advocate Linux of Windows 95 because 95 is unstable. I've never used NT because it's too expensive. That's why it shouldn't be a standard.
Re:Maybe it's not relevant to you,
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Anonymous Coward
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Why don't you try to compare Linux of today to Windows of today, like Win98SE? Your lame "Linux is better because Win95 sucks" is pathetic.
"I've never used NT because it's too expensive" You can get a 6 month trial version of NT for free so your excuse here is also quite lame. Check Pricewatch you can get NT4 workstation for less than Redhat costs at your local computer shop.
Re:Maybe it's not relevant to you,
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L0rdJedi
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· Score: 1
How much is this trial version of NT going to cost after 6 months compared to the continuing cost of RedHat after 6 months? Sounds like full price to me.
Well the IMDB says that it was "I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubble gum." Which sounds approximately right to me.
Re:This is not really a good thing..
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spencerogden
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I think you have argued against yourself very effectively. I think there are treatments out for Schizophrenia now.:-)
But, as to you first set of arguments. Users of Linux have already chosen an open-source product over all others because it runs faster and more stable than its closed source counterpart. If this project becomes a reality, and Mozilla has been released, will you use buggy, non-standard compliant, and unstable IE5, or will you load Mozilla? The success of this development would mean the best of both worlds. If a closed source product is better(god forbid;)) then use it, no one is forcing you to use an inferior product though.
What if this takes the wind out of the sails of open source projects, I don't think so. We already have Netscape for Linux, but Mozilla is going strong because Netscape sucks. I don't think IE5 is good enough either. As for other programs I think if open source developers think they can do a better job, they will try to. If the already existing program is good enough, they will concentrate on other areas which need improvement, this is the way it should be. Open source does not need to reinvent the wheel (in most cases) to be successful.
and what makes you think we can believe YOU? First off, people aren't leet for using Debian, they're just cool. Now, using Back Oriface makes you l337;P Wouldn't have posted this, but who the hell will moderate it down?:)
--
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson jdube is who
Do MS want this? If not, it will go the way WinOS/2 did under OS/2: they won't get their source contract renewed for Win2000/1/2 or whatever.
Or they could be bought back, the product delayed 8 month and then delivered with half the planned features, like with Citrix.
And better still: one of the (MANY) things that killed off OS/2 commercially was the lack of serious businness software: all this because all developers always preferred a Win version, because "it works on OS/2 too". Almost: the 'emulation' was never up to the real thing, the and you always had a lot of problems with win apps. Even IBM did this.
I'd really like to see such a thing, but I would not consider it so important like many here. It can be useful, but it won't alleviate the 'desktop software problem', at the contrary it would only become worse.
The current Linux model and software such as Apache and Samba are exactly what the computer world need right now. My hope is they will drive the market towards reliable and inexpensive computing solutions and variants of the open source attitude. I think it is a bad idea to move Linux and the application support towards Windows interoperability. It's all the things about Linux that differ from Windows that I like. If IE is so good (and it is) then let's see a worthy competitor that takes advantage of the benefits of Linux (like security and robustness). This is much more appealing than adding a layer of abstraction to allow IE to run on Linux, abstraction layers are inheritantly going to be slow and buggy.
Re:Linux Assimilate Java More
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Anonymous Coward
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Things are coming along... the latest gcc can compile Java source files and produce Java bytecodes, and there is a partially complete GNU Classpath based on Gtk+.
The real reason why Java isn't standard on Linux yet? Sun's licensing.
Re:That's just plain Reverse FUD
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MikeBabcock
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What I'm more interested in is the fact that any company actually interested in porting their apps to Linux can take WINE and work with it to make it work the way they want.
Sure, people like out-of-the-box solutions; that's why they buy Redhat (or Windows for that matter). But the point is that with open source solutions, those who find problems can fix them. This isn't about the religion of open source (or it shouldn't be, at least), but the reasoning for open source.
Is the target backwards?
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Anonymous Coward
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Perhaps instead of porting Windows apps to Linux, some effort should be done in making it trivial to port Linux apps to Windows. That would, in theory, make Linux the primary platform with Windows the secondary.
Think a moment about it. I've read articles that IBM has admitted that Windows compatibality helped contribute to the demise of OS/2. Why should Linux strive for the same thing that killed OS/2? Allow developers to build on Linux and run on Windows with no modification. I know WINE has that as one of it's goals and that, to me, was where the Linux community really needs to go.
Yes. I like Wine. No I don't use a Windows OS at work or at home. I'm the kind of guy MS fears... I used to write software with there dev tools for their OS. Now I work only with Linux. It was not hard to get here. I do not need to use IE5 to read webpages. So what does this do for me? Nothing. Am I impressed? NO! Why? I've seen this kinda thing befour. Will it change things? No not really. Should this company release their software for Linux? I don't care. And here is why.
I see the future of computing depending on a net connection and a browser. Why get hung up on the OS someone uses when It's all going back to a Central browser/server based computting model anyway.
If you use Linux save your money. If you use windows and Linux. Enjoy the free time you get from rebooting.
--
Last one in jail is a fascist.
Building one's house upon sand
by
FreeUser
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· Score: 2
As an athiest I find it very amusing to be suggesting that you check out a passage in the Bible, of all places. However, the Christians have a very apropos parable which should explain to you the fundamental flaw in your reasoning.
When using an operating system as poorly designed, buggy, unreliable, and proprietary (with all that implies: constantly moving technical targets for strategic business reasons, adding to the instability of the product and breaking dependent code -- i.e. programs, etc.) as, say, Microsoft Windows, you are essentially building your house upon a foundation of sand. It may be a very pretty house, with snazzy features that would make any home owner green with envy. But alas, after the first big tide, it will be little more than driftwood.
It doesn't matter how well written your CAD program is, if the operating system it is running on is so unreliable and crash-prone that you are frequently losing hours of work. Add to that the time and money forced upgrades your vendor requires you to make in order to "remain supported", and you have an ideal scenerio for flushing a great quantity of cash and time which would have otherwise been productive down the toilet, directly into your vendors pockets. It may not even be the CAD manufacturer's fault, since they are more than likely chasing a target which Microsoft is moving every few months.
Add the complexity of wanting to use two or three independent apps, which depend on the same, moving platform (but aren't necessarilly being released on the same timetable), and you have a situation wherein at any given time one or more of the apps are incompatable with the very version of the OS the other apps require!
The OS is the very foundation of your system. Ignore it at your own peril.
Re:Been around for years but no-one's used it
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Anonymous Coward
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Yep, probably because no one wants to do the actual porting work (which there will be despite the "Win32 compatibility layer).
Also, the quality of these tools was probably not much (or any) better than Wine was...
Wine can run IE 5 now :)
by
Ian+Schmidt
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...but images aren't loading yet for reasons we're still working on. Still, basic page layout is intact and yes, it still blows Crapscape 4.7 out of the water on page loading speed.
OPEN SOURCE CANNOT BE DESTROYED
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Anonymous Coward
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Why the concern, Open Source by it's nature cannot be destroyed, as long as people believe in it it will exist, look at the linux,BSD, perl, sendmail, apache, KDE, Gnome, Zope etc etc momenutum gathered over the last 2/3 years. Lokk at all the news & developments in 1999. Everyday the announcements on Linux Today etc expand & confirm the massive strides open source software is making. I studied the MainWin web site as well as the Softway Interix website. Who cares what FUD / dubious business practices - strategies Microsoft may beimplementing / devising, they are an irrellevant in the bigger picture. As Bill Gates said on Paxman they are not in the business of free software. MainWin can rapidly extend the apps available for Linux / Unix therefore M$ loses market share for Windows 9X / NT / W2K Softway Interix provides a means for Unix ? Linux apps on Windows therefore Gnome / Kde / GIMP etc can run on Windows offering FREE high quality apps running on Windows platforms hence M$ & all the other proprietary firms Lotus, Adobe, Autodesk et al lose market share on Windows platforms as well. They cannot compete against high quality free price open source software that is why they will lose and open source will win Open source has gained sufficient critical mass. Enough people have seen the benefits and believe it is worth while committing resources to ensuring it's success. hence all the recent investments by the giants like IBM, HP, Intel, SGI etc. M$ can squirm, fud, play dirty tricks but inevitably they will be eclipsed because via the leverage of the internet open source will grow & prosper.
Re: proprietary MS-web
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Chris+Johnson
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"sure MS users can view it, but with the proliferation of set-top-boxes et. al that don't use IE, MS will be forced to comply to the standards..." Certainly not. In the situation of a proprietary MS web, only the set top boxes produced by MS proliferate, and in some cases the most common authoring software might well be tweaked to produce code that intentionally fails to work on whatever set-top boxes aren't made by MS, unless the vendors license proprietary IE code at extortionate prices from MS. I'm surprised you missed that, it's the most obvious thing in the world. We are already about 80% of the way towards that proprietary MS web, it's just that what with the DoJ case and Netscape only recently having died and AOL not being dead enough yet, MS doesn't choose to start turning the screws just yet. The time to start changing everything to really punish anything non-MS and render it useless is about a year and a half from now assuming their plans continue effectively. Until that time it is not in their best interest to put on the pressure. It's like hunting and chasing something- they have to let the rest of the computer industry run until it is tired before they catch up to it and snap its collective neck. Closing with it too early is overly chancy, and not the behavior of a smart predator, and MS may be a dreadfully sloppy software developer but they are a very smart predator and always have been, in the sense that Sweeney Todd may have been a terrible barber but was a very effective murderer.
Mainsoft is a "Lock-Step" Porting Solution
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EXTomar
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· Score: 1
One of the things that struct me while working with Mainsoft's software is that it is very geared toward being a "lock-step" porting solution. You right all of your code on Windows and then move it over to Unix, use their stuff, and churn out a Unix application. This is great if your company works like that, but for many places, there is active development on both Windows and Unix(all sorts of flavors mind you:-) ). With Mainsoft, it was too hard to do active development with their stuff. For instance, many of the scripts you run once...what happens if the settings change(ie remove a file from the build, change compiler flags, etc.)? To make the system really work, you make the changes on Windows, and re-port your application. Not the best way to go about doing things....
1. the GIMP, cool as it is, will never kill Photoshop.
Not in its current state. But it's open sourced, and if enough people start working, then it'll have a fair chance.
2. I agree, IE5 sucks. NOT the way to go. 3. Have you actually used Opera? Not quite there. Try looking at pages that us DHTML or CSS. Opera == Suck.
Eh? I used Opera for two years when I used windows. Simply put - it's the greatest webbrowser available. And I did never see any problems with the CSS support. Actually, it was much better than netscapes.
I seem to remember a test, were Opera covered 78% of CSS correctly, IE 70-something, and Netscape 60-something.. Don't know if I remember it all correct though.
And, I've never experienced any trouble with DHTML neither.
In my experience, Opera == rules. (to put it in your words).
Wake up and realize linux is a collective piece of betaware
If it is betaware, it's the most stable beta I've ever seen.
#define SARCASM
Besides, I wonder when the first release will come out? Version number 3, perhaps?
#undef SARCASM
built on 30 year old tech
That's about the best compliment I can think of. NOTHING in the computer world lasts 30 years! Yet Unix has managed to do it.
I guess that means that in 30 years, no one has been able to do what Unix does better than Unix does it, or we wouldn't be using Unix now, would we?
that is not suitable for most desktops.
That's only because 99% of the people are used to either the Windows or Macintosh GUIs. I don't think the average user knows the look-and-feel of Gnome or KDE, simply because they aren't on display at Best Buy. (actually I prefer Window Maker or (gasp!) CDE myself, but that's a whole other story)
Yes, the millions (and millions!) of configuration files might confuse the average user, but configuration utilities WILL appear to ease the process.
A final word: Documentation is the key. Hint: WE need a "help" utility that searches the HowTOs, FAQs, and/or man pages (at the user's option, of course) for relevant data.
-- Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Excuse me for a moment while I laugh hysterically...
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
This whole "30 year-old technology" thing is getting a little old. How about saying something original that actually makes sense. If you're going to criticise Linux, which is all well and fine, please state specific features that are inferior because they are based on this "30 year old technology". Otherwise, this is nonsensical noise.
I challenge you to give me ONE aspect of M$ Windows that is also not based, at least partly, on some older technology. By technology, make sure you keep in mind the WHOLE of technology, such as our decimal system and all the other principles of mathematics, statistics and physics that have evolved over thousands of years. It is foolish to think that anybody can truly come up with something that is NOT based on older technology. The whole of modern Science and Mathematics has evolved over millenia to the point where it is today. There would never be any advancements if we didn't learn from our mistakes and improve because of it.
It is interesting that they don't mention WINE as competition. Normally ZDNet not mentioning the Open Source product wouldn't surprise me, but this *is* a Linux article.
Wine (by my guesstimation) is looking at a similar time period to be stable enough to port sellable applications with. Corel must think so too, or Corel Office on Linux would be too far off to be worth doing this way (IMHO, of course))
To head off wasted posts quickly, please remember that WINE is *BOTH* a Win32 API implementation, AND a Windows emulator (The latter being a binary loader and interface to the former, of course)
It is interesting that they don't mention WINE as competition. Normally ZDNet not mentioning the Open Source product wouldn't surprise me, but this *is* a Linux article.
It's slightly interesting, but perhaps not in the way you're thinking. This article appears to be a reworded version of the Press Release that Mainsoft released Monday.
I think it's more a case of ZDNet continuing to illustrate that they are not concerned with journalism. Even google turns up hits on their site for Wine, but the last one by Mary Jo is from December, 1998... And it's doubtful whether a zdnet type can remember that long. At least they toned the press release down a bit, and ran it through demoronizer, though.
For instance, the subheading of the press release is: "Mainsoft? Corporation First to Address Market Demand for Applications on the Linux Operating System" - Which actually reflects as doubly disingenuous of Mainsoft, as Corel has been doing much work on Winelib *and* using it to port all of their applications to Linux. (not to mention Netscape, Star Division, etc, who have supported Linux before any "HOT IT INDUSTRY" trade mag had ever mentioned Linux)
This brings to mind some comments Mary Jo Foley made in an article where the "HOT IT INDUSTRY" trade mags were holding a Slashdot bashing. She said that it was weird how Slashdot would "slant" things, eg., they would pick out the parts that made Microsoft look stupid, rather than hightlight the article a real -journalist- would.
I get the idea that her idea of a real journalist's job is to further polish and sensationalize press releases and product announcements so as to better fit the audience the magazine targets. Fun stuff, those editorial policies.
Re:blah
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
How exactly does using a modern email client that works well and has the benefits of Outlook make for "dumbing down" linux? Let's see...Outlook...Pine....Outlook..."K"mail...outloo k...nasty-ass-Netscape Messenger...hrrmmm. I'll take Outlook thank you. If you can't get over the fact that M.S. made it to see that it isn't really a bad peice of mail client then why don't you STFU?
BTW, I prefer OE5 to Outlook98 or whatever but they still both do their job well.
I've worked with this product
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
I worked in a company that used this product. It has much more complete API coverage than Wine. However, it is very expensive and does not work very well. It results in extremely buggy and slow apps which use ludicrous amounts of memory. Also, patch releases often have regressions for even the most trivial bugs. I strongly recommend that anyone who needs to port a Windows product to Unix do a proper native port, with an XP back end and per-platform GUIs instead. It's a bigger up-front investement but it will pay off in the long run.
Re:blah
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I have supported it for the last year. The only problems I've seen from end users is configuration settings, and usually because of the ISP I work for thinking they know how to code an installer that puts the correct config in there.
Win32 on UNIX... how many re-implementations?
by
matthead
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· Score: 2
I'm disappointed that ZDNet didn't mention WINE in their article. You'd think they'd make an effort to make a more complete report- they mentioned Bristol, which sounds like a slightly different project.
This almost reminds me of something I saw this summer... I worked a comapny which routinely uses SAMBA when deploying mixed UNIX/Windows networks for clients. We recieved plenty of advertising for a product that did exactly what SAMBA did- for a price, of course. One of the quotes in the brochure was supposedly from a CEO who said something along the lines of "Our projects are too valuable to trust to free software..."
We all shared a good laugh over that one. Who has experience with this? Is it a way better product than WINE? Or can we laugh at this, also?
--
-Matthead
Re:Win32 on UNIX... how many re-implementations?
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Per+Abrahamsen
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· Score: 2
It is more likely to be bug-compatible, since they use the original Win32 code.
Re:Requirement
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
As such prehaps the ability to have office etc running on Linux might help make the tranistion into the market place a bit easier Then agin we can always try to make people like startoffice or applixware.
Why not? We made lots of people "like" MS Office the same way. Why do we short-change most people and their ability to adapt, and instead pander to their fears? Oh, wait. That's how marketing works. Sorry, my bad.
You have to admit that Windows is still dominent on the desktop and anything that allows linux to provide easier access to this might be helpful.
Again, why? This is like calling a Geo Metro a "Porsche 911 Turbo in sheep's clothing".
I don't like M$ os much as the next person but if they make there product open source (I know likely as hell freezing over) that it just might help.
Unless BillG decided that he needed another big Billion-Dollar charity tax write off. MS shareholders will never let this happen.
There are alternative as we all know like Wine (and maybe VMWARE) but they either have don't have full application support or take a large performance hit. Just my 2 pence.
and just how much performance do most people need to run MS Office? Yes, I do not notice much usability difference, if at all, between the 2 machines I use most: P200MMX w/ 64MB RAM, PII-300 w/128MB RAM, with MS Office. That people still buy into the MS & Intel marketing bullshit is disturbing.
You're telling me THAT'S why IE for UNIX sucks so badly? (Yes, it sucks. I've heard that from all the people who tried to run IE for Solaris/SPARC.)
--
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
There is more to porting....
by
cpuffer_hammer
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· Score: 1
It will take more to porting than replacing the API and emulating the environment.
There file permitions and home directories personal configurations. Windows is to single user focused. Not not that the wide range of hardware Linux runs on will make life easer for ports. Finaly there is the culture of FreeSoftware (not just OpenSource but realy free).
Of course there are some people who don't care if someone else owns the tools they use. They may give up there freedom and take there support and creativity with them. That will be sad, but I can live with the tools I have now and there will still be progress just slower and of better quality.
With Microsoft now porting the Win32 API onto Linux does this means that there will be a flood of windows programs available for Linux. As good a linux is at the server end even Linus has said Linux isn't ready for the desktop because it can be still unfriendly to a newbie. As such prehaps the ability to have office etc running on Linux might help make the tranistion into the market place a bit easier Then agin we can always try to make people like startoffice or applixware. You have to admit that Windows is still dominent on the desktop and anything that allows linux to provide easier access to this might be helpful. I don't like M$ os much as the next person but if they make there product open source (I know likely as hell freezing over) that it just might help. There are alternative as we all know like Wine (and maybe VMWARE) but they either have don't have full application support or take a large performance hit. Just my 2 pence.
As good a linux is at the server end even Linus has said Linux isn't ready for the desktop because it can be still unfriendly to a newbie. As such prehaps the ability to have office etc running on Linux might help make the tranistion into the market place a bit easier.
Just a nit to pick here, but the M$ 'productivity' suites are so complex now that putting them on Linux isn't going to make Linux any friendlier to newbies - just more familiar in certain ways. That will indeed ease transition into market.
However, as complex as the full Win32 experiences are, they do offer a certain level of coherency and interoperability that will be sorely missed by putting these apps on a Linux platform. It's like getting the worst of both worlds.
--
Ever heard of CygWin?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Actually, there is a similar kind of product for letting Linux apps run on Windows. It's called CygWin by Cygnus Software (Solutions? can't remember...it's Cygnus something, anyway). The major difference between MainWin and this being CygWin is open source. As I recall it runs gcc and its libraries on Windows, but I could be wrong.
Re:Ever heard of CygWin?
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Guy+Harris
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· Score: 2
The major difference between MainWin and this being CygWin is open source.
No, the major difference between MainWin and Cygwin is that they go in opposite directions; MainWin provides a Win32 API atop UNIX-compatible OSes, while Cygwin provides a UNIX API atop Win32 OSes. If you want to contrast Cygwin to a non-open-source UNIX-apps-atop-Windows product, contrast it with Interix, and if you want to contrast MainWin with open-source Windows-apps-atop-UNIX software, contrast it with Wine or TWIN or Twine, say.
Re:FreeBSD
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I disagree. This is a Good Thing, considering most Windows applications would require something, IMHO, resembling a major re-write. Motif/X11 libraries aren't anything like Windows 95/NT programming APIs; porting to Linux would definately take a good portion of time. A perfect example of this is Word Perfect, of Corel. Corel didn't break any ground in porting it to Linux; they already had a Unix version beforehand. And as a user of Word Perfect can clearly see, the Unix version isn't the Windows version. Anything that helps OpenSource win is a winner. People who shun projects because of them making an operating less obscure/niche market are simply complaining about status.
I have wanted to be able to use Internet Explorer for Linux for a long time. I don't like many Microsoft products but IE is one thing microsoft did right.... It crashes less on me than any other browser I have used. So until Mozilla gets to a stable point, I may start using IE! On the other hand I think we need to keep an eye on this type of stuff. If alot of windows programs start flowing into *nix it could cause interest in open source to taper off. Alot of people get into developing open source products because they want to do something in their OS of choice and find out that there arn't any programs out there that do what they want... If there are alot more closed source programs out there coming over from windows, not only will there be less "why doesn't my OS have one of those" projects and more people learning the windows api and going closed source because its common with that api. I know some people are going to flame me for suggesting using Microsoft products but grow up. If a company has a good product I am going to use it. If you have a valid counter or something to add to my statements please add them but if all you are interested in letting people know is how much you hate Microsoft, please don't waste everybodys time
Duh! MainWin was used to port the AIX and Solaris version of Internet Explorer 5! What would be the difficulty of implementing COM, OLE Automation and the rest? COM is a binary, well documented interface based, *working* component model using IDL (and some microsoft extentions) as Interface definitions. 'It's kind of fun to do the impossible.'
-- 'It's kind of fun to do the impossible.' - Walt Disney
Think your right, in fact, that's prob the only thing I'm missing. And even more about the coding, I prob wouldn't be using LICQ if I could use the Ready 'n Stable windhoos version. I also write windows code, but my code isn't included or sended with the package. (he windows doesn't come with a compiler:) Even though I give it to most who request source code.
ICQ for windows is just about the least-stable program I run. I have to kill it many times a day. I swear the developers misused pointers and drawing contexts and were like 'cool! it changes font when we don't reset the context, lets add that as a feature! Random font support.. oh, we can draw on the desktop now because we have corrupted windows NT's context table, lets put little square indicators on top of everything to show people are online'
It routinely hangs the browser when I try to send a link, or hangs itself when I try to see a link (doesn't matter if its IE or netscape). It also has a bug where if you do development work on the system, it will consider any breakpoint in MFC code to be a breakpoint in its own code (don't even ask me HOW it does that, with my program using a completely different MFC dll). Also about once a week I will notice that it will make some other random program in my computer set to 'always on top', while it seems to get a 'always on bottom' mode (Even though no such thing exists in the win32 api)
ICQ is a piece of work. And rather than fixing their broken client or their broken protocol, what do they do? Add a search engine, a web portal, a feature so you can look up peoples horoscope while browsing their personal information, add an embedded web server...
unfortunately, internet explorer would probably be the hardest possible program to emulate correctly. There are too many calls to undocumented system features. You would have to have a full COM, OLE Automation, and OLE/ActiveX implementation before you could even think of it working (that alone would be worth lots of money)
If alot of windows programs start flowing into *nix it could cause interest in open source to taper off.
I hadn't even thought of this point. If the licensing of MainWin was done in a certain way, it could actually end up being a license violation to make a MainWin-hosted program open source. Kind of like (and I know I risk making an apples-to-oranges comparison here, but bear with me) QT's "free" edition forces GPL, and to that end any GPL'd library won't let you link proprietary stuff to it.
I think the focus should be on developing native Linux apps. We don't need M$.
However, this could be a very good thing because it will bring more attention to Linux in the mainstream, although I still haven't yet decided if that is a truly good thing or not. As the masses start to realize that there is an alternative to Windows that can run all their favorite little apps, they will become more interested in finding out more about this Linux thing. Then, once we have their attention, we can do the old bait and switch. They will be able to directly compare Win32 ported apps to native Linux apps (IE5 vs. Netscape/Mozilla). They may start seeing that the native apps run better and they can pretty much do the same stuff that they did before with the other OS. To be effective and long-lasting, change must occur slowly over time, and this could be another bridge that allows more people to migrate to Linux.
I don't think this will harm the Open Source movement at all. If anything, it will boost its momentum as more and more people start seeing the value of competition.
$10 Brutus^H^H^H^H^H^HMainSoft is bought out before the end of the month.
-- Insanity Takes Its Toll. Please Have Exact Change
-- Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Re:blah
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
and yes i probably am ignorant, but its people like me who will make or break linux in the desktop marketplace. BFD. Linux does NOT need the "desktop marketplace" to succeed. Linux has won. MS is reacting to Linux now, not the other way around. MS will come out with a new way to figure out how to lock people in even tighter to Windows NT/2K/Millenium. More people like you will stop diddlying around with Linux, waiting for the Linux community to "make it work for you", and go back to your more comfortable domain, pat yourself on the back for making "the right choice", etc., to the relief of most Linux people.
(I hope you didn't go through the same kind of thing with espresso, cigars or martinis, but you're still probably trying to play golf better than Dorf...)
Besides, for your uses, you can use VMWare to run those apps (Ewwdora, Outlook Express, Internet Exploder, MS Office). So you may think that you're a real heavy-duty computer user, OK. I guess that makes you a legend in your own mind.
The only thing that could seriously wound Linux would be if the hardware got locked down, one way or the other, or it became part of the license agreement when you buy a new PC with Windows on it that you cannot remove Windows as it is an essential piece of the computer system, which, btw, you only have a license to use (extending the software license absurdity to the hardware level), you don't own it, and you are thus not allowed to modify it to your own needs other than through the ways the computer maker or Microsoft have determined is best for you.
Embrace, Extend, Vapor(ware)ize?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
It's late and my head's throbbing, so I don't recall any facts to back this up, but...
<conspiracy_theory> It seems to me as if this is a common M$ tactic, right? Announce that they're coming out with a new product that does this or that, to stop vendors from jumping in that direction. Then maybe come out with a token product which does (maybe) half of what they said, and finally kill it off completely. </conspiracy_theory>
Now admittedly, it's a M$ partner, but can you trust a cohort any more than the real thing?
Hmm... First the FUD campaign, now an interest diversion? Someone may be running very scared.
Re:Embrace, Extend, Vapor(ware)ize?
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jafac
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· Score: 1
" to drag potentially drifting developers back to Win32 with the promise of cross-platform binary compatibility."
It IS a nice promise. Too bad Apple doesn't get it. (another opportuninty to bitch about Win32-Yellowbox licensing taken).
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-- These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Re:Embrace, Extend, Vapor(ware)ize?
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Zigg
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· Score: 2
This would seem to be quite in line with the tagline on their website that makes me more nervous than anything:
Develop on Windows, run on UNIX
If this self-titled conspiracy theory is to be believed, here's a perfect reason to do it -- to drag potentially drifting developers back to Win32 with the promise of cross-platform binary compatibility.
All we can do it wait and see, I suppose. Oh well, I prefer programming in UN*X any day:-)
An OS is a road system, not just a road.
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Logger
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· Score: 1
I think a slight modification to the road analogy makes it more complete. A modern OS is more complicated than a road. A road is merely hardware, driving directly on the road is what embedded software designers do when they write applications running on hardware that doesn't use an operating system. You have one maybe two cars on the road, which is dangerous since there aren't any lines painted or street signs directing traffic. When a car crashes it's its own fault.
A modern operating system is more like a complete traffic system. It has street lights, street signs, dedicated movement and turning lanes, HOV lanes for real-time processes, cops, and the like. An OS with good memory management would also have barriers dividing one lane from the next, and if you wanted to change lanes you'd have to make a call on your cell phone to open a gate in the barrier so you could change lanes. In this context we should all be able to relate to how operating systems differ. The systems which control our freeways are operating systems, in every sense of the term. We've all experienced bad ones, and a few lucky people may have experienced good ones. (Under this scenario I've experienced Road Rage a time or two when some crazy "driver" "crashed" through my "Windows".) There's even a monopolistic force which ensures that when we build a new one, it always sucks just like all the others. We even just try to patch the old one, because we don't want to sacrifice backwards compatibility with our old cars/drivers.:)
Well, if you've ever driven on a good road system, you've been able to make the comparison and get frustrated when you drive on a crappy one. Then you know why operating systems matter, and why we fight over them.
Ryan
Re:blah
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"The Gimp OWNS Adobe Photoshop!!! "
You are so totally clueless as to make your opinion worthless. Try making something other than a cheezy web banner ad, Photoshop or even Paint Shop Pro, blows the doors off GIMP.
More detail: Not Motif... maybe
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ajs
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· Score: 2
From MainWin:
These Windows Services on UNIX incorporate several million lines of Windows source code, assuring you that your code will run on UNIX exactly as it does on NT.
MainWin's implementation of Win32 on UNIX is a thin, efficient layer that sits directly on top of UNIX operating system low-level services. MainWin's Win32 for UNIX supports the full range of Win32 API calls on the UNIX operating system.
Er... does anyone else see a contradiction here? I want to hear from someone who's got their hands on this beast. Does it use a toolkit? Does it even use X? Is it as much of a pig as it sounds?
Questions.....
Re:More detail: Not Motif... maybe
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Guy+Harris
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· Score: 3
does anyone else see a contradiction here?
A contradiction between "thin and efficient" and "several million lines of Windows source code"? Perhaps the "thin and efficient" layer implements very low-level Win32 operations, and the "several million lines of Windows source code" make those Win32 calls (and undocumented Windows calls implemented by MainWin, if any), so that most of the environment consists of said Windows source.
Think of it as containing its own toolkit, whose API looks suspiciously like the window-system part of Win32....
(No, I have no idea what rule they used to insert registered-trademark symbols into that white paper; of whom is "Window Manager" a trademark?:-))
The strategy is to make NT relevant
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Lucius+Lucanius
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· Score: 4
The whole point is to make NT apps run under *nix. Since the old school unix platforms are being drowned by the linux wave, MS is latching on to linux as an interoperability platform to stamp out. It's a clever tactic - basically, their goal in buying mainsoft was to position and elbow in NT. This is part of the elbowing process.
Nobody can accuse MS of being stupid. Their whole game plan in this area is to make NT indispensable.
This reminds me of an Andy Grove statement about how MS has its structure set up to act like antibodies reacting - they use email and feedback mechanisms to react rapidly and carry out their defense. It's very effective. Sure, people accuse them of being clueless, but they're the ones laughing. It's clever, and it works far more effectively than any other large software company.
BTW - Mary Jo Foley has been on a pro-linux anti-MS spree for months now. A lot of her articles are quite insightful too, though I suspect she's lost some of her MS insiders at this point. And she does read/. a few times a day.
L.
Re:The strategy is to make NT relevant
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Guy+Harris
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· Score: 2
basically, their goal in buying mainsoft
Mainsoft, or Softway? Microsoft did buy Softway, whose Interix product is sort of an inverse MainWin (it's a subsystem+libraries for NT that lets you recompile source code written for applications for UNIX-compatible OSes and run them on NT), but I have seen no announcement that they bought Mainsoft.
Microsoft probably views Interix as a way to get a site to move to NT if they have a pile of (in-house) UNIX apps, as the press release on their purchase suggests:
"Our acquisition of Softway's assets is a demonstration of our commitment to provide interoperability for applications and other solutions between UNIX and Windows," said Keith White, Director of Marketing, Business and Enterprise Division at Microsoft. "While we recommend that customers migrate their software solutions to native 32-bit Windows, today's announcement allows certain customers to move rapidly to a Windows NT-based solution during that transition process."
and they probably view WISE (Windows Interface Source Environment) products such as MainWin as a way of encouraging people to write Win32 applications rather than UNIX (or MacOS) applications.
Re:The strategy is to make NT relevant
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bram
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· Score: 1
Actually, that's probably what's happening. M$ is trying to get a grip on the *nix market, and what's the best way to do this? Creating applications for it that everybody depends on being there.
I can see the future now, within 5 years, every *nix will be able to run M$ apps, and every admin will have to explain her/himself to IT's why they aren't using on the company's servers.
I can't tell you how interesting and inspiring it is to see the above post. I'm an extremist, myself- on Linux I gravitate towards the approach Tom prefers, with digressions for things like trying out piles of GNOME apps to see what that's like (tried KDE, didn't like the 'winix' feel of the apps). However, when my Dr. Jekyll side takes over, Winix or for that matter Windows itself is pathetically inadequate, and I boot into MacOS day in and day out, running a set of habitual stable programs and not being bothered with inconsistencies on the scale of a Windows or Winix. So in some senses I would have to consider myself so much of a GUI purist that, again, Windows is pathetically inadequate, and Winix only gets by because it's too primitive to offer the full morass of Windows-like GUI crud! Most of your basic GUI functionality was present in MacOS before even System Six- there have been some very important refinements, particularly in defining semantics for drag and drop of various different datatypes between apps and in window zooming logic (which wasn't really perfected until System 7 and 8), but on the whole the essence of GUI is in offering a _simple_ and physically direct interface. Mere pictures are not enough- the ridiculous toolbarness of Windows and Winix is every bit as arcane as the most strangely-named Unix commands, only with pictures. It takes a lot of selfdiscipline to keep a GUI approachable and learnable- something that Windows disdains to do, and something that Winix/X in general never considered doing (for example, consider the classic X text handling mousebutton boondoggle! It entirely replaces direct manipulation with an emphasis on weird specialised controls, presumably so the mousehandling code will be simpler). What is the alternative? It is what Tom is talking about. It's not elitist- but it is very different. Consider a user interface where operations are no longer behaviors of 'app' objects lying around like Swiss Army Knives- instead they are like words that must be formed into sentences, new sentences for every need, an 'interface' that must be learned but is then used unthinkingly for years. I had to zap several lines of many HTML files the other day. My boss, with great effort and inconvenience, managed to fix the lines in one file and upload it by FTP to the website, using Windows tools. This involved a great deal of GUI manipulation. Using Winix tools would have required a comparable amount of clicking and manipulating (assuming a remote client), as it was inherent in the approach. I tired of watching him and said, 'Give me a terminal', and took over, doing all the rest of the files in vi on the webhosting machine itself, remotely via terminal, with the following commands: vi *foo.html, (arrowkeys), dd, dd, dd, dd, dd, ZZ. Lather, rinse, repeat- I could have been faster if I wanted to rush. Yet I'd had to learn, earlier, that vi had 'modes', what 'dd' and 'ZZ' meant, and how to run vi on a text file. If I was still more literate, the nature of the exact problem that faced me was a natural for a recursive line-deleting script, in that the deleted lines were always identical. If I spoke Unix even more fluently, the image is of me looking at one of the files, copying some text or making note of the lines to be deleted, and then effortlessly writing about two lines of bafflingly cryptic line noise script (if that!), hitting return, and just walking away. Done. Done all the same even if it was thousands of files to correct, because I had the power to identify common factors among the work to be done, and Unix had the power to let me address only the exact tasks that had to be performed, and to build a 'sentence' that was the Unix translation of "See those lines? Go through all the files and delete them when you see them." I didn't have quite that power. I vied with all the files individually, hampered by the terminal's inability to do tab filename completion (sorely missed), and still each task took easy seconds, not in spite of the lack of a GUI, but because there were no actions to perform that did not directly relate to what I was doing, and because the few vi commands I had committed to memory (just by use, nothing more) happened to perfectly suit the tasks I had to perform. If Linux becomes completely synonymous with KDE and Gnome, it will be cheating itself of some incredible potentialities- yet it cannot ever completely lose this. Anyone can fire up six different kinds of term (even if many people's goal is to never have to use one!) and all of this is latent, waiting to be used. More relevantly, the mere existence of KDE and Gnome does not mean that nobody is thinking about how to best maximize the classic potential of Unix, but combine it with the eye candy of modern window managers. I know I have a whiteboard right now filled with brainstorming on how to combine an eyecandy window manager with a powerful emphasis on term windows and methods of manipulating them and handling them. I'm talking not a GUI in which you can run terms, but a windowing environment centrally focussed on certain possibilities inherent in the concept of fixed-character-dimensions terms and use of a mouse to manage window positioning and launch icon-resident processes (and I'm thinking one button mouse with rightclicking being the extra value, rather than two-button or three-button as compulsory to be able to do anything). It's not ready yet. I'm still working on it and in fact I need some window manager behaviors that I'll have to learn to program, because nothing, not even E, does quite what I'm thinking of. But it's coming, because regardless of current fashion there IS another way of doing things, and the way to make it approachable is not to put buttons on everything, but to think out and design the concepts so that they make sense when used as language. Once people start using language-style interfaces, they never let go...
If microsoft ports Win32 over to Linux, The people working on WINE won't have any more problems. Also, if this happens, MS might also port win32 to other os's MacOS, BeOS, etc. Also, if this happens, more work environments will allow linux to be installed. I am not aloud to install linux on my work computer because it does not have certan programs (linux). If ms ported Win32, then I would be able to install, and load those programs.
-Tim
Re:Closed Source
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You know for all the Linux advocates who continually say there are apps to do anything and everything you want on Linux there sure are a lot of people who say they hate Windows/NT but 'have' to use it. If there are all these great apps available for Linux why is that? Are these people just to stupid to find them, or don't they exist outside of the minds of the rabid Linux advocates?
What are the actual apps they sell?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Which apps are they trying to run under linux? What is the point of this API exercise?
Re:What are the actual apps they sell?
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Guy+Harris
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· Score: 2
Apps?
"They", in the sense of "Mainsoft", sell Visual SourceSafe for UNIX, which is Microsoft's source code control system rehosted to UNIX using Mainsoft's MainWin product - MainWin isn't an app, it's libraries and the like to let you build Win32 apps to run on the UNIX-compatible OSes on which MainWin is offered.
Internet Explorer was ported to various UNIX-compatible OSes using it, as were a variety of apps - none of them looking like they'd be the Top Ten Shrink-Wrapped Windows Applications at your local computer store (they're more specialized) - as seen by checking out Mainsoft's press releases. Those applications don't all come from Mainsoft and don't all come from Microsoft; they come from a variety of vendors.
blah
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2
i dont see how so many people (of the posts ive read so far) can be complaining about WINE or anything like this.
i mean, this is exactly what LINUX needs. either that or some stable applications! look at netscape, oh wait it crashed. most people (except the over the top linux advocates) would prefer to use a stable web browser - so IE5 is obviously the way right now. what other applications?? hmm lets see... sure gimp is a nice tool, but wouldn't it be a lot cooler to use photoshop? email clients, ummm... netscape's email client is about the friendliest thing i've seen for an x-client and has the expected features, but outlook express or eudora is a hell of a lot better.
having a working win32api emulator is what linux needs if it is to get anywhere with people like myself. i've used linux for a few years on and off, sure it was fun to mess around with the console and play with x for a while - but now after all that time wasted crapping around i think i'd still prefer a nice, easy to use application which is a standard. give me IE5 and outlook or eudora for x and linux would have me for good - rather than it being a "hobby" to me and the many others who constantly swap between Windows and Linux.
look forward to the flames. and yes i probably am ignorant, but its people like me who will make or break linux in the desktop marketplace.
This could easily be something that gives linux alot more attention than what it currently has. Linux is lacking in the "User friendly" aspects that windows has. I know many people can argue that windows is user friendly but to most people starting up a machine and seeing that colorful desktop instead of a login screen makes them more comfortable.
There are alot of reasons that people use windows over Linux and those are price and stability. The reason people use windows is there are actually applications that do what they want easily. It is understandable that there arn't alot of applications out for Linux (yet) that are user friendly. Alot of Linux applications are written in computer scientists spare time. And we don't have to make something user friendly, chances are it won't be;) Some high quality windows applications could make Linux a possible choice in the corporate world as a desktop. With KDE and GNOME we arn't far off from being user friendly...
You like Windows? So use Windows -- and shut the fuck up! What is the big thing you people have about saying "no applications" when what you mean is "no Windows-like applications"? If you're dumb enough to use Outlook, go right ahead. Just don't demand that Linux be dumbed-down to your level.
Re:blah
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
another idiotic statement from an over the top linux advocate. you must be a student! linux does have "applications" - except they all pale in comparison to the feature filled applications that are present in windows.
ahh why bother replying, you and the others like you are the ones holding back linux from reaching its potential.
You're so right. People shouldn't be blind to some Linux app's inferiority. (though I prefer Linux apps just by the IDEA they are Linux and not MS. Maybe a part of our Linux preducice and blindness.) I for one will completely delete my NT partition and go only Linux if there is a Linux version of MS Source Safe. (for versioning reasons, I have all of my web apps and products in the database.) BTW, Is there a Linux alternative?
1. the GIMP, cool as it is, will never kill Photoshop. 2. I agree, IE5 sucks. NOT the way to go. 3. Have you actually used Opera? Not quite there. Try looking at pages that us DHTML or CSS. Opera == Suck. 3. Kmail is OK. just OK. I use it now but until it stops downloading previously read mail from the server when you elect to leave mail on the server, it will pale in comparison to Outlook.
Outlook's "intuitive interface" is annoying. I *hate* sitting there watching it do things for me, most of the time while it's filling in addresses and shit I'm trying to do something else, and my hard drive is clicking away because of it's doing what it thinks *it* should do. Uhhhg!!! The Gimp OWNS Adobe Photoshop!!! If you audit the features of the two (with a standard install of the newest version of each) you'll see the gimp has way more features, scripting support and loads of other things you have to fork out the dough for ps. Some of Adobe plugins are cool, but if you know what you are doing, you don't need them anyway... they are just extensions of what you could really do anyway with no addons.
Re:blah
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Linux alternative to VSS? Sure. They be a bit less "visual" right now, but they're there. SCCS. PVCS. Et al.
Again, if you *REALLY* need VSS, then run it on Linux through VMWare.
Re:blah
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Yeah, but you can do some wacky cool things with Outlook (custom forms... want one where your e-mail always prints out in landscape? Make a custom form to do it...then choose that form when printing the message, rather than diddle with the printer settings)... Outlook does have its lamer usability points. It doesn't really do lists of contacts well, if at all. In typical fashion, it obfuscates things that can be really important...like, why is it such a pain in the ass to view an e-mail message as it is, the whole complete unprocessed version of it (for forwarding a SPAM message).
Hmm, it's privately held...
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Lally+Singh
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· Score: 1
Whoops! just noticed that MainSoft is privately held. Looks like MS will have to make an offer that MainSoft can't refuse:-)
-- Insanity Takes Its Toll. Please Have Exact Change
-- Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Re:Hmm, it's privately held...
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artg
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· Score: 1
Mainsoft probably have no intention of refusing.. what better way to sell off a company that will lose it's primary product when Wine is good enough ?
Re:Why do people love IE5?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I'm a web developer, and have found Netscape to be a total pain in the butt when it comes to standards. For example, if you leave out certain optional html tags, Netscape goes crazy. IE on the other hand handles it just fine, like it's supposed to. Also, I believe it was Netscape that came with RedHat 6.0 that couldn't do Java Applets at all. If you would load up a site with Java on it, Netscape would crash. And one final point, Netscape's resizing sucks. It takes several seconds just to repaint a web page that IE could do in about 1/100th of a second.
Looking in the wrong direction
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hakker
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· Score: 1
I know some chinese developers working on this program out of Shanghai. What they are working on is more along the lines of this. Windows networking code is anything but posix compliant. Microsoft has decided to call their network api "windows sockets". The aim of this project, at least in part as I understand it, is to write an api for linux that will allow the use of "windows sockets" code on posix compliant systems. The primary aim of this is to bring windows flagship network programs (eg. MS Exchange Server and MS SQL Server) over to run on a linux platform. My point is, don't be looking for many desktop user MS appications on your X-Window desktop soon.
Reguards
Re:Looking in the wrong direction
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Guy+Harris
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· Score: 2
Windows networking code is anything but posix compliant.
As far as I know, the POSIX standards for network APIs (e.g., P1003.1g) are still drafts, so, arguably, NO networking code is "POSIX compliant"; has the standard been approved yet?
Microsoft has decided to call their network api "windows sockets".
They decided that ages ago; it's BSD-like, but has some of its own stuff (e.g., I think it lets you start a host name lookup without waiting for it to finish, and to wait for it to finish later, and, I suspect, to wait either for it to finish or some other event to come in, so you can handle other events while you're waiting).
The aim of this project, at least in part as I understand it, is to write an api for linux that will allow the use of "windows sockets" code on posix compliant systems.
If it works on POSIX-compliant systems, it's not an "API for Linux", it's an API for POSIX-compliant systems - or, rather, for systems that provide a networking API that looks like the POSIX/POSIX draft one, which would include but not be limited to UNIX.
Or, perhaps, it's for systems with a UNIX-style network API, rather than the (still apparently in draft form, as per the above) POSIX network API.
Of course, MainWin already has support for Winsock, according to this page on the Mainsoft site, so it's not as if that's not already available. And it supports more than just the sockets API; I rather suspect you'd need to support a heck of a lot more of the Win32 API than just the Winsock calls to port the server applications you mentioned, so I rather doubt that there's some project to deal only with Winsock.
Re:Why are we fighting over the OS?
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radsoft
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· Score: 1
The old IBM adage, "if it works don't fix it," has a new application as the world stumbles over into a new millennium. Today, in 1999, a new group might claim with pride of their favorite OS, "we don't have to fix it, because it works!"
The Holy War between the armies of Linux users, Windows users, and Mac die-hards has grown more vicious than ever. And none of the content of the diatribes actually matters one iota - and certainly not Dr. Goebbel's new anti-Linux page at microsoft.com.
My contention is that the only issue for most users is stability, and measuring stability for these users is straightforward. At the IBM think tank in Hursley in the south of England, where pressure is on to integrate with Windows NT, Linux is a clear favorite. "It's bulletproof," one developer told me. And that's all he needed to say. Stability is what end users want. They don't want blue screens of death, leaky drivers, faulting TCP stacks, and the like. They want to be able to turn on their computer and have it run - and run and run and run without re-booting all the time - and just do what they set out to do. And in this regard, Linux fits the bill, and no other OS comes close.
I am not a Linux user, but I am raised on UNIX. And I do vaguely remember when we got word about a chap across the sea from us in Stockholm who had taken the kernel to something called MINIX as I remember and was working on it. But when a developer tells me what he tells me in such uncertain terms, with such a note of satisfaction in his voice, directly corroborating all I've heard over the months and years - then I purport to know.
The application software will come. Maybe it will be freeware too. There once was a time when all software was officially free anyway. Long before the emergence of the Software Beast in Redmond. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs sold hardware - the software just tagged along. It seems we're back there again. You can't get around paying for hardware. The laws guarding software are a real headache. Someone might have to invest in programmers, but then again maybe they don't. Hardware companies might invest in support gurus, but then again they did that back in the old days too. For all MVS ever was, and it's hard to compare apples and oranges here, I don't think IBM would whine that open source was less stable than what they constructed.
And the complexity, as the opposing armies call it, is just a hurdle. The more people use computers - and new generations are being born all the time who know things by 10 that our IT gods never learned in their lifetimes - the more this "hurdle" will turn into an innocuous speed bump - just something else to be learned, like driving a car, cycling a washing machine, filling out an income tax form.
I think - I am guessing here - that the Linux experience might be akin to a Swiss avalanche. It needs momentum. And as it gathers momentum, it gathers power, and thereby more momentum. The more people using it, the more stable and developed it becomes, which results in even more people using it, which results in further stability, and so on and so forth. I don't regard corporate tagging onto the Linux bandwagon as decisive here - I just don't think it will matter much when the final score is in. I think the ordinary users in the field will determine the outcome - the users with PCs on their kitchen tables and cables running over their toasters, huddling over manuals deep in the night. The more the word gets out - the more people who use this system - the more it will spread. Like chatter teeth bumping into chatter teeth - sooner or later they're all yacking away.
Security isn't even an issue. What the web servers of the world run is one thing (and that's basically freeware anyway), what your kitchen gurus need is something quite different. Your kitchen gurus can't even spell security, raised as they are on shortcuts and Start menus and Favorites.
People have forecast the doom of William H. Goebbels 3 before. The Richest Man in the World has only grown richer. It's fashionable, even, to criticize him and his company. It's great gratuitous speculation to let him and his corporation have it when they're on the verge of introducing a new product. And the way it usually goes - once the product is released, in a few weeks, as the oooh's and ahhhh's die down, everyone with the stars still in their eyes, blinded by this new product, will forget this new Winter of Our Discontent.
But I'm not so sure this time. I won't be a fool and say Bill will even be scratched by this latest attack from Linux. But you never know. You just never do.
Where we at radsoft.net are stationed, it doesn't matter much really, although personally I am beginning to find the Windows experience rather enervating. We've been trying to fight bloat and compensate for unstable Microsoft system hacks ever since we had to use Windows - I think we've succeeded, but that doesn't mean we're happy about it.
Typical bait and switch Microsoft tactics. A sane business simply should not rely on a cross-platform solution that is fundamentally dependent on one of the target platforms! (Microsoft NT source code in this case) Microsoft did this with Bristol as well: gave them NT source code access, Bristol developed a WIN32 API implementation for Unix and this indirectly baited Unix companies like AutoDesk to port their app to NT and still keep it running on Unix as well. A year or two later Microsoft suddenly increased the licensing cost of the NT source code five-fold. Five-fold *per client license* price increase. What did this mean? NT-only versions of the software remained cheap, the Unix port suddenly got very expensive. Bristol actually went ahead and sued Microsoft (and lost the case badly), and AutoDesk was stranded in the NT space. Btw., the market share of AutoDesk's AutoCAD has dropped significantly since then, so this should be a warning to other businesses. Now how is MainSoft different? Sure it will work for a year or two, until President Bush orders his antitrust chief to settle with Microsoft (under ridiculous conditions). Microsoft will be the true 1100-pound gorilla again it used to be, and MainSoft will be yet another Bristol. Keep in mind that Microsoft can increase the price of the NT source code license unilaterally at any time, to almost any value. It's theirs after all, so if you depend on it thats your problem. What should we Linuxers do? Just ignore them and write cool Linux-API (Unix) apps, Micro/MainSoft are losers;) Maybe ask MainSoft wether Microsoft guarantees (contractually) that MainSoft will get easy, fair-price, volume-independent and early access to NT source code (and source code in development) in the future.
-- --Coke
Re:'Bait and Switch'
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
don't forget SoftImage , Microsoft bought them out made em port everthing to NT then sold em to avid. They actullay use MainSoft For theit Irix product and the performance on Irix is not that hot, very very sllugish.
You do NOT want MS using some portability library to get their apps onto Linux. Look at the experience with the MacOS. Around about 1990, MS went with a common core code base for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Windows and MacOS. It was thought to be a Good Thing, ensuring that MS would continue to keep the mature Mac revs current with the then fresh Windows versions.
Of course, it didn't stop with the core code. Anyone who loaded Office onto their new PPC back in '94 will remember that the GUI looked just like the Win version, and was soooooooo slooooooow. Exactly. MS was running their Win code through compatibility libs to end up with PPC executable. From that moment on, it was obvious MS was just milking the MacOS market with a minimum effort while they drove everyone over to Windows. It wasn't a hard sell, when the apps looked the same, and the native Windows version ran faster.
If MS ever allows one of it's captive licensee's efforts at an honest to God NT API on Linux product to become sucessful, you can COUNT on these things:
* the Linux port of apps built on it will run like molasses;
* those apps will always come out the better part of a year later than the Windows release; * commercial Linux-only apps will be ported to Windows, which will become their primary market; * non-traditional Linux users will blame the platform, not the application, and switch back to Windows; * you'll see lots of MS ads in Linux user, trade, and developer rags to draw money and effort off to Windows API's and applications.... and WINE will be long dead.
-- Luke, help me take this mask off... Just for once, let me butterfly kiss you with my own eyes.
AutoCAD on Linux....it would be nice!
by
savaget
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· Score: 1
It would be a dream come true to see apps like AutoCAD, MapInfo, CorelDraw..ect running on a Linux desktop. No more need to reboot every so many hours to avoid a GPF or a Blue Screen. Whether this would come true by porting these apps or running through Wine...it would not matter, just get them running on a stable platform!!
Why are we fighting over the OS?
by
flieghund
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· Score: 5
I am becoming resigned to the fact that the operating system, for all intents and purposes, is meaningless. I use a limited number of programs on a day to day basis; the three that I use the most are:
- AutoCAD 14 - form*Z 3.1 - Photoshop 5.5
(I am an architecture geek, if this wasn't obvious.) I have found that (at least in the case of Photoshop and form*Z) it matters next-to-none what OS I am on -- both run equally well and without any major differences on either platform. I'm stuck using a Windows machine for AutoCAD: Autodesk (its makers) decided after Release 12 (?) that it was no longer financially worthwhile to support two versions for platforms that made up less than 10% of the marketplace combined (namely, Mac and Unix). But I guess I'm okay with that, because it has allowed some nice CAD programs to flourish, at least on the Mac platform.
So, the point: I hate Windows; I specifically hate all the little crap that it does, its bugs, its "helpful features" that are anything but. However, due to my field of study and the choice of programs available, I'm rather stuck on a Windows machine. How I long to use Linux, Be, or *anything* other than Windows! Alas, I cannot. I was literally a few hours away from installing linux when I found that WINE cannot even run *older* versions of AutoCAD and form*Z and Photoshop, let alone execute the latest versions.
(I realize, and have heard arguments to the like before, that there are "similar" programs available on the linux platform. But is that really the solution you want to promote? "Don't like your OS? Switch and relearn all of the programs you use!" Harumph. For example: I've seen Gimp, I've dabbled with Gimp, I still vastly prefer the look, feel, and features of Photoshop. Sorry.)
I welcome anyone who wants to create the ability to escape the curse of Windows, even if it is MS itself at the heart of it. Remember what I said at the beginning: the OS is irrelevant. There are Holy Wars being faught over Mac vs. Win vs. Linux vs. Be vs. BSD vs. etc. Why? To me, operating systems are the roads of the world; programs are the cars. No one fusses about the roads they drive on (well, almost no one), but few people miss an opportunity to fuss about their car.
Okay, a fuzzy analogy, I apologize. (A wee bit tired right now...) Now, I'm an architecture geek, remember, not a computer geek; but try this: How much of what you do with your computer, productivity-wise, actually has anything directly to do with the operating system? I've examined my habits, and the answer is almost none. With few exceptions, almost everything I do on a computer involves programs that run on the OS, even telnet and plaintext editing. It seems to me that programs are where the money really is, not the OS.
Now, I am *NOT* advocating a "one world, one OS" system; rather, I'm envisioning a world in which there are multiple vendors for your OS, all of which are essentially the same. Think of it as the gas you put in your car -- with some minor performance variations, the gas from Shell will get you where you're going just as good as the gas from Mobil. What gas you put in your car doesn't matter nearly as much as where you are going.
Okay, to summarize: OS, irrelevant; programs, reason for having a computer; anything that blurs the distinction between one OS and the next (or makes the OS distinction a distant second to program usability), good news indeed.
-- "I came here to kick ass and chew
bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum."
MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
Re:Why are we fighting over the OS?
by
Coppit
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· Score: 1
Okay, to summarize: OS, irrelevant; programs, reason for having a computer; anything that blurs the distinction between one OS and the next (or makes the OS distinction a distant second to program usability), good news indeed.
I wholeheartedly agree. (Well, as long as the window manager isn't part of the OS -- I want that much control, at least.:)
However, you're not going to see it anytime soon. Microsoft is deathly afraid of the OS becoming a commodity, which is why they fight tooth and nail agaist Java and for the web browser market. These technologies make the OS irrelevant.
If you look at PDAs, you'll see that Microsoft has fought hard for the OS, but has largely failed because they entered late enough that they have to actually compete on quality.
------------------------------------------------ ------- "For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words
Re:Why are we fighting over the OS?
by
JamesKPolk
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· Score: 1
Yes, the OS *should* be irrelevant, because the OS should be as bug-free as possible, and programs should be portable (due to the source being open, etc. etc.)
However, Windows + AutoCAD does just the opposite. It's a shame that one is ever forced into windows, but it happens... Perhaps one of Autodesk's competitors will follow in Netscape's footsteps...
Re:Why are we fighting over the OS?
by
CausticPuppy
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· Score: 2
I agree that the applications, not the OS, are the reasons we're supposed to be using computers. I still have to use Windows because there simply isn't a decent MIDI/Multitrack audio program available for Linux. Cakewalk Pro Audio uses directX for its audio plugins (real-time reverb, etc) which is, of course, proprietary, but it works rather well.
However, Microsoft obviously doesn't feel the OS is "secondary" to the applications, because their OS actually costs more than most applications, especially NT. So for now, my home system dual-boots between Win98 and Linux. Right now I just have Linux there to learn it, but most of what I actually do requires Windows.
-- -CausticPuppy
"Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Ports in the wrong direction.
by
DunbarTheInept
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· Score: 1
Why do all these products try to port things the wrong way around? It's the hardcore developers that prefer Unix and the end-users that prefer Windows. Why have developers using the Win32 API to write products for end-users on Linux? That's totally backward. The developers would rather develop on Linux.
--
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
We don't need this. We need real Linux apps. Why would I want to use software that was designed for a crappy OS, by a crappy company?
Linux already has software for everything I need, including Quake. If you complain that Netscape is unstable (it isn't TOO bad under Linux, but it does die once in a while), use Lynx.
The only thing this is useful for is StarCraft anyway.
They will be real Linux apps. The will just look like Windows NT apps. Does anyone remember fvwm95? Not too long ago we were trying to make X look like Windows, now we abhore it. What is going on?
Oh and Quake is a really useful app, isn't it? Corporate Entities are going to flock to buy Quake licenses for all their employees are they?
Re:We need real Linux apps!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I'm confused. If Linux already has all the software you need, why are you concerned about more native Linux apps?
Re:FreeBSD
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Do you really think that "FreeBSD (and others) are, as yet, unpolluted by the influx of marketroids." ? I'm curious why FreeBSD have so many major releases instead of minor version bumps. After all it is a matter of downloading with cvsup/ftp right ? I think that also shows marketroids are concerned with selling an amount of cd's and to compete with linux distro's version bumping ? Tell me what changed from 2.2.8 to 3.1 to 4.0-alpha..
This is what I predicted about 5 years ago as how MS could kill Linux. It worked for the Mac. If Linux gets a lot of nice MS apps, all using the MS toolkit, then MS would gain control of the Linux apps market (face it, some MS apps are really good, and they're all really compatible with each-other). Then, later, MS could make them work a little slower or a little worse on Linux, and probably even find a way to make them "crash" Linux (denial of RAM attack if nothing else) and people who liked Linux but wanted their apps to work would be forced to get Windows boxen. I'm just surprised that it took MS so long to start, but I guess that they didn't feel too threatened.
Having an Open Source OS is only the first step. All APIs need to be Open Source as well, or they just invite the creation of a monopoly.
Have a nice day!
-- "The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Why Wine will be Better (IMHO)
by
_Gnubie_
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· Score: 4
Wine has come a long way in the past year. I can only hope this doesnt cause wine to lose its momentum.
Mainwin allows windows code to be compiled on linux into native executables. Wine does this too but also allows the loading of native Win binaries to be loaded and executed using the wine win32api implementation.
Will the Mainwin people implement directX and write a direct3d to glx translation layer like the Wine crew are doing? Personally I doubt it. Wine also allows the loading of _native_ linux libs from a win32 program. I can fire up halflife and wine will load the _linux_ glide lib and give me full 3d acceleration.
Last but certainly not least... Wine IS open source. You want to hack in something that makes the widgets look like GTK ones? fine! try doing that with Mainwin.
Yes, witness Microsoft's "Linux Killer". I'm sure it's a lame attempt, won't work, but won't be their last attempt - but here's the "angle".
The monopoly, is NOT the Windows OS itself. I'm not even sure Microsoft gives a rat's ass about the OS (witness the quality of it). Microsoft's franchise is THE PLATFORM. If Microsoft can make the platform more attractive, (by letting it run on Linux), they can keep more customers from defecting wholesale. Sure, some folks will defect to Linux because now they can run their favorite MS apps on it. But they're still buying closed source software from Microsoft. The non-technies will try it out, and the first few iterations might make it worthwhile, they'll feel like techies because they're running KRAD Linux. Then, Microsoft's partner will find some critical bugs in the system, and send out updates fixing the bugs, but bundled with performance slowing "enhancements". Gradually, the features will get crappier and crappier, and the non-technies will leave the Linux platform with a bad taste in their mouths, and go back to running Win apps natively on Windows. Either way, MS has not lost any MS Office customers.
This same strategy played out on the Macintosh platform - with the Mac port of Office. Mac users loved it, they had compatible files with the rest of the world, and then MS screwed it up so that it was unuseable (4.2.1), and people, instead of abandoning Office, abandoned Macintosh. Now, MS did a fine job with Office98. It's great. but it's meant to be a hold-off for the DOJ case. I'll bet you a 1100MHz Intel chip that the next version of MS Office for Mac SUCKS really really bad, on purpose. And people who spent money demigrating from Mac to Windows, and back to Mac, will be forced to go back to Windows with an even stronger "Windows Only" mentality than before. The folks that trusted MS, and bought Office98, in my opinion, are going to get screwed for trusting MS. Y'all should have bought Apple Works, and that file-translation thingie. Y'all should also bitch-slap anyone you know using MS Office on Windows, to get them to start using RTF or some other x-platform format, instead of native Word. By allowing people to continue using Word, you've gotten stuck in Microsoft's trap, and when Office01 sucks rocks, you'll have nobody to blame but yourself.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-- These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I work for a company that works with MainSoft. First they have very little to do with Microsoft. It's a little company that has a deal take the Microsoft source and port it to various *nix.
MainSoft has done an amazing job porting the Win32 API for *nix for some time now. The've ported it to Solaris and HP/UX. Why do you thing IE is out for Solaris and not Linux? Because IE for solaris is using MainSoft's win32 port!
Not only is MainSoft's port for win32, but COM/ATL and most C++ library's one uses in windows. It seriously only takes 5 mints to port your COM object to a Unix. No kidding.
Anyone who ses's this tech coming to the linux world a bad thing is blinded by there own linux cult paranoia.
Personally I think this is the only thing that would keep linux a contender. Wake up and realize linux is a collective piece of betaware built on 30 year old tech that is not suitable for most desktops. It's hot right now, but unless they get more things like mainsoft catering to it, it's going to burn out and die.
Personally I think this is the only thing that would keep linux a contender.
Heh, Linux is not only a contender, it is the slayer of Micro$oft. When 14 year old newbies are starting to install linux because its "cool" -- well, that certainly is progress. People that've used computers for 1 or two years installing a unixclone? Woah I say.
Wake up and realize linux is a collective piece of betaware built on 30 year old tech that is not suitable for most desktops.
Who do you think you are fooling? Humans are.. some thousand year old "tech". Let's make som robots to take over and erase the 'old tech'.;D
Also, you call linux betaware. Still, I've not had linux crash severly on me in the one year I've used it (Ok, I had a bad pagefault a couple of weeks ago.. my processor fan died.. I'm lucky I got home when I did.. an hour later and my processor would've been toast).
If X crash, I just jump to a shell. If my keyboard is 'locked' I just ssh in from another machine, kill X, and woah.:)
It?s hot right now, but unless they get more things like mainsoft catering to it, it?s going to burn out and die.
We don't need closed-source windows API's. WINE is a Good Thing (tm), while this crap should never be distributed by any of the major distros. I reallyreally hope that neither Debian, SuSE, RedHat, Slackware, Turbolinux or any of the others ever distrubte that crap.
Very Sad - Linux = O/S. NT=DOS + a thumping great overbloated windows (X) library + incompatablity code + glue code. As a byline very sorry to hear about Bristol, but the points are relevant. MS can throttle this aftermarket through pricing at a whim... Then do studies that 'prove' is is cheaper to go MS all the way. Just as windows code kills a formerly ok operating system (NT), you can bet emulation under linux will be equally bad. Just as Linux needs re-writing, MS can hold up the application bait, and a whole lot of 'brains' take the money and run, porting applications, to slow down linux outbreaks. Nice idea. However some budddies sense, developing skills for MS applications (exclusive) is a poor 2nd to writing real OS code. Maybe DOJ will rule MS has to release source, at highly favorable terms, until 10% market share obtained - although see Apple offerings. Maybe, saying look here, they can run emulation - they hope to weasel out of something more unpleasant.
FYI, NT is not built on DOS at all. While Windows 9x uses the DOS kernel, NT doesn't.
NT uses the "Windows NT Executive" (that blue pretty (and frightenenly familiar) blue screen that you see on bootup). Thatis the NT kernel. NT might include a DOS like Command Prompt, but then, so do many other OSes (like AmigaOS had CLI), but this isn't DOS, at all. That is one of the biggest differences betweem NT and Win9x.
Some years ago, I read a book by ex-Microserf Eller, about his experiences at MS since he started coding Windows 1.0 there. I found the part concerning GO Corporation very interesting. Around 1992, Go launched their pen-oriented (instead of mouse-oriented) operating system. Microsofts reaction was "Pen Windows", in fact just Windows 3.11 plus some DLLs for pen drivers and text recognition. In the marketing war thereafter, Microsoft said: "Hey, you don't need Go. Windows can do it too." The hype was gone and Go was dead, as Martin Eller describes it. The same might apply to this situation. Linux does a heck of a lot more than running Win32 binaries, but Microsoft will tell us that we don't need too switch to Linux, because Windows runs Win32 binaries natively. People won't see the difference between Windows and Linux anymore, and therefore people won't move to Linux. Isn't that the strategy, classical extend & embrace? Even if this idea doesn't kill Linux, it probably kills Wine. That is a real loss, because Wine is the bridge between Microsofts monopoly on the Win32 standard and the Open Source movement. Wine itself might be alpha forever, but look at the impact it has. Even for Windows-coders, it is a huge resource of information about Windows. Snippets of code have been reused in lots of (even closed-source) applications. Which exactly shows the importance of Linux: we do not want to depend of the Redmond Giant. That is the freedom you are talking about.
Re:Extend & Embrace
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
Nah, they won't kill Linux that way, or even Wine. There are more than enough existing Linux users to keep both projects going, and there aren't many of them that would go back to Windows. Would you? They might possibly slow down the growth of Linux a fraction, but we can wait.
A much easier way for Microsoft to kill Linux would be to release MS-Linux. They wouldn't be able to produce an incompatible kernel without violating the Linux trademark, but they *can* produce a proprietary set of libraries. Watch out for that one when they get really worried.
Why would mircrosoft want cross platform compatibility?
The simple reason I came up with is that If they loose ground in the operating system world, they still can continue with their line of software. If Linux-MFC (an oxymoron) is easier to program then many people will pay for microsoft's Developper studio (which is ok, other than it's cost).
They are just doing it so they will win both ways. Notice that they aren't making a windows application to run linux but vice-versa. This is because they realize that people don't like their operating system.
Just think, Do you really think they would do this if there wasn't anything in it for them.
This is not really a good thing..
by
Ice_Hole
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· Score: 3
Think about it.. This will change Linux a lot.. Everything for Linux (nearly everything) is open source. This is a good thing. But as soon as programs like this make it possible for Linux to run Windows apps, most of which are closed source, then we lose. Us open sourcers are still sucking Microsoft's tit for all it's worth (If that makes sence?) What is the point of Linux? I am sure this answer is different for everyone. I don't want Microsoft to come in, create a way for all Microsoft products and programs designed to run in Windows to be ran in Linux. It may sound nice to be able to use Microsoft Office, or IE, or other programs like that in Linux. But what are we willing to give to be able to do it? Are you willing to let Microsoft have their take in the Open Source field? Are you going to let them come in, and add to Linux for their own profit? Personally I would rather use a program some guy spent his time on makeing work right and efficiently, then some Microsoft Bloatware, that a team wrote not because they wanted to, but because that was their job. Which method turns out quality? I agree that the individual will not alway's come up with the better program..
Also, on the flip side. (Now this will get you thinking).. Is this really a smart move on Microsoft? Are they really getting rid of the Open Source community, trying to nudge them out? I think not! Think of what this would transform Linux into. Now Linux would be able to efficiently and stably run windows apps. Hmm.. Can Windows run UNIX apps in the same fasion? Now Linux will be able not only to run it's programs, but also Windoes programs, thus replaceing 2 computers. But a Windows machine will still leave you looking for the features of a Linux Machine.. Thus, a Linux machine would be able to effectively perform all the tasks of not only a Linux machine, but also a Windows NT machine.. As for Windows, it is still lacking a lot in terms of being able to perform well as a Linux/ UNIX machine.. This is also a good thing for the Linux Community. The main reason for a Windows user not to change to Linux is that their programs (Which they have grown to love) don't work on Linux! They don't want to leave what they know behind to learn somthing new. That is how life goes. With this people would be able to run their favorite programs. This is a nice thing to be able to do. And I personally would like to be able to do it also.
((I think I have argued both sides. But that's OK. They are my thaughts. I feel that they offer a little insight as to what is happening. What Microsoft want to accomplish I can only guess..))
-- "I couldn't give him (Bill Gates) advice in business and he couldn't give me advice in technology."
Linus Torvalds
Just another Win32 emulation layer
by
Raphael
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· Score: 2
After reading the MainWin overview on MainSoft's site, it is obvious that it is just another Win32 emulation layer, similar to Wine for Linux or Wabi for Solaris. Of course, they state on their page that MainWin is not an emulator. But all it does is to translate Win32 API calls to something that runs under Linux. The calls are executed in the MainWin layer (thanks to the Windows source code that they can use) or translated to Linux system calls. By the way, MainWin is already available for many UNIX systems, and they are just adding Linux to their list.
How is this different from Wine? On the negative side, it is closed source and probably quite expensive. On the positive side, the fact that they have access to the Windows source code means that they might be more compatible with all the undocumented Win32 features that are used by some MS applications.
I don't think that there is anything really exciting about this announcement. Win32 emulators have existed for quite a while on various UNIX systems, and all of them have their drawbacks. This one might be better in some areas and worse in some others, but it will never replace a native port of the applications to Linux.
If MicroSoft (not MainSoft) starts publishing press releases encouraging developers to work only on Win32 because it is portable to all environments including Linux, then we may have something to respond to. But I don't think that any serious company would stop porting their products to Linux because some small company provides a (closed and expensive) emulation layer for Win32 apps.
-- -Raphaël
Re:Just another Win32 emulation layer
by
GC
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· Score: 1
My understanding of the article tells me that this is not the same as WINE and nor is it an emulator.
WINE (Wine Is Not An Emulator either...)
* WINE runs Windows runtimes. * MainWin runs UNIX runtimes created from Windows NT source code.
Gnome/KDE
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Which one? After all, applications for one rarely support the other, and the majority of X apps don't support either. And I wouldn't call them useless for not supporting that (some of us have no need for tony panels to run X).
Why do people love IE5?
by
owain_vaughan
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· Score: 1
Why? Why? Why?
It doesn't implement half the features you would expect: eg. CGI programs generating multipart MIME output is handled fine by Netscape, but IE fails miserably.
Similarly the JavaScript handling is abysmal, document.domain doesn't work at all and plenty of simple JS is screwed up completely.
Why trust MS to implement standards properly and not just the ones they want to - to try and warp the market yet again?
Re:Why do people love IE5?
by
Alex+Belits
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· Score: 1
MSIE _resizes_ faster than Netscape. Windows has no window manager, so resizing/maximizing/un-maximizing is done often, and Netscape redraws take a lot of time. X has window managers, so the last thing X user will do is resizing Netscape window just to fit something on the screen.
-- Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Re:Why do people love IE5?
by
Emil+Brink
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· Score: 1
Hm, I think your comment gains a lot in understandability if one replaces "window manager" with "virtual desktop". Works for me, at least.:)
Re:Why do people love IE5?
by
Alex+Belits
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· Score: 1
Window shades are useful for handling large browser windows, too, and immediate reaction to window operations doesn't work well without a window manager if browser is busy doing something.
-- Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Re:Why do people love IE5?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
>Netscape font's (especially in Linux) look like >crap Now that I've installed MS truetype fonts under Linux fonts look fine in netscape. Anyway: Netscape is horribly slow to startup Netscape support for non european languages is inferior to IE in my experience (combo boxes are screwed). In netscape the back button doesn't work properly especially a pain here at slashdot. The smooth scrolling in IE is a real pleasure to watch somewhat put a lot of love into that. The user interface in IE is more deeply threaded I can (and often do) click on a link and then right click open in new window several other links while I'm waiting for the first click to be processed. Well actually this is my experience with IE4. I know that IE5 fixes several bugs in IE4 but I don't dare to install anymore software on my work pc than I absolutely have to. Kudos to microsoft for an outstanding piece of software. They also deserve credit for outlook express, an excellent mail client (except for poor keyboard handling and general MS limitations like no support for custom font sizes).
Most people are not webdevelopers so they use a browser that works for them. Non webdevelopers don't care about the mime output of cgi scripts. nor do they care about javascript.
"Why trust MS to implement standards properly.."
Netscape hasn't done any better (excluding mozilla which will take another few months to appear). The 4.x version of their browser can hardly be called standards compliant. But standards are only relevant to web developers not to users. Users expect their favorite webpages to just work they don't care how they work. This is something MS used to their advantage when developing IE. While netscape was fooling around with the 4.x generation of their browser, IE created IE which from a users point of view is faster, more stable and prettier.
And my pessimistic guess is that they will use the same thing again to outcompete mozilla. Nobody outside the webdevelopers community cares about standards. MS is compliant enough for most users.
--
Jilles
Re:Why do people love IE5?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Also my posts under IE don't get fucked up like they just did. That reminds using preview under IE here at slashdot doesn't lose the tags you have typed in while netscape does.
And when typing in this edit control under IE the page scrolls to make sure that the cursor is kept in visible rather than disappearing off the screen like netscape. (This is if the edit box is only partially visible)
>Netscape font's (especially in Linux) look like >crap Now that I've installed MS truetype fonts under Linux fonts look fine in netscape.
Anyway:
Netscape is horribly slow to startup
Netscape support for non european languages is inferior to IE in my experience (combo boxes are screwed).
In netscape the back button doesn't work properly especially a pain here at slashdot.
The smooth scrolling in IE is a real pleasure to watch somewhat put a lot of love into that.
The user interface in IE is more deeply threaded I can (and often do) click on a link and then right click open in new window several other links while I'm waiting for the first click to be processed.
Well actually this is my experience with IE4. I know that IE5 fixes several bugs in IE4 but I don't dare to install anymore software on my work pc than I absolutely have to. (No windows at home yet just linux at the moment)
Kudos to microsoft for an outstanding piece of software.
They also deserve credit for outlook express, an excellent mail client (except for poor keyboard handling and general MS limitations link no support for custom font sizes).
Typed under emacs as the stupid browser edit box was pissing me off.
Why do I love IE5? Let me list the ways. Because it has much better bookmark system. The one in Netscape is complete and utter crap. IE handles more HTML and more advanced HTML and its' dirivities (DHTML, CSS). IE also looks better just looking at it, Netscape looks like something out of the early 90's. Netscape font's (especially in Linux) look like crap, half the time the text is all scrunged up and tiny so it's a pain to read. Netscape is incredibly picky on your HTML, IE gives you more leeway. Netscape on Linux crashes at least once a day, if not more. IE crashes maybe once a week. And yes, that is pushing the browsers to the max (ie. having about 5 of them open at the same time) And don't get me started on the lack of plug-in's for Linux. I'd take IE over Netscape (especially for Linux) anyday. Luckily, the rest of Linux kicks ass, so I put up with Netscape when I boot into it : )
Re:Why do people love IE5?
by
IntlHarvester
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· Score: 1
Great, Except Netscape resizes slowly even on Windows.
From the look of it, resizing or changing the font in Netscape causes the browser to go back out to the network and reload the page. Why it does this instead of reloading from cache is beyond me.
Remember OS/2 and windows emulation?
by
MrOion
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· Score: 2
To be honest, I'm very skeptical to this "emulating windows"-thing. Remember OS/2? Why should people develop for OS/2 when it was able to run windows programs? Isn't it possible that the same thing can happen to Linux too, if it become capable of emulating windows?
I said skeptical, not afraid - this because I thrust the Linux/Open Source community to be able to avoid the trap... one way or another...:-)
Re:Remember OS/2 and windows emulation?
by
GC
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· Score: 1
This is not really an issue. I believe OS/2 emulated DOS and Windows then just ran on top of it. MainWin appears to actually use NT C++ source code in order to support the applications.
Also the programs here will be Linux runtime programs and not Windows runtimes. They will just have the Win32 look and feel (As long as the Window manager allows it:))
Does this mean that MS Internet Explorer will become available for Linux shortly?
I would like to see an open Win32 to UNIX transplatform development kit. Wine is not (IMO at least for a time to come) a good solution for Win32 interoperability. For one it's slow, as it has to emulate the Windows environment which is a cludge to begin with and two, emulation in any form leads to object incompatibility. Windows apps were only designed on Windows. So apps that use special interfaces which wine cannot supply either because the issues are too complex to emulate (like driver dependent software) or require some system resource, are then non-operational in the wine environment. In a desktop environment you want conformity among your applications. Such as a common toolkit, application integration, and standard API. A development kit such as I mentioned could optimize the win32 API translation and standardize on a toolkit making it practical to port Win32 to UNIX. I'm sure there's plenty of issues but definitely worth looking into.
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This space for rent. Call 1-800-SIGADVT to place your ad.
Re:Development kits
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Ever heard of winelib? The Win32 API library for porting Win32 apps to unix. It's the other half of the wine project, and is what eg. Corel is really interested in.
Microsoft Hedging on Linux?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
As the Linux movement becomes more successful in its goal of world domination but before Microsoft fizzles out *grin*, I predict the following scenario:
Microsoft becomes a Linux distributor themselves; it will either acquires Mainsoft or port their slowly dying Win32 API (Hmm... Win64 by then?) to Linux themselves; their Linux distribution would be the only one in the market that comes with their Office suite and other tools familiar to corporate users...;-p
Maybe I am suffering from both dementia and paranoia but I think this Mainsoft announcement bodes both good and evil.
Not *everyone* sweats away listening to dodgy loud metal trying to get the latest patch to apache to work, or whatever they're hacking on, for free. Businesses still exist and like to make money - it's way too early for us all to go broke & hippy about it all. Admittedly, M$loth apps are the last things I want to run - I do, however, need NT at home for the scanner and quake2, but otherwise I work off linux all day - because my ideology is not fundamentalist "linux has to be better", but rather, it *is* the way I want to work.
-- ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
I don't get it.. when I read the article I was thinkin', "That would be cool." But most of you posters seem to think otherwise. I don't see why.... Maybe because I'm a recent Linux convert still trying to get along without Windows aps....
Does anyone know how restricted MainSoft's use of Windows source code is?
It's all about maintaining control of the API
by
leereyno
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· Score: 2
The number one asset that microsoft has is the windows API. Because microsoft defines the API they are able to include hidden calls that only they know about. Some of these calls are simply faster implementations of other calls which are already documented. Others are unique. Either way it gives their applications an out of the box advantage over anything a competitor might develop. Wine threatens this hidden control by exposing the existence and nature of each call. Some of these calls have even been implemented in wine. Wine also has a slight chance of someday competing with microsoft in defining the windows API itself. If wine implements new and better calls that developer's make use of, Microsoft's control of the API will be threatened. Microsoft of course does not like this but they cannot directly attact wine because of the boiling water they are already in for anti-trust violations. So rather than attack wine they simply "embrace and extend," all to prevent the windows API from becoming open. Gates is a tricky SOB and that is also the kind of person he hires. The model Microsoft follows is that business is a form of warfare. Those of us who want to see Linux/*BSD/whatever succeed need to remember that and pay attention to what our customer's want. If we don't give it to them, MS surely will, even if their version is bloated and buggy.
-- Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Re:It's all about maintaining control of the API
by
artg
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· Score: 1
Picking up on an earlier comment.. one way in which Wine might provide a substantial improvement to the Win32 API is by implementing a Win64 API. Given Microsoft's record of portability, it's likely that Wine will be WAY ahead on this one (and will have Win32 on 64-bit platforms from day one). Win2000 will look pretty sick running in 32 bit mode against Wine running Win32 apps over a 64 bit kernel.
Linux Assimilate Java More
by
Boomstick
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· Score: 1
How does it feel to be assimilated?
Java developers know. As we enter the adjusted millenium, we will not yet have a decent Java 1.2 Virtual Machine in the major web browsers or on any alternative platforms except Solaris. And the penguins all like perl. Hopefully all that will change.
If the Justice Department does nothing, will we have Windows 2005 with a Linux kernel that sits on 90% of the desktops? To be better, Linux needs applications, and that's where Java should come in.
As Java developers turn to Linux, I hope Linux developers and Open Source developers assimilate with open arms.
off topic: ie5
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
errr
I heard that javascript was sort of invented by netscape (?). No wonder that implementation of JS in IE5 isn't perfect. You can't blame IE5 for not being "NS-compliant". If you ask me, webauthors should write HTML4 compliant source, that can be handled by any browser. In what way do you help the visitor of your homepage if his/her browser accidentally doesn't support your fancy gadgetteria?
Anyway this is way off topic so apologies for that mr./. moderator;^)
CSS were created by IE and we (at least I do) blame netscape of not compling with the W3 standard. By the way I do blame IE for not compling with it too.
Mozilla, if it ever gets done, will be the most standard web browser available. I am shure hope that it goes out soon enougth.
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
--
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Open source everything just doesn't work
by
leereyno
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· Score: 0
The open source movement is driven by the work of people who use what they create. This is why we have great operating systems like linux and *BSD. Great development tools like gcc. But what we don't have are a lot of great open source end user applications. There is gimp and I'm sure there are a few more examples of great open source apps, but not many. The open source model works best for the underlying layers used to create and run applications, not the applications themselves. This is why we probably won't ever see a truly great open source word processor or spreadsheet or whatever that is not in some way a commercial venture. Programmers have to eat and most of us do like money. There is little incentive to create things that you yourself won't use "just because." There is a lot of incentive to create tools to make tools to make applications you are going to use or are being paid to develop. That is where open source has always been and that is where it will be in the future.
-- Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Re:Open source everything just doesn't work
by
mill
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· Score: 1
KWord and Gnumeric will rival Word and Excel soon. At least in functionality normal users need.
There might not be an obvios commercial incentive to produce Free software when it comes to these kind of applications, but that doesn't seem to stop Miguel de Icaza or Torben Weis et al to do it.
I think the money will be in integrating things with other applications or provide support contracts to fix bugs (might be needed for companies that depend heavily on these applications to work correctly).
/mill
Re:Mainsoft features+experience
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
I don't have direct experience of Mainwin but my company is porting its software to Solaris using this. We already ported an earlier product in about 2-3 weeks after some initial hiccups.
It lets you choose a Motif-like or Windows-like look and feel at run time, which is quite neat. It includes all the DCOM, windows internationalisation, MFC and other things that people use a lot above the Win32 APIs. Overall it looks pretty complete, as it should be since a big chunk of it is licensed Windows NT code.
It's not clear if the ported apps look as native-like as they could, but it seems like a good tool for porting apps quickly.
I think WINE is quite a way behind this, not surprisingly, but with Corel's fixes and updates could perhaps become more competitive.
In the long run, I think many companies will do native Linux ports - at least Mainwin lets the software get onto Linux. If/when Linux app demand explodes, companies will have the justification to do native ports to Linux for performance, better look and feel, etc.
Re: Stable Windows emulators
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
Right now, I run VMware as a way of running WinNT apps on top of Linux.
I'm gradually moving apps such as AIM over to Linux - but gaim requires glibc2.1, and my manual install of that failed, so I need Linux 2.2... In the mean time, AIM on Windows on VMware works well - I even have sound working to alert me to switch to Windows when someone comes online.
MainWin and other commercial emulators are important to get users onto Linux. Once they are there, they'll discover that there's a bunch of free software (beer and liberty, almost a catchphrase!) and start using that as well. Often they'll start using the native GUI tools immediately if they are good enough, it's just that they still need Office and so on.
WINE is a great project and will be very significant, but I think it needs a few more years and/or some serious funding to make it really happen. Maybe Corel and other companies will use WINE instead of Mainwin to do this, we shall see.
The interesting thing is that NT on VMware+Linux is MUCH more stable than NT on my laptop - it hardly ever crashes, perhaps because the virtual hardware environment is quite basic and well-tested. And Office auto-save is much faster in this environment, even though VMware is writing to disk via separate async I/O processes. So there are good reasons to use Linux even if running Windows apps under an emulator...#
Sigh... The more attention Linux gets, the more polluted it gets (both in code and community), and the more I think about switching to FreeBSD (or NetBSD, for the hell of it). There's something to be said about the elitist attitude that would stop poorly designed apps and programs (like these) from being run.
I generally agree. The problem is "1 window manager, 1 desktop environment, 1 version" - we all know that with that limitation, as some would have it be, OpenSource goes out t'window. Open-Source is not linux, in some ways it's "more than" linux - it's the software development ethic, more than anything else. And FreeBSD (and others) are, as yet, unpolluted by the influx of marketroids.
Is it possible that one day, we'll all be saying "Open-Source is essential" and actually wake up & realise it doesn't happen any more, given the rate at which non-free things are being ported?
-- ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Go reguritate that MS fud somewhere else. You really ought to have more respect for yourself. At least learn what you're talking about before you open your mouth. NT is indirectly based off of VMS which is itself 30 odd year old technology. C which windows itself is written in, originated with the second version of unix in 1970. C++ first appeared 15 years ago. TCP/IP which is what drives the internet, is 25 years old itself. The basic design for the CRT in your computer monitor dates back to when Eisenhower was president. Of course all of these things have been improved over time, just like Unix. NT is an attempt to copy unix in many ways. Many of the functions and features it implements are open standards that originate with unix. If unix is so old and decrypet(sp) how come Microsoft can't come up with something better?
-- Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
This is a pig -- look at IE for Solaris.
by
jaffray
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· Score: 2
Shortly after IE was released for Solaris, several people in my department tried it out. We were sick of Netscape crashes and bloat and speed problems, we liked a couple of features IE had, we wanted to be able to test sites in multiple browsers.
It was a complete joke. The process took about 30MB, largely non-shared, and was slow as hell. (Netscape at the time was well under 10MB, as was IE natively on Win32.) We abandoned it as unusable; as far as we could tell, its only purpose was to allow MS to say "IE runs on all platforms, even Unix!". (Unix == Solaris in marketroid-speak.)
Perhaps someone who has used IE under Unix more recently could comment on size and speed. If it's anything like it was back then, don't expect any useful applications to come out of this announcement.
Alan
Re:This is a pig -- look at IE for Solaris.
by
PigleT
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· Score: 1
I've not done IE under unix (of any sort) recently, so can't update you on that.
But a comment on the browser scene: netscrape, sure, is underfeatured and over-bloated. IE is evil, of course. Mozilla isn't remotely ready for "public consumption". My recommendations on the unix browser scene boil doing to either Opera (as & when they get their act together) or Konqueror - part of the KDE. I'm using the latter now as one of my mainstays for non-javascript browsing - even slashdot comes out OK in it, and it's stable enough (1.1.2). Oh, and it also renders PNGs correctly in a webpage.
-- ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Re:the pot calling the kettle black!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
A BSD user calling others elitist! Now I can laugh all the way home, this will keep me entertained for hours.
Cause its part of yer OS, man.
by
Dast
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· Score: 1
As long as Windoze is still running, so is IE.;)
I disagree with one of the previous replier's comment about Licq, however. I use the windoze icq at work, and it is slow as christmas and unstable as hell. But the terribly beta version of Licq I use at home is fast and solid.
But back on topic, I guess I am lucky, because I don't have any applications that hold me in the windoze world.
What more do you need than emacs any way. Heh.
--
This sig is false.
That's just plain Reverse FUD
by
Foogle
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· Score: 5
You've never even seen MainWin, and you're saying that Wine is better? Maybe in theory, sure, but let's be honest - Wine isn't really a viable solution except in a few (few) cases. There aren't more than a handful of programs that run flawlessly under it. And that's what a company needs to run Win32 programs under Linux - flawlessness. Anything else won't cut it, and they'd be better off using WinNT instead.
Same goes for MainWin. If they don't provide a stable system that can run just about any Windows app then they will not succeed. OpenSource won't even come into play with this - these guys are MS partners: They can produce code that's more compatible, because they probably have licenses to use the original source from MS. Don't kid yourself, they've got the upper hand. And as for customization, well I'd like my programs to work first, before I start worrying about theming, okay?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
... is because unlike Navigator, it doesn't go down more often than an over-worked hooker. Netscape: Putting the 'K' in 'Kwality'
-- ${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Re:Remember OS/2 and Bristol
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Hmm thats twice, two knives.. third time lucky? IE5 to linux - what a great idea, something as good as - but without all the security holes-- nahhh
Mainsoft used to be owned by Softway
by
Noke
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· Score: 1
Softway Group that used to own Interix before Microsoft bought it, also owns Mainsoft. Kinda interesting that the group owns both sides of the market: One for running unix apps on NT, and one for running win32 apps on unix. I wonder if MS is going to purchase Mainsoft too?
Nearer the Hardware Abstraction Layer
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Running Win32 apps on Linux is one thing, it would be cool if VxDs can run natively on Linux too.
Although Linux supports a lot of hardware these days, it is still nowhere near what darn M$ is supporting.
Re:Done with my homework now.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2
Yeah, Linux is having a real hard time breaking into the mainstream, especially during the last year. In fact, during this time I've seen more people switch from Linux to Windows than I've ever seen before! It's incredible, you know, seeing people trying to get refunds on Linux because it was preloaded on their computers but they didn't want it. It's been a long time coming.
One can see, of course, that with all of the financial and technical support that IBM, Sun, Oracle, HP and SGI (among other big boys) have finally given to Microsoft this year, there are more reasons than ever to switch to Windows! Especially the support issue. Finally someone will be able to help us when Windows breaks and that's a real incentive for me. I'll never forgive Torvalds - because of Linux I lost touch with that smart little tech support girl (we had to let her go) because we didn't have enough problems. With Windows I won't be lonely anymore.
You know, I'm glad. I always hated that darned Linux stability and am really looking forward to being able to waste time at work again with the most trusted excuse in the world - my computer crashed. And another thing, I really needed a reason to spend more money in the computer department and now that we're switching to Windows I'll get my wish. I mean, if a computer just sits there and does what you want, what good is that? I can't spend any extra money because of that, and not spending money is just plain anti-capitalist and anti-American and I'm very grass roots patriotic. And another thing- I'm really looking forward to the anti-virus industry once again taking off. I've got a lot of stock that's nearly worthless, but with everyone switching to Windows those virus alerts mean money in my pocket (and also allows me to get more work done).
Things are really looking up for Windows lately, with everyone switching to 2000 when it comes out. I was so tired of using Alpha's and SPARC's and am really looking forward to the tried and true x86 boxes. This way, with slower processors, more time will be spent getting work done and my superiors love that. We'll have to switch everything over to new hardware, which means we'll get even more work done. If I'm that productive I'm sure to get promoted!
--
It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.
I am still faily new to the linux seen and use my PC is dual boot mode as there are features of both windows and linux that I like. StarOffice caters for all my workin needs (I am a student). But, windows does have some/very/ good applications such as Bryce and 3dstudio max (ok and games) and IE5 (sans security holes) is much better that Netscrape 4.7 IMHO. If M$ want to develop for linux fine by me as they are the biggest software developers in the world and may to something to help our crusade, what must not happen is M$Linux2001. -
Re:Is it really so bad.....
by
gkAndy
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· Score: 1
Funny, I though half the "crusade" was against software giants like Microsoft:)
--
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--
Andy
Re:Okay, I'm a student...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
and the students of today are the leaders of tomorrow. No comment either of us makes will hold linux back, but you haven't learned that.
IE's Java implementation is much faster
by
dsfox
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· Score: 1
in case you wanted another reason. Don't use it myself, this is just what colleagues tell me.
Nearer the Hardware Abstraction Layer
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Running Win32 apps on Linux is one thing, it would be cool if VxDs can run natively on Linux too.
Although Linux supports a lot of hardware these days, it is still nowhere near what darn M$ is supporting.
Brilliant
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
..and you wonder why Linux is having a hard time breaking into the mainstream?
./excel ERROR: You must be root to run this. ok... su password ./excel *computer works really hard for five minutes* Your hard drive has been formatted. Thank you for using Microsoft Products. *Computer works for a minute* Welcome to Microsoft Windows 2000 install...
In other words: As if I'm gonna let Microsoft products touch my sweet little machine!!!
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
-- If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit. jdube is who I am.
There are almost a half dozen implementations of the win32 API on *NIX platforms already. The only one I can think off the top of my head is (was) WINdu by Bristol Technologies. They tried to play rough with microsoft; ended up suing M$ and getting their source license taken away.
MS Stamping out Open Source?
by
leonids
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· Score: 1
Could Microsoft be having some tricks up it's sleeves yet again? By allowing direct and easy porting of closed-source Windows program over to Linux, it is introducting more and more close-source influence in Linux, and open-sourced in particular. These programs already have a good fame coming from users in Windows, so they are going to sell good under Linux. More and more Linux users migrate over to these closed-source programs, and BINGO! Open-source development and usership under Linux dies down. Nobody no longer sees it worthwhile to develope under open-source as real good alternatives now exist under this porting layer.
Microsoft probably considers open-source to be a big competitior, and headache. To stamp out competition, as it always does when it can't handle that tweeeeeny bit of competition, the application world returns to the closed-source high price licensing nonsense.
Maybe Microsoft can start learning how to handle competition without resorting to low-down tactics such as buying the new company over, or introducing FUD? We could start by providing EXORBITANT psychiatric session for Bill Gates and fellow colleagues?
People aren't seeing the point here
by
Mechanik
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· Score: 2
I think people really aren't seeing the point to MainWin, Wind/U, and other such products. The main argument that people seem to be making here against these products is that it presents people with a really bad porting strategy, because of dependence on Microsoft's architecture, performance hits, etc. While I do agree with all of this, people seem to not realize that there are good things about it too, and I'm going to tell you why. I'm going to illustrate this with a personal example here. Over the summer I worked as a summer student for a company that started off a couple of years ago making a product for Windows. However, after a couple of years of success in the market (number one market share), some VERY important customers (read: big cellular tech companies) indicated that they would like to see Solaris and HP/UX versions of our software. Up until then they had been using tools which had been very inferior to our product, and they wanted to get their hands on what we had to offer. However, they were not about to go restructuring their whole network and switch from UNIX to Windows just to get our tools. So it was decided that our company damn well better give them what they wanted, because these companies's business is VERY important to our parent company, as even though these companies might only buy 100 copies of our software, they use our software to write code for the gazillions of dollars in chips that they buy from our parent company, so even though we could end up losing money on the software itself, the cost recouped in chip sales would blow that away. So, ok, our company now has to do UNIX ports. However, the program has already been written to use MFC. Ideally if you knew you were going to do a port you would design your code with an appropriate abstraction layer so that you could do a proper job of the port, but when they wrote the program they hadn't had any indication that they would have to do this. What's more is that the company is pretty small... 30 people. The company doesn't have the resources to devote to rearchitecting the entire program so that "proper" ports can be made. What's more is that they have deadlines still to meet for their Windows product line, and those have to be met at the same time... they can't be holding up production. So what do they do? They buy Bristol's Wind/U to do the port. In theory this allows you to just drop in your Win32 code and recompile it, and voila you have a UNIX solution. In practice this doesn't happen, as the Wind/U toolkit has bugs, and in our case there were lots of Intel/Windows specific assumptions made when the program was written, and these things all had to be worked around or fixed. But the result was that in less than four months a team of three developers (two of which were just summer co-ops, of which I was one) managed to port a 300,000 line program, and what's more, we managed to fix bugs that were in the original release, as well as add some UNIX specific behaviour and functionality (which you can't do if you just emulate a program under Wine). If we had tried to rearchitect the whole thing, it probably would have taken at least twice the number of people and taken probably more than three times as long. To be honest, those factors would likely have prevented the thing from EVER being ported. The company (which does tend to be Windows-centric unfortunately), would probably just have told those customers to go invest in some Windows hardware and hope they listened. Products like MainWin and Wind/U will allow products to be ported that would otherwise never get ported at all. I don't know about the rest of you, but I would say that's a good thing. It's better to have a port even though it may not be optimally architected, than to have no port at all.
Been around for years but no-one's used it
by
heroine
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· Score: 2
These things have been around forever yet we don't see any Windows apps anyway. For around $1000 you could have gotten a Win32 environment years ago but no-one did. There's a bigger demand for a Linux environment on Win32 as we have many unfinished tools for this. Cygwin never supported threads. Mingwin was abandonned two years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Right on dude! And I was listening to the Clash way before they ever got popular! The same with Green Day!
/.
Why don't you use a product/like something because you actually like it, not what other people think.
First time I have ever heard the cry of "Sellouts" on
The based on 30 year technology gave you away. In theory you are right in that having this technology for linux is good. It could bring more applications to linux. But at what cost? Remember, Microsoft is ultimately behind this. And even the most die-hard Microsoftie surely is aware that they're ultimately out for themselves, at the price of screwing over anyone/anything (I don't think of conspiracy theories, I just look at the facts). Yes, I realize they are a business and they want to make money. I just personaly agree with most of their methods.
Now take for example a company (like mine) that is developing a product on NT. We are using COM/ATL, but we have kept a lot of it cross-platform because we want to be open to have a Unix version. So instead of using CORBA for the distributed object aspect of the product, we go with MainSofts product (I'm assuming your claim of COM/ATL is true, and I have no reason not to believe you). Then, some time down the road Microsoft decides to either put a stop to this or raise the licenses incredibly high (if you don't think this is a very real possibility, you have been living in a cave... just read through some replys). Where does that leave us or any other company... "Shit, I guess we're going to only support NT. We can't backtrack and redo everything for Unix." Bottom line, if Microsoft wasn't who Microsoft is, it be a different story. Something good to come out of this is that vendors that already have an NT product could "port" it over. But I would be leary if starting from scratch and cross platform is important to you.
-Willy
I've been waiting for a usable version of wine for at least 3 years now. It's not any more usable for me now, than the first day I started waiting. How long should we be waiting? If it doesn't run the apps I need then it is useless for me.
--Aaron Newsome
Do you ever actually read the articles you comment on, JDube? From what I know of you both here and IRL, I'd guess not.
If you did, you'd realize that this project has little to nothing to do with specifically running Micros~1 products on your box. It's about running Win32 apps on linux. Now, if I cared to, I could come up with a long list of Windows programs that have nothing to do with MS.
I don't know what's worse -- when MS tries to make themselves look pretty by spreading their usual lies, or when linux users spout anti-MS statements that are just as unfounded.
"Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't they?" -- Scarecrow, from the Wizard of Oz
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"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
You mention that the Win32 API has been ported to Solaris and HP-UX and is used in IE5. Well, I'm here to tell you that HP-UX IE5 is the world's slowest browser and that's official ! Why? Because the GUI has to tortuously go from Win32 calls through an API translation library and back out as native calls. Performance on a fast 64-bit PA-RISC workstation is incredibly bad - you have to wait 5 seconds for a window to refresh after pulling down a menu and releasing it, making the browser totally and utterly unusable. If this is the future that MainSoft have in store for us, they can keep it ! We need native applications, not badly kludged efforts like IE5 on HP-UX and Solaris.
Whether or not he's used the product is besides the point. The post was just a bunch of speculation as to whether or not certain features will be included in MainWin, as opposed to WINE. There was no basis for the argument or facts to back it up, just "WINE is open source, so WINE will be better". As far as I'm concerned that's not much of an argument. I like Open Source as much as the next /.'er. but it isn't the magic answer for every software product's ails. WINE has a long way to go before it'll be usuable in a general sense, and if MainWin is working alongside Microsoft on their product, then MainWin has an enormous head-start.
That said, you are correct: MainWin is not an end-user application, whereas WINE is. They can be used to server to totally seperate groups. Although, yes, WINE can be used for both :)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
MainWin is a horrid bloated beast. I hope I never have to face it again.
You will see few linux applications. borland will probably cancel their linux projects, and corel the same. Companies would not want to develop 2 apps for 2 operating systems if one will run on both. You can see this now, corel are using WINE, so the same source code will work under linux and windows.
You have to just look at history.. look at OS/2, that could run win16 apps, and because of this, companies just released the native windows version because it ran on os/2 as well.
Also, if customers run both linux and windows, and run the app on both operating systems, do you really think for one minute they are going to buy the linux and windows version? Nope, too expensive.
Yes, it may bring more apps to linux, but linux doesn't really need this. You need patience. It looks good at first, but if you look further, linux will be another windows platform. First quarter of 2000 is going to be good for linux with alot of applications released for it. thinking the MainWin will be good for linux, yes in the shortterm, no in the long term... Linux will probably fade away like o/s2 has.
Do you think windows apps will be more stable than native linux apps, and as fast - probably not. Only native applications will run and full speed and be as reliable (Ie, if it crashes, linux won't go down).
As for Internet explorer for linux, by the sounds of it, many linux users like IE, and would use IE in preference to netscape. This could do harm to mozilla.. if there is a small amount of potential users, and people get fed up because its late (i'm not fed up, i'm looking forward to it), Mozilla will be seen as a faillier, when its got a small user base - also woulldn't look good for open source. By i'm getting a bit off topic here.
Windows can only get stronger if people use this application, linux will get weaker. You can see it through history... if you look.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Sort of off topic I guess, but I just wanted to comment on the semi-catchy name; in C/C++ you have main() as your entry point into an executable. In Windows, you have WinMain(). MainWin? I guess this qualifies as either an FYI or a -1 Offtopic ..
XMMS -> WinAmp, for X
The same people that got up in arms about 'questionable free' libqt will react similarly to any other closed applications programming interface. I could see something like this possibly dissuading K developers, but it won't even slow down GNOME or GNUstep developers.
> remember that WinAmp does a buttload more than x11amp
Maybe I am wrong, but have you recently visited the XMMS home?
It's a long time since x11Amp switched to XMMS.
This is just MS's attempt to get Office for Linux out there.
Microsoft wasn't able to get IE running under Solaris because of their lack of Unix experience. This is how they did IE, and it was outsourced to boot. This is how they will do Office to.
Then I weep for tomorrow.
I think, it is really time to become concerned about Linux future. Definitely, the long time development strategy is lacking. Remember, what happened, when Qt and GTK appeared? Tons of buggy and unneeded applications started to appear, because every kid, who has read one book on C++, decided to become "k3wl" and "code for Linux". With the appearance of Windows API it will get much worse. I think, that Linux should be split into two branches - one, supporting limited amount of extensively tested hardware, containing only stable native linux applications, manifestly open-sourced, server-oriented - a robust, free, extremely stable working tool. Another - supporting all modern and unstable hardware, all the "bells and whistles", non-open-source stuff and other BS - desktop-and-newbie-oriented. While all the commercial Linux distributions will tend to become the second type, someone should care about enforcing this separation. Otherwise Linux risks to lose a lot of people to other free operating systems.
I'm convinced that this was one of the nails in OS/2's coffin. Once OS/2 got good Windows support (pre-Win95), the incentive for developers to develop native OS/2 apps went through the floor. Why should they develop for OS/2? Develop for OS/2, it runs on OS/2, develop for Windows and it runs on Windows and OS/2. But without native apps, OS/2 became just a marginally better GUI. It lost all those stability and performance advantages that were its reason for existence in the first place.
Fortunately, this should only effect developers who are developing for profit. Open source developers aren't likely to change because they don't care about profitability. They'll develop on the OS they like. This could certainly effect how proprietary developers work, though.
BTW, Someone mentioned that "no one programs using the Win32 API directly these days". While this is certainly true, I must point out that Microsoft gives you the source to at least two important wrappers (MFC and ATL) with their development kit. MFC should run pretty much unchanged (Though why you'd want to I can't imagine). ATL would need COM, obviously, but I'd guess that that would be the next logical step.
Personally, I'm not much interested in this WINE stuff because it goes against the whole reason I put together my Linux system. I am sick and tired of the damn Windows APIs and Windows bloat. I have to suffer through it eight hours a day. I've no interest to suffer through it at home one minute longer than I have to.
The cake is a pie
Read what I wrote again.
:)
I'm a Linux user calling BSD users elitist, and I want to be part of that elitism (and probably could be, too, and would enjoy it immensely).
Linux could use some elitism to keep out the trolls, dolts, twits, marketroids, suits and just plain morons. (The ones who think they know stuff are the worst.) Seems like Linux is just too "hip" for that now, though. Hence my considering moving to BSD, where you can still get flamed for asking stupid questions or not RTFM...
OTOH, I could just wait for Linux to get passe, like Southpark is now - after the huge wave of mainstreamism, I find it's really just the original fans who watch it, rather than those who watched it because it was "cool" and/or for the shock value. Can't wait to be rid of those little turds, when they piss off back into Windows.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Good comments regarding Window Managers, Environments, and how open source/free software trancends any particular OS.
Is it possible that one day, we'll all be saying "Open-Source is essential" and actually wake up & realise it doesn't happen any more, given the rate at which non-free things are being ported?
No. This is tantamount to saying that the marketroids and suits can fool the geeks, which we all know is completely impossible - they're too stupid and we're too smart.
It can't happen because there are people like you and I and RMS and Bruce Perens and on and on, who actually care about the freedom of software "for the sake of it", as the suits would suppose. While these people exist, non-free software cannot win (at least not with these people), because you can't beat free software. That's the beauty of free software - you can't wake up in a world of non-free ports, because dedicated people will keep working on the free software, and once it's free there's (usually) no going back.
The suits may fool as many Joe Averages as they like into using non-free software, but they can't fool free software believers into using the non-free software, and they cannot beat free software except by joining them, and making their software free. And if they do that, well, who's won then?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
>Hey man, read the MainSoft site. They've already got this product out >Linux version is just a port to another OS. I don't think it is >anywhere near as unlikely as you make it out to be.
If it doesn't support what people who run linux use which is Gnome/KDE, this software is *useless*, not that it's all that really useful to begin with. Don't expect it to amount to anything much. It won't attract the Wine userbase, and the ones don't care about Windows at all won't even bother looking at it.
>maybe MS is planning a move to buy TrollTech.
>End of game.
Not really. TrollTech caved in a few months ago and GPLed KDE and the QT toolkit. If Troll gets bought out by M$, QT and KDE will still go on.
0 1 - just my two bits
Since the user (at this moment) chooses to use internet explorer, that's the target platform for web developers.
Most users don't choose to use Internet Explorer. Ask a user sometime what browser their using. If they know that (possible) ask them what version. They probably have no clue. Most users use what's given to them. In the case of Windows, that would be IE. We all use Netscape where I work because I set up the computers and that is what I put on them and that is what the users are trained to use. This is mostly because of all the security bugs that keep popping up in IE. That and yes, we don't like MS.
If the average user had a choice, IE would probably not have such huge market share.
I don't think it is a good idea. VxD come from Win3.1. I think it is a good idea to rewrite the code then use old technologie like that.
What makes or breaks an OS? A short trip down at least the recent history of failed computers and those that stick around for the long run should show you.
It doesn't matter how wonderful your operating system is. It doesn't even really matter how stable, or how many features it has, or anything. No company, not even one as big as Microsoft, can create an OS and then create every application that will ever be needed for it. This requires inspiring a development community to develop for your OS. I submit that this is the reason that lesser-known, though probably superior, operating systems have failed and others have grown up -- by enticing or turning away developers.
Microsoft has virtually overlooked one part of the development community for quite some time now; the public domain/freeware/open source part. Admittedly, open source for Microsoft platforms is still next to nonexistent; most software with an open source license is also ported to UN*Xish platforms; but until Linux started taking off, the PD/freeware crowd was still going strong on Windows.
Now recently, many companies who previously sold software for Microsoft platforms almost exclusively have announced their intention to bring their applications to Linux. I firmly believe this is largely due to the precursor loss of the PD/free/open crowd. I know I've seen this pattern before. My best guess is that it follows the learning pattern of a programmer; whichever OS and development tools you can get your hands on without spending a fortune, you start to learn to develop for -- later in life, when you want to make money for developing, you still feel most comfortable on that platform.
In any event, Microsoft now sees too late the pending loss of their developer base, and is taking the completely incorrect route to recapture it. MainSoft's product will probably address the high-end, large-scale, mucho dinero market quite well. However, it won't do anything for the PD/free/open community, and as such it won't be anything more than a temporary win. If Microsoft was really interested in recapturing developer share -- which they absolutely must do to survive, they need to relax their ever-tightening grip and open everything up.
If I were running Microsoft, I would open up MainWin. Make it completely open source. I don't think it would be good for the developer community at all but it would definitely insure a win.
Well maybe, but maybe not: in fact it validates the goal of WINE. And there are a lot of developers that make knick knack apps for Windows that are interested in Linux but won't be able to pay the licensing on this thing. As a result, WINE may just get more interest than it does now.
This all assumes that WINE is closing in on having something that really works. If not, then there's no sense crying over the loss of something you never really had. MS is almost certainly of the opinion that this is insurance against proper Linux development kits from causing a critical mass in Linux apps; I think there's at least a 50% chance that they've got it backwards. This tool will bring more apps to Linux faster, validating Linux as a platform in the eyes of the public faster, which will get more developers and software publishers used to the idea of marketting & writing for Linux sooner. It's a catalyst. Once invested in a market, a company is more likely to make a committment to a full native app for that market, than if they had no app at all.
yeah, I know, there's vmware, and yeah, I know, there's dual boot and all sorts of other things, but on many occasions I have to sit down at somebody else's machine running one of Microsoft's windowing operating systems, and I'd like to be able to unpack a little archive and run linux, and be able to assure the owner of the machine that all I did was put a bunch files in one directory and they can be deleted.
Then, they'd love using the various things I'd install and there'd be another linux convert.
BTW, all of those "other ways to do it" say to me: hey, most of this work is already done, just bring the pieces together. Anybody know of a reason why this might be too hard to do?
So how does this project differ from WINE?
With "kill", I mean that Wine will lose the functionality battle with MainSoft - no wonder, because MainSoft has the Windows source code and Wine doesn't. MainSoft basically has to recode Wine. Remember how Micros~1 recoded Netscape?
You are right; proprietary Microsoft-Win32 libraries are a scary thing. But this is probably exactly what MainSoft is going to ship... and every distribution will be going to include it, just like they include Wine. Which brings us back to the question, how bad is it to support the Win32 API?
Well, this is something I've been wanting to say for a long time, and unfortunately maybe a moot point now: Linux can be run on non-X86 hardware. Okay, I know most of you know this, but from many of the comments to various announcements seen here it's obvious that many don't. The press orgy surrounding Linux over the past year has certainly ignored this fact
I've been running Linux on several PowerPC boxes for the last three years. My first impression of Linux was that I'd found the Holy Grail: I could run powerful applications at home on my PowerMac, on a friend's Dell, or a Sun workstation at school. GNU software and POSIX compliance made all of this possible.
The first inkling that fragmentation was going to occur in this wonderful new community was when id released the Linux port of Quake. The Linux world went crazy- those that could run it, at least. Suddenly the rest of us were shut out. It wasn't free software, either- which meant there was no ability to hack it for the rest of us. When they released the Alpha-based Linux port it was an encouraging sign, but the future was all too clear.
Now everyday there is a great new "Linux" product announced, most by comapnies that aren't even aware that an "Intel compatible processor" is definitely not a requirement for this wonderful opertaing system. If software based on Win32 APIs become the standard Linux applications, everything Linux was created for is over. The various productivity suites under development will be crushed by Office2000- authentic Microsoft bugs, security holes, and all.
What can be done? I don't know. Until the last year or so we used to stick together as a community. Now software is developed strictly for one graphical desktop, or worse one particular packaged distribution. I'm not willing to concede there's the imminent fragmentation the traditional technology press is salivating waiting for, but we s the Linux community need to start looking out for each other again, and fighting to make sure this wonderful operating system remains free from being shackled to one particular company (software OR hardware.)
I agree, the OS is going to take more of a back seat, as there are more kinds of devices out there that require a specialized OS. In that context, a good OS should strive to be transparent, not feature-rich and apparent. It should be designed and optimized to interpret cross-platform standards, like *ML and Java, and the higher-level features should be done in those languages, rather than bloating the OS.
This is really sick. I suppose now that wine has been so sucsful MS decides that its time to "Exorcize the Freedom to Inovate" and all that BS. Oh well having IE5 for linux may be nice
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
I actually had a MainSoft rep call me about this product of their's. I told here I wouldn't even consider using their product unless a Linux version was available. That was, until I asked a few more questions. The redistrubable libs are *huge* (10 meg or so). I didn't even get into performance. It sounds like they did implement it The Right Way(tm), but they only license the technology from Microsoft. AND, get this, the royalities you pay are a *per seat* royality. The more you sell, the more MS makes. Can't beat that, eh? (NOT!)
mob
Gee this is so great! Now yet another excuse for companies to avoid creating decent linux-native applications. We should be demanding real linux apps, not some crappy win32 layer...see IE on Solaris for a reference as to how that goes...
-Growing up is like walking east.
I actually had a MainSoft rep call me about this product of their's. I told her I wouldn't even consider using their product unless a Linux version was available. That was, until I asked a few more questions.
The redistributable libs are *huge* (10 meg or so). I didn't even get into performance as the deciding factor was: they only license the technology from Microsoft. AND, get this, the royalities you pay are a *per seat* royality. The more you sell, the more MS makes. Can't beat that, eh? (NOT!)
mob
I think the real killer for OS/2 was that nobody would write native apps for it since it ran Windows apps.
I also believe that Linux is not about world domination, its about having an operating system that is/has exactly what you want. And as long as there are geeks out there who love to build their own kernels Linux can never die.
However, if "world domination" is what you want out of an OS then you must crush Windows. To do that, create an environment that makes it much easier to write native apps and drivers for linux, and tools that make it very easy to port them to windows.
It's the applications that drive the OS and it was the way Bill made it easy for other companies to make money that made his OS the market leader.
MainWin uses the Windows source, as far as I know, wine doesn't.
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If you complain that Netscape is unstable, use Lynx.
Um. Do you use the web on a regular basis? Do you even realize what the web is all about? If Lynx was all we need, then why would we EVER have invented the web? Lynx is a glitzy version of a gopher browser for http.
The web is about multimedia. Without graphics and sound, we simply have glorified ftp and gopher.
Lynx _IS_ occasionally useful, but is NOT suitable as a dedicated web browser. Anyone who uses Lynx as their only web browser is really missing out on the whole web experience.
If you ask AMD they will send you a free OSR2 or Win 98. Yes, really; I did it myself. You'll need at least proof of purchase for the chip, though, and your Windows certificate of authenticity or something similar (they accepted my CD key photocopied off the back of the CD).
Microsoft is likely willing to spend an awful lot of money on "market research". At this point, they are probably just trying to find out how viable a platform Linux is. The added bonus is, if they port Win32 now, they won't have to port it later if they find that they need to ship something under Linux. This is also a cheap way to test the FUD waters. After all a lot of people are thinking of porting apps to Linux. If MS announces that Win32 may support Linux "Real Soon Now", those plans may be de-railed by companies that don't want Linux porting to be a waste of their time...
My question is this, though: what underlying toolkit will they use. Will it be based on raw Xlib (good for speed), Motif (a lose just about all the way around, at this point), GTk+ or Qt (good, full-featured toolkits with powerful features "free") or GNOME or KDE (even more features than their underlying toolkits, but even more bloat to put the world's most bloated toolkit on top of). I think that at this point even GNOME is not in a position to be a simple back-end to a Win32 port (i.e. there is not a 1-1 mapping from all Win32 features to GNOME, yet), so there's going to be a lot of glue code no matter what. I'd hate to see Win32 apps released for Linux, and be 10 times slower out of the gate.
This will be fun to watch, but I doubt it will pan out as anything serious just yet.
now imagine if MainSoft/Microsoft do the same crappy code on linux, microsoft will know how to tell the world how linux is shit for running apps. 'nuff said.
isn't this what twin is doing? Have a look at all the wine-ish projects at http://www.winehq.com/others.html.
And that's a Good Thing???
OS integration is bad, bad, bad
Netscape's look hasn't changed since the dawn of time..er.. a couple years ago.
If it ain't broke.....
Bitch & moan all you like, but it just shows how you'll use & love any piece of crap as long as its not Microsoft.
Erm, that's not my reasoning at all. Netscape just handles standards better - No matter what the IE docs tell you. As a web developer in my previous job we had no end of hassles getting a new web site to work even remotely well in IE. The JavaScript, frames, MIMR type handling etc just didn't work! (BTW, I didn't design it :)
You'll love this: I even use IE on my Macs...why? It looks cooler.
Even if it does pervert all web standards known to man!!!
God forbid someone express their own opinion that goes against the Party Line..
As I've already said, Netscape is simply better than IE, regardless of what it looks like - this is completely independent of any Anti-MS feelings.
If we want to be taken seriously out there in the world, ya gotta learn how to get along with other people.
I couldn't agree more. This is a lesson that IE fanatics would do well to heed - just because a HTML-impaired page looks good on their browser doesn't make it a standard!!!
CrayDragu, you are an idiot and you repeated that quote twice. It's a joke, get over it.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
It's closed. It's endorsed by MS ( Indirectly ) and it will probably work properly since the easiest way to emulate a monster like Win32 is to look at the source.
SoftPC for the mack was also built by an NT source code licensee.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
But that's just the point - it doesn't work on some rudimentary web sites, but there are some that are deliberately engineered to handle its quirks.
Non webdevelopers don't care about the mime output of cgi scripts. nor do they care about javascript.
Yes they do when the site doesn't work because of the crappy implementation of those two facilities.
"Why trust MS to implement standards properly .."
Netscape hasn't done any better
I think it has - I'm not saying Netscape 4 is perfect, but it's a damn sight better than IE.
(excluding mozilla which will take another few months to appear). The 4.x version of their browser can hardly be called standards compliant. But standards are only relevant to web developers not to users. Users expect their favorite webpages to just work they don't care how they work.
But that's just the point - their 'favourite' web pages won't work because of the half-assed way IE handles frames, JS etc......
This is something MS used to their advantage when developing IE. While netscape was fooling around with the 4.x generation of their browser, IE created IE which from a users point of view is faster, more stable and prettier.
Can anyone say 'Style over content'?
What it looks like doesn't matter in the slightest. Whether it handles simple web standards is more important.
And my pessimistic guess is that they will use the same thing again to outcompete mozilla. Nobody outside the webdevelopers community cares about standards.
They do when things don't work!!! Without standards you'll just end up with a proprietary MS-web - sure MS users can view it, but with the proliferation of set-top-boxes et. al that don't use IE, MS will be forced to comply to the standards...
MS is compliant enough for most users.
I agree. But claiming it is superior is another matter altogether!
FYI,
Bristol won the unfair trade practices case, but MS successfully convinced the jury that Bristol had stopped functioning as a company partially with the intent of making it look like Microsoft crushed them and needed to be punished (by making Bristol exceutives rich). MS argued this behaviour shouldn't be rewarded with a huge judgement, and the jury agreed awarding Bristol exactly $1. Also, the jury found MS had not violated antitrust laws, so the award was not tripled.
Now, this is possibly a misleading statement. The Linux as an OS is not irrelevant to enthusiasts and developers working on Linux. Certainly, there is always development to be done - new hardware to support, new concepts in computing to implement. In this light, Linux is the focus.
However, to those who are "computers as a tool" folks and are more interested in the applications they need to run, the Linux OS isn't specifically important. They want the OS to be pretty much secondary to their being able to use specific tools.
Linux provides this kind of environment.
Linux is able to be "irrelevant" in two ways - via its development model and its ability to be customized.
Lets look at the Linux development model first. Features make it into Linux distributions based on the merits of that feature. Features that meet a great demand, and have technical merit, often get the most support. Features that don't meet either requirement tend to be abandoned. The Linux environment is developed based on workable technologies and applications; there is rarely any other consideration.
In contrast, commercial developers are often pressured to maintain an OS' market. Often this takes the form of marketing agreements and requirements to support specific technologies. This leads to technical decisions becoming dependent on marketing requirements. Eventually, the applications you need are developed based on the requirements of an OS. The OS becomes the focus.
The next issue is that of customization. Different people work in different ways. Being able to make an environment behave in a way that makes you productive is important. Customization allows you to generate that environment even if your requirements are different than your coworkers.
One of the most visible aspects of one's computing environment is the graphical user interface. Within Windows, you are expected to use the default GUI. Applications are designed with these conventions in mind. They also occasionally make use of hidden hooks within the default GUI. Meanwhile, Linux uses the X Windowing System. X allows users to use whatever window manager they wish, thus having the ability to completely customize the "look and feel" of their environment. Furthermore, applications are designed to work independently of the GUI environment.
There are exceptions to the points in the above paragraph. For example, there are 3rd party alternatives to Window's explorer shell. However, those alternatives aren't 100% compatible. And in the Linux environment, some applications are dependent on desktop environments such as KDE or Gnome (which in turn are compatible with numerous window managers). However, that being said, I think you will find the philosophy of Linux lending to customization much easier than Windows (or many other commercial, proprietary environments).
In the end, you have to use what works the best for the task at hand. Linux is not always the answer. That's why dual-boot environments are fairly common.
However, if you are interested in an environment that is designed with the user in mind and is able to be configured according to your requirements, you owe it to yourself to look into Linux or another Open Source OS (such as the *BSD flavors). Support projects that provide the functionality you need to these OS'. Demand that functionality from your vendors.
Sure. The OS should be irrelevant to functionality. But that doesn't mean the OS is not important.
IE5.
Seeing as MainSoft are the guys who 'ported' IE5 to Solaris with their win->unix tools.
Aren't you the smooth talker! I nominate you as head of Linux developer recruiting. :) Hey, how about the people who wrote the API in the first place document it in the first place? Just a thought. :)
. . . yeah, and the electricity your computer uses dates back to Franklin's little experiment with a kite. . .
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
A browser shouldn't give you any leeway in html code. It should followed standards to a t. Sure IE currently supports more standards, but what good is it if it doesn't care if you don't have a closing tag or if XML namespaces is handled totally wrong.
As from personally experiences IE 5 is slower and crashes on my computer more than NS.
Linux was also developed besides the fact that there was 'closed source' operating systems avaiable.
Think about it.
No dude, you have not used it lately. What are you trying to get work? MS Office - yes it works, even 2000 And with Corel donating developers to the WINE project, things have been moving along faster than before Wine has its bugs, but development is constant, and things are moving forward very progressively best of luck to the wine crew
-----Transmission Complete----- If you want to email me...Don't
This makes a lot of sense. OS/2's big claim was that it ran Windows Applications "better than Windows". But, I think, people then think "why not just get Windows if running windows app's is what we want". With Window's source running rampant I am suprised that someone hasn't put it out on the net where everyone can grab it. assuring you that your code will run on UNIX exactly as it does on NT. Yeah, crashes alot and runs slow
Standards ? You talking about Standards ? I dont know much about HTML and DOM, but as far as HTTP goes, IE does a much better job than Netscape. IE had support for HTTP keep alives since IE4. Netscape didnt know a keep-alive from mozilla's butt! Aside from that, the fact that IE is componentized - you can access all components of IE ( HTML renderer, XML parser, Script parsers, Protocol Handler ) etc from your code. It offers more features for developers than Netscape.
Everyone is complaining about, "why didn't they mention wine", well there is a fundamental difference, wine doesn't license the windows source code like these fools do. wine is good, but they've been getting to the point where there's only so much you can reverse engineer. This will probably be a way more evolved program, if for nothing else, they're a microsoft code licensee and partner. I'd rather see this go into the wine work, don't get me wrong. I also think they'd be better of teaming up with wine, that way the community would endorse it too, but whatever.
This will probably take off some of my Karma and give me a bad moderation, but what the hell..
I go to school with both jdube/Boolean, and CrayDrygu. Its interesting to see the relations between people in real life, and in the online world.
Cheers to those who have read the article, and posted serious comments based on the facts!
...And btw, CrayDrygu usually has the facts right. Hell, he usually corrects my mistakes. And jdube/Boolean seems to be the leet Debian user heh. Who are you going to listen to, the linux user, or the mostly correct one?
- PovRayMan
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Check out my blackbox styles
Many of us have seen what MainWin does, dude.
;)
Microsoft used MainWin to make Internet Explorer (4 and 5) for UNIX. (i.e. Solaris and HP/UX)
It's huge, it's bloated, it often doesn't run. I've only tried it on Solaris, but it only works on certain versions of Solaris, requiring some patches. I'm not impressed with any porting library that needs kernel patches to run.
Compare this with running Internet Explorer 3 for Windows 3.1 under Wine: fast, light, doesn't die immediately, views slashdot over ssh (with some problems -- inverts truecolor images? (recent Wine bug)).
Now, let's compare the products. MainWin is very expensive, professional, proprietary porting software. WINE is completely free, anarchic, completely alpha-level software. So why does it run Internet Explorer better?
I think MainSoft needs to fund Wine development. Since it's completely free, they can steal it and call it 'MainSoft'. I don't care that much, as long as Wine gets better and MainSoft doesn't get any worse. Besides, it'd be cool to see Wine running on non-x86 architectures, too.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I hope I'm not paranoid if I say it's a mixed blessing. I see good points:
- Increasing application base
- Paving the road to portable applications
However, I also see bad points:- Less motivation to ensure portability
- Closed source and expensive liscensing
- Encouraging use of expensive, closed IDEs
I hope we don't see more developers moving excusively to a Win32 environment. The more developers are familiar with multiple environments, the better they can choose the right environment for the job. Does that make sense?Betaware? Now, Linux is still in development (much like Windows), but it's not in beta. The development progress for Linux and other open-source software is much more... um... open, than that of closed programs. You can download the development version of a program, but that's not the same as a beta version. "Beta" usually means that a final release hasn't been made, and that the software may still be prone to crashes and numerous bugs. As far as I can tell, Linux hasn't been in beta since... the 1.0 release.
That is to say, technology that's had three decades to prove it's worth, and grow to fill the needs presented to it. UNIX isn't on it's way out... not yet. In fact, I hear all the time about how Linux (at least one UNIX) usage is growing! It seems you're implying that by not being new, something is second-best. Did I misinterpret that?
This part is much more debatable than the last bits. Over it's three decades, UNIX hasn't penetrated very far into the desktop. That's changing now, however. As more people see a need for UNIX on the desktop, it will grow to be a good, useable system on the desktop, just as it's a very good, useable system on the server. Personally, I think Linux is doing just fine on my desktop- I like the control it lends me over my computer. Much more flexible and useable than Windows.
What are your goals? World domination, or will you settle for a system that _you_ can use? For now, I'll just settle for a system I can use, which I have right now. No Win32 implementation required. That may change, at which time I'll be part of the demand for this product- or it's competitors. I don't think the lack of a Windows emulator will cause Linux to whither away. It was, from the beginning, made to be a useable system, and doesn't need this to be useable. All they're doing is inceasing the useability. That's all good... except for the part about expensive licensing and closed source. If anything, that only serves to decrease useability.
-Matthead
I'm glad you are therefore helping to update and write new API documentation, instead of just whining about it.
I don't want to write API docs, I want to write programs. I don't want to document the programs I use, I want to use them. If it is easier for me to use program A than program B because A is better documented (despite B being better otherwise), I will probably use A.
I don't want to deal with it, I just want it to work. It's the same reason I use Linux instead of MS-Windows. It just works.
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Surely there's nothing undocumented when you've got the source?
Jeff
See Bill G. sees himself as a visionary. For them to produce a MS-Linux they would have to claim they invented Linux in odder to stop the brain locking cognitive dissonance from setting in. Since it is impossible for them to have created Linux the way they invented the internet, chances are they will avoid it. :0)
A "Winix app" is a program that happens to run under Unix but doesn't fee like it. All the social cues are wrong. It's like a hard-core Apple Mac user being given an MS-DOS program that has been ported to his system, where "ported" means no more than making the code run. It's still not going to work for him. And he'll hate it.
What are the the Unix cultural cues that are missing from Winix "apps", or Windows cues that are present in Winix "apps" but missing from Unix programs? It's a lot of little things. Here are just a few:
If you run Word Perfect under Linux, it's still not a Unix program. It's a Winix "app". It doesn't feel like Unix. xv is a Unix program, but ee is a Winix "app". KDE and CDE mostly comprise Winix "apps", not Unix programs. Netscape is a Winix "app", not a Unix program.
Linux users in particular seem to be happy with Winux "apps". Even more frighteningly, they seem happy to crank them out from scratch. I'm not completely certain I understand that phenomenon. Perhaps this is because they never really got into Unix programs in the first place. These things certainly aren't Unix friendly.
I don't see the mindless porting of Windows "apps" to Unix systems as being particularly useful to Unix people. The resulting "Winix apps" will never be proper programs and tools. They weren't designed that way. They may well appeal to the mindless masses who've been trained to accept a completely distinct set of cultural computing cues, and this strategy might get more non-technical users to employ the platform, but it does nothing to make happy those of us who are already comfortable with Unix. In fact, it often has quite the opposite effect.
This isn't Unix as Literature anymore. We're in the the post-literate age of populist pablum instead. But hey, that's both the price and prize of popularity. You're supposed to enjoy it. Well, unless you're one of those Unix types, that is.
Well I sure hope you sent a letter on company letterhead to Adobe and Autodesk requesting Linux ports of their programs...It's so easy to do. Why not do it? Posting a whine about it to Slashdot is no less effort and while you may not get a response immediately from those comapnies, complaining about it here is a guaranteed waste of your time.
1) MainWin is not an emulator.
2) "Expensive" is a relative term. Even it is $50,000, that is cheap if it leads to $500,000 is additional sales.
Think about it.
Please tell us how/why you used ? in place of '.
The Source is indeed very usefull but generally, it is much more effective to have valid and up to date API documentation. This is what Linux is missing most.
Well you comparison between Software and OS with Cars and Roads is pretty good, but it shows that you've not had an awful lot of choice.
Well its more like cars and countries, cos in some countries you get loads of gravel tracks while in others you get motorways, some with speed limits and others without and in some countries you even drive on the other side of the road.
Thats why you're fighting OS wars - it doesnt matter if youre driving a tractor, but for any faster car it matters quite a lot!
I beg to differ there, if you check carefully I think you'll find that IE5 implements more of the useful stuff in the latest HTML4 and DHTML specs. Especially the new text control in DHTML often works more correctly and predictably under IE. Of course, neither browser deserves too much credit, since full support is still far off.
I'm mainly using IE5 simply because it feels faster on my machines. I've used both Netscape and IE since versions 3, and IE has always been snappier as far as I'm concerned. True, IE5 has the extremely irritating disappearing BACK button feature, which sends me up the wall. Still, not enough reason to switch to Netscape. Besides, OE5 is head and shoulders above Messenger, which can't even check multiple POP3 accounts. So unless I feel that I'm truly missing out by not using Netscape, I'll poop on it.
MainWin will come out and very very likely be much better than WINE. But it will cause the open-source movement to rally around WINE, to show how far it has to go. Lots more effort will be put into it's development, and as a result, we will get a far superior, Open-sourced product than the one we have.
Bring MainWin on. I'll use it, until WINE Improves on all of it's features. And as open sourced recods have shown, it won't take very long.
I've seen various comments about the alleged "hidden API calls" in the win32 API that Microsoft uses to get an unfair edge over the competition. I think all these "hidden" calls are really just internal API calls being called directly, instead of going through the documented calls. Is it any wonder that old applications break when the DLL gets upgraded?
Instead of hating MS for using "hidden" calls, laugh at them for their poor coding methodology.
NathanI have ported a lot of code from UNIX (Solaris sparc and x86, DEC-UX, AIX and Linux, and even BEOS) to Windows and vice-versa. C being very portable, the only major difficulties when porting that I have encountered so far had to do with threads and file systems (I suppose IO and drivers too but I don't use them) for which I use my own set of functions which call the proper OS native functions as necessary. There are some other quirks like strncmp vs stricmp and things like that which are usually just a matter of placing a #define. What I hate the most when porting to Windows is going from a regular "make" setup to a Visual C++ workspace. Of course, I don't program much GUI stuff... Fortunately for Linux, Borland and Corel will have a great set of solutions early next year that will address this issue (GUI) and others. If X was way easier to program, there would be no reason for software not being ported to UNIX. I don't want to bother with a specific toolkit, especially when there are many equivalent, all more or less competing with each other. My point is screw MainSoft, it's for the lazy people who don't know/care about UNIX anyway. As for Wine, let's hope it's a temporary fix to the Linux application availability issue. It's obvious that it's just another attempt from Microsoft to bring developers from UNIX to Windows. Next thing you know, Mainsoft won't support this or that pseudo-important feature that Windows has.
I first ran into MainSoft when I needed a UNIX version of Visual SourceSafe. It appeared to do what I needed it to do (access repositories stored on a UNIX box, shared via Samba, between Windows and UNIX), and so my company bought it.
So I get called by a sales director, and we get to talking about this. (This was in April of 1999, btw.) I tell him that I'd -really- like to get my hands on a version for Linux, since that's where we were doing most of our coding. His answer was rather surprising... (Not a direct quote, but as much as I remember.)
"We haven't put any significant resources into Linux because we haven't had the demand for it. We would end up losing money on the porting. SourceSafe uses our MainWin library, and that's not ported right now, because developers don't seem to want to target Linux. We are, however, taking note of the number of requests, and it's quickly approaching critical mass."
Yes, I know, it's Marketing speaking, and Engineering is always a few months behind. But still.
He also gave some rather interesting insights into SourceSafe. He said that they got the source for SourceSafe 5 from Microsoft, and they ended up having to fix a lot of bugs in it. They did send the fixes back to MS. Anyway, they'd been promised the source for SourceSafe 6 a long while before they actually got it -- two months. They recommitted the resources they were going to use to do the port a couple of weeks before they actually got the source... and by then it was too late.
MainSoft has been one of the nicer companies I've ever had the pleasure of doing business with, actually. I do hope they succeed. (And they don't even, unlike MS FrontPage's Apache extensions, require root privilege to run!)
-Winged
I'd love to see a direct app-to-app comparison of MainWin and WINE, both using linux-compiled binaries. That would be really interesting. You may be right, of course, MainWin might really suck cheese. Or, the MainWin team might introduce a much better product to the Linux world, and we might be pleasantly suprised. I guess we'll see.
And on that note: Does this give anyone else an inkling that we might be seeing an MSIE port to Linux soon?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I have used Navigtor for 3 years, version 2,3 and 4. Nobody can deny that Netscape set a new low benchmark for software quality. They should be criticised for this. The moderation should NOT be used to veto things you don't agree with, and support those that you do. It should be used to elevate the well written, funny or well reasoned, rather than moderating "Linux rulez, Windoze droolz" up.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Sorry, folks. I badly want Wine to work. It doesn't. It isn't even close to working. Yes, I know that 90% or so of the API has been implemented, sort of, but the remainder will take years at the current pace.
MainWin, on the other hand, works. It has problems, but lots of companies are shipping software that runs on top of MainWin.
Um .. yeah.
:).
.. these things are intellectual property minefields and may never get added in, for reasons that have nothing to do with the prodigious abilities of the programmers.
Can The GIMP parse EPS files? No.
Does it have adjustment layers? No.
Can you make a spot color channel in The GIMP? No.
Can you create a duotone EPS? No.
Does it have the history palette or history brush? No.
Can you save in CMYK? No.
Color management? No (which, in all fairness, may actually be a good thing
Layer masks? No.
Does it have a pen tool? No.^H^H^HYes, it does.
The GIMP *is* a wonderfully kick-ass program. It is completely free, and if I was a decent programmer (which I'm not) I'd love to add in layer masks, adjustment layers, history palette, history brush.
Unfortunately, color management, CMYK, Pantone (tm) spot colors, and possibly opening and saving EPS graphics
Every few months, I download a new version of the program, and every time I'm pleasantly surprised at what's been added since the last time. The pen tool is the most recent example.
Redhat has similar guidelines.
I'd imagine SuSE and Caldera might wish to bundle such a thing if it was made available to them. Corel wouldn't, it'd be competing with Wine.
But that's not enough to "embrace" the linux distribution market.
With Window's source running rampant
What do you mean by this? Sure, I'm on IRC alot, but I haven't heard of this being on anybody's "0-day" list. Care to expand?
"Yes they do when the site doesn't work because of the crappy implementation of those two facilities"
But that doesn't happen. No sensible webdeveloper would produce a site that doesn't work on the browser with the largest market share. If those two features are a problem the solution is simple: don't use 'em.
"I think it has - I'm not saying Netscape 4 is perfect, but it's a damn sight better than IE"
They are both far from perfect.
"What it looks like doesn't matter in the slightest. Whether it handles simple web standards is more important."
Bullshit, as I pointed out, looks are all that matter. The average user is quite clueless about so called standards (I think the word standard is a bit premature when it comes to HTML 4.0 since no browser has fully implemented it yet). Since the user (at this moment) chooses to use internet explorer, that's the target platform for web developers. So in reality most sites work on ie. The few that don't are usually not so relevant. It's been a long time since I encountered "this site only works with netscape 4.x" or even "this site is best viewed with netscape 4.x".
"They do when things don't work!!! Without standards you'll just end up with a proprietary MS-web - sure MS users can view it, but with the proliferation of set-top-boxes et. al that don't use IE, MS will be forced to comply to the standards..."
Set top boxes at this point use far less advanced browsers than netscape or IE. Generally HTML 4.0 and XML are not supported on them. So I don't see how this makes a difference.
I'm not saying I like this situation but I'm realistic enough to recognise things as they are. I truly hope mozilla will make a difference.
Jilles
We used it to port a relatively large (~300,000 lines of source) Windows app to four flavors of UNIX. MainWin is quirky at best, but did allow us to ship said product on those platforms and customers seemed happy. I personally found the apps to be considerably more memory hungry and far slower than a native X11 app, but that's to be expected.
At the time, the licensing fees were somewhat high (approx $4,000-$5,000/year for one platform, additional platforms were cheaper).
I was always surprised that they didn't have Linux support, but that seems to be changing. All in all, it's still far better to be a Good Programmer (tm) and separate your GUI from your core code and allow yourself to "change with the times" and rewrite only the GUI portion when porting to new platforms. Toolkits like this are usually for programs which are inherently tied to the Windows platform either because of poor programming ability or lack of foresight about where the system would end up.
I believe that AutoCAD had Un*x versions up until AutoCAD r13c4. I still wish they did though... :(
:/ (And I don't really like Blender very much.)
I really wish there were some nice 3D modeling and rendering programs like trueSpace and 3DSMax for Linux. I guess that is my rant... I don't like using Windows, but I have to for 3D modeling and CAD...
-Phil
> i mean, this is exactly what LINUX needs.
Unfortunately, if MainWin became a necessary part of Linux, then Linux would no longer be free.
I'm guessing that microsoft is wanting to stake an early claim in the linux application department. They're making tons of money off of
their products like Office. If they could get office over to *NIX platforms, they'd have the entire market of office software.
Also, look at it from Gates' perspective. He wants to be the big daddy showing the world the wonders of computers. He sees himself as the man who brought the information age to the world. His apsirations for money and dominance are not as great as his belief in himself as the 'bringer of technology to the world'. He sees the trend toward linux and this move with MainWin will allow him to plant his big foot securely in Linux. Gates controls the mass applications. The applications become what people know and use, making the OS secondary. The OS is merely there to get the average user into their favorite app. If everyone is running Linux, but staring at MS products all day long, Gates still wins. He's still steering the boat of technology and that's what he wants.
I don't know where you are coming from with this 6 month trial version thing. I don't know about you, but I need to use my computer longer than 6 months, and I don't want it rendered useless at the end of that time.
Oh, and your "RedHat is more expensive than NT" argument "is pathetic" as you would say. I just downloaded the 6.1 ISO, and for free. NT is not free.
P.S. Think before you post, and actually read someones comment before you attack them.
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I thought he said, "I came to chew bubblegum and kick ass," not "I came to kick ass and chew bubblegum," somebody got a video tape to check that out? Seriously though, there's some good potential in there for spraypainting slogans around places that are chained to the M$ OS'es ... "They Live: We Sleep..."
I wasn't sleeping. Nor were any of the other /. readers AFAICT
Personally I think this is the only thing that would keep linux a contender
Contender. A contender for what? Linux does what it does quite well and Windows (NT, anyway) does what it does pretty well too. What's the "goal" that is being sought here? Linux (note, I didn't say Red Hat) has no stockholders. When all the hype is swept away, it still does what it does and unlike Amiga, OS/2 or others, no decision will come from On High to "kill it." It'll just keep building and improving, probably largely independently of what Micros~1 decides to do.
Wake up and realize linux is a collective piece of betaware built on 30 year old tech that is not suitable for most desktops
Betaware. If betaware means software with bugs (I prefer the term defects), then, yes, Linux is betaware. As is Windows, DOS, Doom, Unicenter and any other piece of complex software. If you are trying to imply that Linux is less stable or has more defects than Windows, you'll have to do a better sales job than that as you've provided no evidence of such a claim, only invective.
30 year old technology. Any widely used technology (Linux, MVS, Windows, for example) is going to be based on proven technology. Windows NT is based on VMS. Linux is based on Unix, MVS is, well, MVS. All of these technologies are based on 50ish year old technology - the transistor. The transistor is based on 150ish year old technology - electricity. If you're trying to imply that somehow Linux is fatally flawed because it uses established methodologies, you'll have to jump in the kettle yourself or provide alternate examples.
Thanks for the comment! Now I just have to find that blasted CD of mine (I think it is in some drawer somewhere).
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Actually, OS is very very relevant. I used to be deeply into web design and graphics, but since I switched to Linux I'm more interested in coding. Coding is not fun on windows while Linux still lacks Photoshop (I agree that Gimp is rather weak in comparison).
Before we all go off M$ bashing, have any of you ever seen MainSoft's product? It's been around for a while, you know.
What MainWin does is make windows-developed applications work under UNIX OSes. They are not just runnable, they run exactly like they do under windows. This is a good thing for linux, because it means that companies (like mine, for instance) which must spend serious amounts of money to develop applications under WinNT or Win95/98 don't have to spend equal amounts of money to port those applications (along with all the specialized GUI features, like drag-n-drop, scripting host, etc.) to the various UNIX flavors. This means more applications that would normally never see the light of day on UNIX have the opportunity to grow into a real market there.
For my company in particular, this is a life-saving product. We simply do not have the extra resources to develop all that stuff on another OS.
However, that being said, I do feel that in some ways microsoft is trying to preserve its market by getting developers to choose M$ as a "common" platform. IMHO this won't work. We only use mainwin because we want to port a product previously targeted for the winnt market to the UNIX market. If we knew there would be this kind of demand on UNIX 3 years ago, we would have developed the product differently.
Maybe Microsoft can start learning how to handle competition without resorting to low-down tactics such as buying the new company over
That's what business is about! Don't sell out.
I disagree with the first part of your comment. Many people dual boot right now to play games or, in my case, use Photoshop or some other programs that Linux has no equally good replacements at this time. If we could run these programs in Linux, that's less dual-booting and no need to pay for Windows licence. Good.
Sorry to post AC but if the wrong people see this, I may get into trouble. :-)
Mainsoft's solution is very low-level XLib code. When my company looked into using Mainsoft as a Unix porting solution(at the time they had stuff working on Solaris 2.5.1+, AIX 4.3, HP 10.20, IRIX 6.3), we found a lot of problems with it because of the way it stressed X Server. Your machine had to be patched just right otherwise it failed to work(ie. crahs/hang up).
The interesting thing about Mainsoft's software is that functions very close to what it does on Win32 This means that there are by default two threads running(a guts thread and an GUI thread). Since the software is accessing X directly, you can make your applications exactly like Win32 or X. The registry is maintained on disk. Although WiGL was implement, OpenGL in general didn't seem to work all that well. Structered Storage worked great.
In the end we didn't use it because of stability issues. Out of the box, none of our machines worked correctly. Even after rigorous patching, which messed up two of the machines, it only partially functioned(OpenGL seemed to be their weakness).
I really do feel sorry for the Wine Team....Mainsoft gets all sorts of code and inside API directly from Microsoft that the Wine Team could never find.
How do you know he has never seen MainWin? It has been a product for other versions of Unix for a while. From the MainSoft web site "MainWin currently supports: IBM AIX 4.3, HP-UX 11.00 and 10.20, IRIX 6.2, 6.3, and 6.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6. Support for DEC UNIX, IRIX 6.5 and Solaris 2.7 is in development and will be available in the near future." Elsewhere "MainWin allows you to recompile and deploy your Microsoft Windows application on UNIX platforms." MainWin is not primarily an end-user product. It is a developer product that allows developers to recompile their code into a native Unix format. I'm unclear on whether you have to ship shared libraries with a recompiled application. It is clear, though, that you can not take a Windows binary and plunk it down on a system with MainWin and expect it to run.
If you have been using all of the things that you need and they never crash and you never need to do anything more, than consider yourself lucky. I have never had so much luck with Windows.
If all of the apps that I need for Linux worked well for Windows--like emacs, TeX, an ftp server , bash, and telnet--I would still not use Windows. I just can't rely upon it. Linux never goes down on me. I can rely upon Linux.
Take for instance my situation with a K6-2 400. This chip has problems with Windows 95 because of something to do with a timing loop. The bug is well known and causes Windows to give a GPF one half the times it tries to boot. Microsoft has released a patch, but not for Windows 95a, which happens to be the version I have.
Essentially what they are saying is that if I am using 95a, I'm not important. So now, half the time I boot, I have to reboot. And this is just one example. Sometimes my mouse stops working randomly. Anytime I update drivers in Windows it's like running around in circles.
In short, we should advocate Linux of Windows 95 because 95 is unstable. I've never used NT because it's too expensive. That's why it shouldn't be a standard.
OSes Irrelevant to you, Linux better for me.
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Well the IMDB says that it was "I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubble gum." Which sounds approximately right to me.
But, as to you first set of arguments. Users of Linux have already chosen an open-source product over all others because it runs faster and more stable than its closed source counterpart. If this project becomes a reality, and Mozilla has been released, will you use buggy, non-standard compliant, and unstable IE5, or will you load Mozilla? The success of this development would mean the best of both worlds. If a closed source product is better(god forbid ;)) then use it, no one is forcing you to use an inferior product though.
What if this takes the wind out of the sails of open source projects, I don't think so. We already have Netscape for Linux, but Mozilla is going strong because Netscape sucks. I don't think IE5 is good enough either. As for other programs I think if open source developers think they can do a better job, they will try to. If the already existing program is good enough, they will concentrate on other areas which need improvement, this is the way it should be. Open source does not need to reinvent the wheel (in most cases) to be successful.
Spencer Ogden
and what makes you think we can believe YOU? First off, people aren't leet for using Debian, they're just cool. Now, using Back Oriface makes you l337 ;P :)
Wouldn't have posted this, but who the hell will moderate it down?
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
Just my 0.006 Euro... ;-)
Do MS want this? If not, it will go the way WinOS/2 did under OS/2: they won't get their source contract renewed for Win2000/1/2 or whatever.
Or they could be bought back, the product delayed 8 month and then delivered with half the planned features, like with Citrix.
And better still: one of the (MANY) things that killed off OS/2 commercially was the lack of serious businness software: all this because all developers always preferred a Win version, because "it works on OS/2 too". Almost: the 'emulation' was never up to the real thing, the and you always had a lot of problems with win apps. Even IBM did this.
I'd really like to see such a thing, but I would not consider it so important like many here. It can be useful, but it won't alleviate the 'desktop software problem', at the contrary it would only become worse.
Bye,
Rob!
AniToolBox! An Open Source animation program!
The current Linux model and software such as Apache and Samba are exactly what the computer world need right now. My hope is they will drive the market towards reliable and inexpensive computing solutions and variants of the open source attitude. I think it is a bad idea to move Linux and the application support towards Windows interoperability. It's all the things about Linux that differ from Windows that I like. If IE is so good (and it is) then let's see a worthy competitor that takes advantage of the benefits of Linux (like security and robustness). This is much more appealing than adding a layer of abstraction to allow IE to run on Linux, abstraction layers are inheritantly going to be slow and buggy.
Things are coming along... the latest gcc can compile Java source files and produce Java bytecodes, and there is a partially complete GNU Classpath based on Gtk+.
The real reason why Java isn't standard on Linux yet?
Sun's licensing.
What I'm more interested in is the fact that any company actually interested in porting their apps to Linux can take WINE and work with it to make it work the way they want.
Sure, people like out-of-the-box solutions; that's why they buy Redhat (or Windows for that matter). But the point is that with open source solutions, those who find problems can fix them. This isn't about the religion of open source (or it shouldn't be, at least), but the reasoning for open source.
- Michael T. Babcock <homepage>
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Perhaps instead of porting Windows apps to Linux, some effort should be done in making it trivial to port Linux apps to Windows. That would, in theory, make Linux the primary platform with Windows the secondary.
Think a moment about it. I've read articles that IBM has admitted that Windows compatibality helped contribute to the demise of OS/2. Why should Linux strive for the same thing that killed OS/2? Allow developers to build on Linux and run on Windows with no modification. I know WINE has that as one of it's goals and that, to me, was where the Linux community really needs to go.
Yes. I like Wine. No I don't use a Windows OS at work or at home. I'm the kind of guy MS fears... I used to write software with there dev tools for their OS. Now I work only with Linux. It was not hard to get here. I do not need to use IE5 to read webpages. So what does this do for me?
Nothing.
Am I impressed? NO!
Why? I've seen this kinda thing befour.
Will it change things? No not really.
Should this company release their software for Linux? I don't care. And here is why.
I see the future of computing depending on a net connection and a browser. Why get hung up on the OS someone uses when It's all going back to a Central browser/server based computting model anyway.
If you use Linux save your money. If you use windows and Linux. Enjoy the free time you get from rebooting.
Last one in jail is a fascist.
As an athiest I find it very amusing to be suggesting that you check out a passage in the Bible, of all places. However, the Christians have a very apropos parable which should explain to you the fundamental flaw in your reasoning.
When using an operating system as poorly designed, buggy, unreliable, and proprietary (with all that implies: constantly moving technical targets for strategic business reasons, adding to the instability of the product and breaking dependent code -- i.e. programs, etc.) as, say, Microsoft Windows, you are essentially building your house upon a foundation of sand. It may be a very pretty house, with snazzy features that would make any home owner green with envy. But alas, after the first big tide, it will be little more than driftwood.
It doesn't matter how well written your CAD program is, if the operating system it is running on is so unreliable and crash-prone that you are frequently losing hours of work. Add to that the time and money forced upgrades your vendor requires you to make in order to "remain supported", and you have an ideal scenerio for flushing a great quantity of cash and time which would have otherwise been productive down the toilet, directly into your vendors pockets. It may not even be the CAD manufacturer's fault, since they are more than likely chasing a target which Microsoft is moving every few months.
Add the complexity of wanting to use two or three independent apps, which depend on the same, moving platform (but aren't necessarilly being released on the same timetable), and you have a situation wherein at any given time one or more of the apps are incompatable with the very version of the OS the other apps require!
The OS is the very foundation of your system. Ignore it at your own peril.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Yep, probably because no one wants to do the actual porting work (which there will be despite the "Win32 compatibility layer).
Also, the quality of these tools was probably not much (or any) better than Wine was...
...but images aren't loading yet for reasons we're still working on. Still, basic page layout is intact and yes, it still blows Crapscape 4.7 out of the water on page loading speed.
Why the concern, Open Source by it's nature cannot be destroyed, as long as people believe in it it will exist, look at the linux,BSD, perl, sendmail, apache, KDE, Gnome, Zope etc etc momenutum gathered over the last 2/3 years. Lokk at all the news & developments in 1999. Everyday the announcements on Linux Today etc expand & confirm the massive strides open source software is making. I studied the MainWin web site as well as the Softway Interix website. Who cares what FUD / dubious business practices - strategies Microsoft may beimplementing / devising, they are an irrellevant in the bigger picture. As Bill Gates said on Paxman they are not in the business of free software. MainWin can rapidly extend the apps available for Linux / Unix therefore M$ loses market share for Windows 9X / NT / W2K Softway Interix provides a means for Unix ? Linux apps on Windows therefore Gnome / Kde / GIMP etc can run on Windows offering FREE high quality apps running on Windows platforms hence M$ & all the other proprietary firms Lotus, Adobe, Autodesk et al lose market share on Windows platforms as well. They cannot compete against high quality free price open source software that is why they will lose and open source will win Open source has gained sufficient critical mass. Enough people have seen the benefits and believe it is worth while committing resources to ensuring it's success. hence all the recent investments by the giants like IBM, HP, Intel, SGI etc. M$ can squirm, fud, play dirty tricks but inevitably they will be eclipsed because via the leverage of the internet open source will grow & prosper.
"sure MS users can view it, but with the proliferation of set-top-boxes et. al that don't use IE, MS will be forced to comply to the standards..."
Certainly not. In the situation of a proprietary MS web, only the set top boxes produced by MS proliferate, and in some cases the most common authoring software might well be tweaked to produce code that intentionally fails to work on whatever set-top boxes aren't made by MS, unless the vendors license proprietary IE code at extortionate prices from MS.
I'm surprised you missed that, it's the most obvious thing in the world. We are already about 80% of the way towards that proprietary MS web, it's just that what with the DoJ case and Netscape only recently having died and AOL not being dead enough yet, MS doesn't choose to start turning the screws just yet. The time to start changing everything to really punish anything non-MS and render it useless is about a year and a half from now assuming their plans continue effectively. Until that time it is not in their best interest to put on the pressure. It's like hunting and chasing something- they have to let the rest of the computer industry run until it is tired before they catch up to it and snap its collective neck. Closing with it too early is overly chancy, and not the behavior of a smart predator, and MS may be a dreadfully sloppy software developer but they are a very smart predator and always have been, in the sense that Sweeney Todd may have been a terrible barber but was a very effective murderer.
One of the things that struct me while working with Mainsoft's software is that it is very geared toward being a "lock-step" porting solution. You right all of your code on Windows and then move it over to Unix, use their stuff, and churn out a Unix application. This is great if your company works like that, but for many places, there is active development on both Windows and Unix(all sorts of flavors mind you :-) ). With Mainsoft, it was too hard to do active development with their stuff. For instance, many of the scripts you run once...what happens if the settings change(ie remove a file from the build, change compiler flags, etc.)? To make the system really work, you make the changes on Windows, and re-port your application. Not the best way to go about doing things....
1. the GIMP, cool as it is, will never kill Photoshop.
;)
Not in its current state. But it's open sourced, and if enough people start working, then it'll have a fair chance.
2. I agree, IE5 sucks. NOT the way to go. 3. Have you actually used Opera? Not quite there. Try looking at pages that us DHTML or CSS. Opera == Suck.
Eh? I used Opera for two years when I used windows. Simply put - it's the greatest webbrowser available. And I did never see any problems with the CSS support. Actually, it was much better than netscapes.
I seem to remember a test, were Opera covered 78% of CSS correctly, IE 70-something, and Netscape 60-something.. Don't know if I remember it all correct though.
And, I've never experienced any trouble with DHTML neither.
In my experience, Opera == rules. (to put it in your words).
3. Kmail is OK. just OK.
I know
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Wake up and realize linux is a collective piece of betaware
If it is betaware, it's the most stable beta I've ever seen.
#define SARCASM
Besides, I wonder when the first release will come out? Version number 3, perhaps?
#undef SARCASM
built on 30 year old tech
That's about the best compliment I can think of. NOTHING in the computer world lasts 30 years! Yet Unix has managed to do it.
I guess that means that in 30 years, no one has been able to do what Unix does better than Unix does it, or we wouldn't be using Unix now, would we?
that is not suitable for most desktops.
That's only because 99% of the people are used to either the Windows or Macintosh GUIs. I don't think the average user knows the look-and-feel of Gnome or KDE, simply because they aren't on display at Best Buy. (actually I prefer Window Maker or (gasp!) CDE myself, but that's a whole other story)
Yes, the millions (and millions!) of configuration files might confuse the average user, but configuration utilities WILL appear to ease the process.
A final word: Documentation is the key. Hint: WE need a "help" utility that searches the HowTOs, FAQs, and/or man pages (at the user's option, of course) for relevant data.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Excuse me for a moment while I laugh hysterically...
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
This whole "30 year-old technology" thing is getting a little old. How about saying something original that actually makes sense. If you're going to criticise Linux, which is all well and fine, please state specific features that are inferior because they are based on this "30 year old technology". Otherwise, this is nonsensical noise.
I challenge you to give me ONE aspect of M$ Windows that is also not based, at least partly, on some older technology. By technology, make sure you keep in mind the WHOLE of technology, such as our decimal system and all the other principles of mathematics, statistics and physics that have evolved over thousands of years. It is foolish to think that anybody can truly come up with something that is NOT based on older technology. The whole of modern Science and Mathematics has evolved over millenia to the point where it is today. There would never be any advancements if we didn't learn from our mistakes and improve because of it.
Next time, think before you write!
It is interesting that they don't mention WINE as competition. Normally ZDNet not mentioning the Open Source product wouldn't surprise me, but this *is* a Linux article.
Wine (by my guesstimation) is looking at a similar time period to be stable enough to port sellable applications with. Corel must think so too, or Corel Office on Linux would be too far off to be worth doing this way (IMHO, of course))
To head off wasted posts quickly, please remember that WINE is *BOTH* a Win32 API implementation, AND a Windows emulator (The latter being a binary loader and interface to the former, of course)
How exactly does using a modern email client that works well and has the benefits of Outlook make for "dumbing down" linux? Let's see...Outlook...Pine....Outlook..."K"mail...outloo k...nasty-ass-Netscape Messenger...hrrmmm. I'll take Outlook thank you. If you can't get over the fact that M.S. made it to see that it isn't really a bad peice of mail client then why don't you STFU?
BTW, I prefer OE5 to Outlook98 or whatever but they still both do their job well.
I worked in a company that used this product. It has much more complete API coverage than Wine. However, it is very expensive and does not work very well. It results in extremely buggy and slow apps which use ludicrous amounts of memory. Also, patch releases often have regressions for even the most trivial bugs. I strongly recommend that anyone who needs to port a Windows product to Unix do a proper native port, with an XP back end and per-platform GUIs instead. It's a bigger up-front investement but it will pay off in the long run.
I have supported it for the last year. The only problems I've seen from end users is configuration settings, and usually because of the ISP I work for thinking they know how to code an installer that puts the correct config in there.
I'm disappointed that ZDNet didn't mention WINE in their article. You'd think they'd make an effort to make a more complete report- they mentioned Bristol, which sounds like a slightly different project.
This almost reminds me of something I saw this summer... I worked a comapny which routinely uses SAMBA when deploying mixed UNIX/Windows networks for clients. We recieved plenty of advertising for a product that did exactly what SAMBA did- for a price, of course. One of the quotes in the brochure was supposedly from a CEO who said something along the lines of "Our projects are too valuable to trust to free software..."
We all shared a good laugh over that one. Who has experience with this? Is it a way better product than WINE? Or can we laugh at this, also?
-Matthead
Why not? We made lots of people "like" MS Office the same way. Why do we short-change most people and their ability to adapt, and instead pander to their fears? Oh, wait. That's how marketing works. Sorry, my bad.
You have to admit that Windows is still dominent on the desktop and anything that allows linux to provide easier access to this might be helpful.
Again, why? This is like calling a Geo Metro a "Porsche 911 Turbo in sheep's clothing".I don't like M$ os much as the next person but if they make there product open source (I know likely as hell freezing over) that it just might help.
Unless BillG decided that he needed another big Billion-Dollar charity tax write off. MS shareholders will never let this happen.
There are alternative as we all know like Wine (and maybe VMWARE) but they either have don't have full application support or take a large performance hit. Just my 2 pence.
and just how much performance do most people need to run MS Office? Yes, I do not notice much usability difference, if at all, between the 2 machines I use most: P200MMX w/ 64MB RAM, PII-300 w/128MB RAM, with MS Office. That people still buy into the MS & Intel marketing bullshit is disturbing.
You're telling me THAT'S why IE for UNIX sucks so badly? (Yes, it sucks. I've heard that from all the people who tried to run IE for Solaris/SPARC.)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
It will take more to porting than replacing the API and emulating the environment.
There file permitions and home directories personal configurations. Windows is to single user focused. Not not that the wide range of hardware Linux runs on will make life easer for ports. Finaly there is the culture of FreeSoftware (not just OpenSource but realy free).
Of course there are some people who don't care if someone else owns the tools they use. They may give up there freedom and take there support and creativity with them. That will be sad, but I can live with the tools I have now and there will still be progress just slower and of better quality.
With Microsoft now porting the Win32 API onto Linux does this means that there will be a flood of windows programs available for Linux. As good a linux is at the server end even Linus has said Linux isn't ready for the desktop because it can be still unfriendly to a newbie. As such prehaps the ability to have office etc running on Linux might help make the tranistion into the market place a bit easier Then agin we can always try to make people like startoffice or applixware. You have to admit that Windows is still dominent on the desktop and anything that allows linux to provide easier access to this might be helpful. I don't like M$ os much as the next person but if they make there product open source (I know likely as hell freezing over) that it just might help. There are alternative as we all know like Wine (and maybe VMWARE) but they either have don't have full application support or take a large performance hit. Just my 2 pence.
Actually, there is a similar kind of product for letting Linux apps run on Windows. It's called CygWin by Cygnus Software (Solutions? can't remember...it's Cygnus something, anyway). The major difference between MainWin and this being CygWin is open source. As I recall it runs gcc and its libraries on Windows, but I could be wrong.
I disagree. This is a Good Thing, considering most Windows applications would require something, IMHO, resembling a major re-write. Motif/X11 libraries aren't anything like Windows 95/NT programming APIs; porting to Linux would definately take a good portion of time. A perfect example of this is Word Perfect, of Corel. Corel didn't break any ground in porting it to Linux; they already had a Unix version beforehand. And as a user of Word Perfect can clearly see, the Unix version isn't the Windows version. Anything that helps OpenSource win is a winner. People who shun projects because of them making an operating less obscure/niche market are simply complaining about status.
I have wanted to be able to use Internet Explorer for Linux for a long time. I don't like many Microsoft products but IE is one thing microsoft did right.... It crashes less on me than any other browser I have used. So until Mozilla gets to a stable point, I may start using IE!
On the other hand I think we need to keep an eye on this type of stuff. If alot of windows programs start flowing into *nix it could cause interest in open source to taper off. Alot of people get into developing open source products because they want to do something in their OS of choice and find out that there arn't any programs out there that do what they want... If there are alot more closed source programs out there coming over from windows, not only will there be less "why doesn't my OS have one of those" projects and more people learning the windows api and going closed source because its common with that api.
I know some people are going to flame me for suggesting using Microsoft products but grow up. If a company has a good product I am going to use it. If you have a valid counter or something to add to my statements please add them but if all you are interested in letting people know is how much you hate Microsoft, please don't waste everybodys time
I agree.
I think the focus should be on developing native Linux apps. We don't need M$.
However, this could be a very good thing because it will bring more attention to Linux in the mainstream, although I still haven't yet decided if that is a truly good thing or not. As the masses start to realize that there is an alternative to Windows that can run all their favorite little apps, they will become more interested in finding out more about this Linux thing. Then, once we have their attention, we can do the old bait and switch. They will be able to directly compare Win32 ported apps to native Linux apps (IE5 vs. Netscape/Mozilla). They may start seeing that the native apps run better and they can pretty much do the same stuff that they did before with the other OS. To be effective and long-lasting, change must occur slowly over time, and this could be another bridge that allows more people to migrate to Linux.
I don't think this will harm the Open Source movement at all. If anything, it will boost its momentum as more and more people start seeing the value of competition.
before the end of the month.
--
Insanity Takes Its Toll. Please Have Exact Change
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
(I hope you didn't go through the same kind of thing with espresso, cigars or martinis, but you're still probably trying to play golf better than Dorf...)
Besides, for your uses, you can use VMWare to run those apps (Ewwdora, Outlook Express, Internet Exploder, MS Office). So you may think that you're a real heavy-duty computer user, OK. I guess that makes you a legend in your own mind.
The only thing that could seriously wound Linux would be if the hardware got locked down, one way or the other, or it became part of the license agreement when you buy a new PC with Windows on it that you cannot remove Windows as it is an essential piece of the computer system, which, btw, you only have a license to use (extending the software license absurdity to the hardware level), you don't own it, and you are thus not allowed to modify it to your own needs other than through the ways the computer maker or Microsoft have determined is best for you.
It's late and my head's throbbing, so I don't recall any facts to back this up, but...
<conspiracy_theory>
It seems to me as if this is a common M$ tactic, right? Announce that they're coming out with a new product that does this or that, to stop vendors from jumping in that direction. Then maybe come out with a token product which does (maybe) half of what they said, and finally kill it off completely.
</conspiracy_theory>
Now admittedly, it's a M$ partner, but can you trust a cohort any more than the real thing?
Hmm... First the FUD campaign, now an interest diversion? Someone may be running very scared.
I think a slight modification to the road analogy makes it more complete. A modern OS is more complicated than a road. A road is merely hardware, driving directly on the road is what embedded software designers do when they write applications running on hardware that doesn't use an operating system. You have one maybe two cars on the road, which is dangerous since there aren't any lines painted or street signs directing traffic. When a car crashes it's its own fault.
:)
A modern operating system is more like a complete traffic system. It has street lights, street signs, dedicated movement and turning lanes, HOV lanes for real-time processes, cops, and the like. An OS with good memory management would also have barriers dividing one lane from the next, and if you wanted to change lanes you'd have to make a call on your cell phone to open a gate in the barrier so you could change lanes. In this context we should all be able to relate to how operating systems differ. The systems which control our freeways are operating systems, in every sense of the term. We've all experienced bad ones, and a few lucky people may have experienced good ones. (Under this scenario I've experienced Road Rage a time or two when some crazy "driver" "crashed" through my "Windows".) There's even a monopolistic force which ensures that when we build a new one, it always sucks just like all the others. We even just try to patch the old one, because we don't want to sacrifice backwards compatibility with our old cars/drivers.
Well, if you've ever driven on a good road system, you've been able to make the comparison and get frustrated when you drive on a crappy one. Then you know why operating systems matter, and why we fight over them.
Ryan
You are so totally clueless as to make your opinion worthless. Try making something other than a cheezy web banner ad, Photoshop or even Paint Shop Pro, blows the doors off GIMP.
From MainWin:
These Windows Services on UNIX incorporate several
million lines of Windows source code, assuring you that your code will run on UNIX exactly as it does on NT.
MainWin's implementation of Win32 on UNIX is a thin, efficient layer that sits directly on top of UNIX operating system low-level
services. MainWin's Win32 for UNIX supports the full range of Win32 API calls on the UNIX operating system.
Er... does anyone else see a contradiction here? I want to hear from someone who's got their hands on this beast. Does it use a toolkit? Does it even use X? Is it as much of a pig as it sounds?
Questions.....
The whole point is to make NT apps run under *nix. Since the old school unix platforms are being drowned by the linux wave, MS is latching on to linux as an interoperability platform to stamp out. It's a clever tactic - basically, their goal in buying mainsoft was to position and elbow in NT. This is part of the elbowing process.
Nobody can accuse MS of being stupid. Their whole game plan in this area is to make NT indispensable.
This reminds me of an Andy Grove statement about how MS has its structure set up to act like antibodies reacting - they use email and feedback mechanisms to react rapidly and carry out their defense. It's very effective. Sure, people accuse them of being clueless, but they're the ones laughing. It's clever, and it works far more effectively than any other large software company.
BTW - Mary Jo Foley has been on a pro-linux anti-MS spree for months now. A lot of her articles are quite insightful too, though I suspect she's lost some of her MS insiders at this point. And she does read
L.
Linux can't really succede or fail, if people use it it's working for them but Linux isn't something that can fail. Redhat can fail, but not Linux.
I can't tell you how interesting and inspiring it is to see the above post.
I'm an extremist, myself- on Linux I gravitate towards the approach Tom prefers, with digressions for things like trying out piles of GNOME apps to see what that's like (tried KDE, didn't like the 'winix' feel of the apps). However, when my Dr. Jekyll side takes over, Winix or for that matter Windows itself is pathetically inadequate, and I boot into MacOS day in and day out, running a set of habitual stable programs and not being bothered with inconsistencies on the scale of a Windows or Winix. So in some senses I would have to consider myself so much of a GUI purist that, again, Windows is pathetically inadequate, and Winix only gets by because it's too primitive to offer the full morass of Windows-like GUI crud!
Most of your basic GUI functionality was present in MacOS before even System Six- there have been some very important refinements, particularly in defining semantics for drag and drop of various different datatypes between apps and in window zooming logic (which wasn't really perfected until System 7 and 8), but on the whole the essence of GUI is in offering a _simple_ and physically direct interface. Mere pictures are not enough- the ridiculous toolbarness of Windows and Winix is every bit as arcane as the most strangely-named Unix commands, only with pictures. It takes a lot of selfdiscipline to keep a GUI approachable and learnable- something that Windows disdains to do, and something that Winix/X in general never considered doing (for example, consider the classic X text handling mousebutton boondoggle! It entirely replaces direct manipulation with an emphasis on weird specialised controls, presumably so the mousehandling code will be simpler).
What is the alternative? It is what Tom is talking about. It's not elitist- but it is very different. Consider a user interface where operations are no longer behaviors of 'app' objects lying around like Swiss Army Knives- instead they are like words that must be formed into sentences, new sentences for every need, an 'interface' that must be learned but is then used unthinkingly for years.
I had to zap several lines of many HTML files the other day. My boss, with great effort and inconvenience, managed to fix the lines in one file and upload it by FTP to the website, using Windows tools. This involved a great deal of GUI manipulation. Using Winix tools would have required a comparable amount of clicking and manipulating (assuming a remote client), as it was inherent in the approach. I tired of watching him and said, 'Give me a terminal', and took over, doing all the rest of the files in vi on the webhosting machine itself, remotely via terminal, with the following commands: vi *foo.html, (arrowkeys), dd, dd, dd, dd, dd, ZZ. Lather, rinse, repeat- I could have been faster if I wanted to rush. Yet I'd had to learn, earlier, that vi had 'modes', what 'dd' and 'ZZ' meant, and how to run vi on a text file.
If I was still more literate, the nature of the exact problem that faced me was a natural for a recursive line-deleting script, in that the deleted lines were always identical. If I spoke Unix even more fluently, the image is of me looking at one of the files, copying some text or making note of the lines to be deleted, and then effortlessly writing about two lines of bafflingly cryptic line noise script (if that!), hitting return, and just walking away. Done. Done all the same even if it was thousands of files to correct, because I had the power to identify common factors among the work to be done, and Unix had the power to let me address only the exact tasks that had to be performed, and to build a 'sentence' that was the Unix translation of "See those lines? Go through all the files and delete them when you see them."
I didn't have quite that power. I vied with all the files individually, hampered by the terminal's inability to do tab filename completion (sorely missed), and still each task took easy seconds, not in spite of the lack of a GUI, but because there were no actions to perform that did not directly relate to what I was doing, and because the few vi commands I had committed to memory (just by use, nothing more) happened to perfectly suit the tasks I had to perform.
If Linux becomes completely synonymous with KDE and Gnome, it will be cheating itself of some incredible potentialities- yet it cannot ever completely lose this. Anyone can fire up six different kinds of term (even if many people's goal is to never have to use one!) and all of this is latent, waiting to be used.
More relevantly, the mere existence of KDE and Gnome does not mean that nobody is thinking about how to best maximize the classic potential of Unix, but combine it with the eye candy of modern window managers. I know I have a whiteboard right now filled with brainstorming on how to combine an eyecandy window manager with a powerful emphasis on term windows and methods of manipulating them and handling them. I'm talking not a GUI in which you can run terms, but a windowing environment centrally focussed on certain possibilities inherent in the concept of fixed-character-dimensions terms and use of a mouse to manage window positioning and launch icon-resident processes (and I'm thinking one button mouse with rightclicking being the extra value, rather than two-button or three-button as compulsory to be able to do anything).
It's not ready yet. I'm still working on it and in fact I need some window manager behaviors that I'll have to learn to program, because nothing, not even E, does quite what I'm thinking of. But it's coming, because regardless of current fashion there IS another way of doing things, and the way to make it approachable is not to put buttons on everything, but to think out and design the concepts so that they make sense when used as language.
Once people start using language-style interfaces, they never let go...
If microsoft ports Win32 over to Linux, The people working on WINE won't have any more problems. Also, if this happens, MS might also port win32 to other os's MacOS, BeOS, etc. Also, if this happens, more work environments will allow linux to be installed. I am not aloud to install linux on my work computer because it does not have certan programs (linux). If ms ported Win32, then I would be able to install, and load those programs.
-Tim
You know for all the Linux advocates who continually say there are apps to do anything and everything you want on Linux there sure are a lot of people who say they hate Windows/NT but 'have' to use it. If there are all these great apps available for Linux why is that? Are these people just to stupid to find them, or don't they exist outside of the minds of the rabid Linux advocates?
Which apps are they trying to run under linux? What is the point of this API exercise?
i dont see how so many people (of the posts ive read so far) can be complaining about WINE or anything like this.
i mean, this is exactly what LINUX needs.
either that or some stable applications!
look at netscape, oh wait it crashed.
most people (except the over the top linux advocates) would prefer to use a stable web browser - so IE5 is obviously the way right now.
what other applications?? hmm lets see...
sure gimp is a nice tool, but wouldn't it be a lot cooler to use photoshop?
email clients, ummm... netscape's email client is about the friendliest thing i've seen for an x-client and has the expected features, but outlook express or eudora is a hell of a lot better.
having a working win32api emulator is what linux needs if it is to get anywhere with people like myself.
i've used linux for a few years on and off, sure it was fun to mess around with the console and play with x for a while - but now after all that time wasted crapping around i think i'd still prefer a nice, easy to use application which is a standard.
give me IE5 and outlook or eudora for x and linux would have me for good - rather than it being a "hobby" to me and the many others who constantly swap between Windows and Linux.
look forward to the flames.
and yes i probably am ignorant, but its people like me who will make or break linux in the desktop marketplace.
bye
held. Looks like MS will have to make an offer
that MainSoft can't refuse
--
Insanity Takes Its Toll. Please Have Exact Change
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I'm a web developer, and have found Netscape to be a total pain in the butt when it comes to standards. For example, if you leave out certain optional html tags, Netscape goes crazy. IE on the other hand handles it just fine, like it's supposed to. Also, I believe it was Netscape that came with RedHat 6.0 that couldn't do Java Applets at all. If you would load up a site with Java on it, Netscape would crash. And one final point, Netscape's resizing sucks. It takes several seconds just to repaint a web page that IE could do in about 1/100th of a second.
I know some chinese developers working on this program out of Shanghai. What they are working on is more along the lines of this. Windows networking code is anything but posix compliant. Microsoft has decided to call their network api "windows sockets". The aim of this project, at least in part as I understand it, is to write an api for linux that will allow the use of "windows sockets" code on posix compliant systems. The primary aim of this is to bring windows flagship network programs (eg. MS Exchange Server and MS SQL Server) over to run on a linux platform. My point is, don't be looking for many desktop user MS appications on your X-Window desktop soon.
Reguards
The old IBM adage, "if it works don't fix it," has a new application as the world stumbles over into a new millennium. Today, in 1999, a new group might claim with pride of their favorite OS, "we don't have to fix it, because it works!"
The Holy War between the armies of Linux users, Windows users, and Mac die-hards has grown more vicious than ever. And none of the content of the diatribes actually matters one iota - and certainly not Dr. Goebbel's new anti-Linux page at microsoft.com.
My contention is that the only issue for most users is stability, and measuring stability for these users is straightforward. At the IBM think tank in Hursley in the south of England, where pressure is on to integrate with Windows NT, Linux is a clear favorite. "It's bulletproof," one developer told me. And that's all he needed to say. Stability is what end users want. They don't want blue screens of death, leaky drivers, faulting TCP stacks, and the like. They want to be able to turn on their computer and have it run - and run and run and run without re-booting all the time - and just do what they set out to do. And in this regard, Linux fits the bill, and no other OS comes close.
I am not a Linux user, but I am raised on UNIX. And I do vaguely remember when we got word about a chap across the sea from us in Stockholm who had taken the kernel to something called MINIX as I remember and was working on it. But when a developer tells me what he tells me in such uncertain terms, with such a note of satisfaction in his voice, directly corroborating all I've heard over the months and years - then I purport to know.
The application software will come. Maybe it will be freeware too. There once was a time when all software was officially free anyway. Long before the emergence of the Software Beast in Redmond. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs sold hardware - the software just tagged along. It seems we're back there again. You can't get around paying for hardware. The laws guarding software are a real headache. Someone might have to invest in programmers, but then again maybe they don't. Hardware companies might invest in support gurus, but then again they did that back in the old days too. For all MVS ever was, and it's hard to compare apples and oranges here, I don't think IBM would whine that open source was less stable than what they constructed.
And the complexity, as the opposing armies call it, is just a hurdle. The more people use computers - and new generations are being born all the time who know things by 10 that our IT gods never learned in their lifetimes - the more this "hurdle" will turn into an innocuous speed bump - just something else to be learned, like driving a car, cycling a washing machine, filling out an income tax form.
I think - I am guessing here - that the Linux experience might be akin to a Swiss avalanche. It needs momentum. And as it gathers momentum, it gathers power, and thereby more momentum. The more people using it, the more stable and developed it becomes, which results in even more people using it, which results in further stability, and so on and so forth. I don't regard corporate tagging onto the Linux bandwagon as decisive here - I just don't think it will matter much when the final score is in. I think the ordinary users in the field will determine the outcome - the users with PCs on their kitchen tables and cables running over their toasters, huddling over manuals deep in the night. The more the word gets out - the more people who use this system - the more it will spread. Like chatter teeth bumping into chatter teeth - sooner or later they're all yacking away.
Security isn't even an issue. What the web servers of the world run is one thing (and that's basically freeware anyway), what your kitchen gurus need is something quite different. Your kitchen gurus can't even spell security, raised as they are on shortcuts and Start menus and Favorites.
People have forecast the doom of William H. Goebbels 3 before. The Richest Man in the World has only grown richer. It's fashionable, even, to criticize him and his company. It's great gratuitous speculation to let him and his corporation have it when they're on the verge of introducing a new product. And the way it usually goes - once the product is released, in a few weeks, as the oooh's and ahhhh's die down, everyone with the stars still in their eyes, blinded by this new product, will forget this new Winter of Our Discontent.
But I'm not so sure this time. I won't be a fool and say Bill will even be scratched by this latest attack from Linux. But you never know. You just never do.
Where we at radsoft.net are stationed, it doesn't matter much really, although personally I am beginning to find the Windows experience rather enervating. We've been trying to fight bloat and compensate for unstable Microsoft system hacks ever since we had to use Windows - I think we've succeeded, but that doesn't mean we're happy about it.
Rick Downes
radsoft.net
Typical bait and switch Microsoft tactics. A sane business simply should not rely on a cross-platform solution that is fundamentally dependent on one of the target platforms! (Microsoft NT source code in this case) Microsoft did this with Bristol as well: gave them NT source code access, Bristol developed a WIN32 API implementation for Unix and this indirectly baited Unix companies like AutoDesk to port their app to NT and still keep it running on Unix as well. A year or two later Microsoft suddenly increased the licensing cost of the NT source code five-fold. Five-fold *per client license* price increase. What did this mean? NT-only versions of the software remained cheap, the Unix port suddenly got very expensive. Bristol actually went ahead and sued Microsoft (and lost the case badly), and AutoDesk was stranded in the NT space. Btw., the market share of AutoDesk's AutoCAD has dropped significantly since then, so this should be a warning to other businesses. ;) Maybe ask MainSoft wether Microsoft guarantees (contractually) that MainSoft will get easy, fair-price, volume-independent and early access to NT source code (and source code in development) in the future.
Now how is MainSoft different? Sure it will work for a year or two, until President Bush orders his antitrust chief to settle with Microsoft (under ridiculous conditions). Microsoft will be the true 1100-pound gorilla again it used to be, and MainSoft will be yet another Bristol. Keep in mind that Microsoft can increase the price of the NT source code license unilaterally at any time, to almost any value. It's theirs after all, so if you depend on it thats your problem.
What should we Linuxers do? Just ignore them and write cool Linux-API (Unix) apps, Micro/MainSoft are losers
--Coke
Of course, it didn't stop with the core code. Anyone who loaded Office onto their new PPC back in '94 will remember that the GUI looked just like the Win version, and was soooooooo slooooooow. Exactly. MS was running their Win code through compatibility libs to end up with PPC executable. From that moment on, it was obvious MS was just milking the MacOS market with a minimum effort while they drove everyone over to Windows. It wasn't a hard sell, when the apps looked the same, and the native Windows version ran faster.
If MS ever allows one of it's captive licensee's efforts at an honest to God NT API on Linux product to become sucessful, you can COUNT on these things:
Luke, help me take this mask off
It would be a dream come true to see apps like AutoCAD, MapInfo, CorelDraw..ect running on a Linux desktop. No more need to reboot every so many hours to avoid a GPF or a Blue Screen. Whether this would come true by porting these apps or running through Wine...it would not matter, just get them running on a stable platform!!
I am becoming resigned to the fact that the operating system, for all intents and purposes, is meaningless. I use a limited number of programs on a day to day basis; the three that I use the most are:
- AutoCAD 14
- form*Z 3.1
- Photoshop 5.5
(I am an architecture geek, if this wasn't obvious.) I have found that (at least in the case of Photoshop and form*Z) it matters next-to-none what OS I am on -- both run equally well and without any major differences on either platform. I'm stuck using a Windows machine for AutoCAD: Autodesk (its makers) decided after Release 12 (?) that it was no longer financially worthwhile to support two versions for platforms that made up less than 10% of the marketplace combined (namely, Mac and Unix). But I guess I'm okay with that, because it has allowed some nice CAD programs to flourish, at least on the Mac platform.
So, the point: I hate Windows; I specifically hate all the little crap that it does, its bugs, its "helpful features" that are anything but. However, due to my field of study and the choice of programs available, I'm rather stuck on a Windows machine. How I long to use Linux, Be, or *anything* other than Windows! Alas, I cannot. I was literally a few hours away from installing linux when I found that WINE cannot even run *older* versions of AutoCAD and form*Z and Photoshop, let alone execute the latest versions.
(I realize, and have heard arguments to the like before, that there are "similar" programs available on the linux platform. But is that really the solution you want to promote? "Don't like your OS? Switch and relearn all of the programs you use!" Harumph. For example: I've seen Gimp, I've dabbled with Gimp, I still vastly prefer the look, feel, and features of Photoshop. Sorry.)
I welcome anyone who wants to create the ability to escape the curse of Windows, even if it is MS itself at the heart of it. Remember what I said at the beginning: the OS is irrelevant. There are Holy Wars being faught over Mac vs. Win vs. Linux vs. Be vs. BSD vs. etc. Why? To me, operating systems are the roads of the world; programs are the cars. No one fusses about the roads they drive on (well, almost no one), but few people miss an opportunity to fuss about their car.
Okay, a fuzzy analogy, I apologize. (A wee bit tired right now...) Now, I'm an architecture geek, remember, not a computer geek; but try this: How much of what you do with your computer, productivity-wise, actually has anything directly to do with the operating system? I've examined my habits, and the answer is almost none. With few exceptions, almost everything I do on a computer involves programs that run on the OS, even telnet and plaintext editing. It seems to me that programs are where the money really is, not the OS.
Now, I am *NOT* advocating a "one world, one OS" system; rather, I'm envisioning a world in which there are multiple vendors for your OS, all of which are essentially the same. Think of it as the gas you put in your car -- with some minor performance variations, the gas from Shell will get you where you're going just as good as the gas from Mobil. What gas you put in your car doesn't matter nearly as much as where you are going.
Okay, to summarize: OS, irrelevant; programs, reason for having a computer; anything that blurs the distinction between one OS and the next (or makes the OS distinction a distant second to program usability), good news indeed.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
Why do all these products try to port things the wrong way around? It's the hardcore developers that prefer Unix and the end-users that prefer Windows. Why have developers using the Win32 API to write products for end-users on Linux? That's totally backward. The developers would rather develop on Linux.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Linux already has software for everything I need, including Quake. If you complain that Netscape is unstable (it isn't TOO bad under Linux, but it does die once in a while), use Lynx.
The only thing this is useful for is StarCraft anyway.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Do you really think that "FreeBSD (and others) are, as yet, unpolluted by the influx of marketroids." ? I'm curious why FreeBSD have so many major releases instead of minor version bumps. After all it is a matter of downloading with cvsup/ftp right ? I think that also shows marketroids are concerned with selling an amount of cd's and to compete with linux distro's version bumping ? Tell me what changed from 2.2.8 to 3.1 to 4.0-alpha..
This is what I predicted about 5 years ago as how MS could kill Linux. It worked for the Mac. If Linux gets a lot of nice MS apps, all using the MS toolkit, then MS would gain control of the Linux apps market (face it, some MS apps are really good, and they're all really compatible with each-other). Then, later, MS could make them work a little slower or a little worse on Linux, and probably even find a way to make them "crash" Linux (denial of RAM attack if nothing else) and people who liked Linux but wanted their apps to work would be forced to get Windows boxen. I'm just surprised that it took MS so long to start, but I guess that they didn't feel too threatened.
Having an Open Source OS is only the first step. All APIs need to be Open Source as well, or they just invite the creation of a monopoly.
Have a nice day!
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Mainwin allows windows code to be compiled on linux into native executables. Wine does this too but also allows the loading of native Win binaries to be loaded and executed using the wine win32api implementation.
Will the Mainwin people implement directX and write a direct3d to glx translation layer like the Wine crew are doing? Personally I doubt it. Wine also allows the loading of _native_ linux libs from a win32 program. I can fire up halflife and wine will load the _linux_ glide lib and give me full 3d acceleration.
Last but certainly not least... Wine IS open source. You want to hack in something that makes the widgets look like GTK ones? fine! try doing that with Mainwin.
Yes, witness Microsoft's "Linux Killer". I'm sure it's a lame attempt, won't work, but won't be their last attempt - but here's the "angle".
The monopoly, is NOT the Windows OS itself. I'm not even sure Microsoft gives a rat's ass about the OS (witness the quality of it). Microsoft's franchise is THE PLATFORM.
If Microsoft can make the platform more attractive, (by letting it run on Linux), they can keep more customers from defecting wholesale. Sure, some folks will defect to Linux because now they can run their favorite MS apps on it. But they're still buying closed source software from Microsoft. The non-technies will try it out, and the first few iterations might make it worthwhile, they'll feel like techies because they're running KRAD Linux. Then, Microsoft's partner will find some critical bugs in the system, and send out updates fixing the bugs, but bundled with performance slowing "enhancements". Gradually, the features will get crappier and crappier, and the non-technies will leave the Linux platform with a bad taste in their mouths, and go back to running Win apps natively on Windows. Either way, MS has not lost any MS Office customers.
This same strategy played out on the Macintosh platform - with the Mac port of Office. Mac users loved it, they had compatible files with the rest of the world, and then MS screwed it up so that it was unuseable (4.2.1), and people, instead of abandoning Office, abandoned Macintosh.
Now, MS did a fine job with Office98. It's great. but it's meant to be a hold-off for the DOJ case. I'll bet you a 1100MHz Intel chip that the next version of MS Office for Mac SUCKS really really bad, on purpose. And people who spent money demigrating from Mac to Windows, and back to Mac, will be forced to go back to Windows with an even stronger "Windows Only" mentality than before.
The folks that trusted MS, and bought Office98, in my opinion, are going to get screwed for trusting MS. Y'all should have bought Apple Works, and that file-translation thingie. Y'all should also bitch-slap anyone you know using MS Office on Windows, to get them to start using RTF or some other x-platform format, instead of native Word. By allowing people to continue using Word, you've gotten stuck in Microsoft's trap, and when Office01 sucks rocks, you'll have nobody to blame but yourself.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I work for a company that works with MainSoft. First they have very little to do with Microsoft. It's a little company that has a deal take the Microsoft source and port it to various *nix.
MainSoft has done an amazing job porting the Win32 API for *nix for some time now. The've ported it to Solaris and HP/UX. Why do you thing IE is out for Solaris and not Linux? Because IE for solaris is using MainSoft's win32 port!
Not only is MainSoft's port for win32, but COM/ATL and most C++ library's one uses in windows. It seriously only takes 5 mints to port your COM object to a Unix. No kidding.
Anyone who ses's this tech coming to the linux world a bad thing is blinded by there own linux cult paranoia.
Personally I think this is the only thing that would keep linux a contender. Wake up and realize linux is a collective piece of betaware built on 30 year old tech that is not suitable for most desktops. It's hot right now, but unless they get more things like mainsoft catering to it, it's going to burn out and die.
this is my sig.
Some years ago, I read a book by ex-Microserf Eller, about his experiences at MS since he started coding Windows 1.0 there. I found the part concerning GO Corporation very interesting. Around 1992, Go launched their pen-oriented (instead of mouse-oriented) operating system. Microsofts reaction was "Pen Windows", in fact just Windows 3.11 plus some DLLs for pen drivers and text recognition. In the marketing war thereafter, Microsoft said: "Hey, you don't need Go. Windows can do it too." The hype was gone and Go was dead, as Martin Eller describes it.
The same might apply to this situation. Linux does a heck of a lot more than running Win32 binaries, but Microsoft will tell us that we don't need too switch to Linux, because Windows runs Win32 binaries natively. People won't see the difference between Windows and Linux anymore, and therefore people won't move to Linux. Isn't that the strategy, classical extend & embrace?
Even if this idea doesn't kill Linux, it probably kills Wine. That is a real loss, because Wine is the bridge between Microsofts monopoly on the Win32 standard and the Open Source movement. Wine itself might be alpha forever, but look at the impact it has. Even for Windows-coders, it is a huge resource of information about Windows. Snippets of code have been reused in lots of (even closed-source) applications. Which exactly shows the importance of Linux: we do not want to depend of the Redmond Giant. That is the freedom you are talking about.
Why would mircrosoft want cross platform compatibility?
The simple reason I came up with is that If they loose ground in the operating system world, they still can continue with their line of software. If Linux-MFC (an oxymoron) is easier to program then many people will pay for microsoft's Developper studio (which is ok, other than it's cost).
They are just doing it so they will win both ways. Notice that they aren't making a windows application to run linux but vice-versa. This is because they realize that people don't like their operating system.
Just think, Do you really think they would do this if there wasn't anything in it for them.
Think about it.. This will change Linux a lot.. Everything for Linux (nearly everything) is open source. This is a good thing. But as soon as programs like this make it possible for Linux to run Windows apps, most of which are closed source, then we lose. Us open sourcers are still sucking Microsoft's tit for all it's worth (If that makes sence?) What is the point of Linux? I am sure this answer is different for everyone. I don't want Microsoft to come in, create a way for all Microsoft products and programs designed to run in Windows to be ran in Linux. It may sound nice to be able to use Microsoft Office, or IE, or other programs like that in Linux. But what are we willing to give to be able to do it? Are you willing to let Microsoft have their take in the Open Source field? Are you going to let them come in, and add to Linux for their own profit? Personally I would rather use a program some guy spent his time on makeing work right and efficiently, then some Microsoft Bloatware, that a team wrote not because they wanted to, but because that was their job. Which method turns out quality? I agree that the individual will not alway's come up with the better program..
Also, on the flip side. (Now this will get you thinking).. Is this really a smart move on Microsoft? Are they really getting rid of the Open Source community, trying to nudge them out? I think not! Think of what this would transform Linux into. Now Linux would be able to efficiently and stably run windows apps. Hmm.. Can Windows run UNIX apps in the same fasion? Now Linux will be able not only to run it's programs, but also Windoes programs, thus replaceing 2 computers. But a Windows machine will still leave you looking for the features of a Linux Machine.. Thus, a Linux machine would be able to effectively perform all the tasks of not only a Linux machine, but also a Windows NT machine.. As for Windows, it is still lacking a lot in terms of being able to perform well as a Linux/ UNIX machine.. This is also a good thing for the Linux Community. The main reason for a Windows user not to change to Linux is that their programs (Which they have grown to love) don't work on Linux! They don't want to leave what they know behind to learn somthing new. That is how life goes. With this people would be able to run their favorite programs. This is a nice thing to be able to do. And I personally would like to be able to do it also.
((I think I have argued both sides. But that's OK. They are my thaughts. I feel that they offer a little insight as to what is happening. What Microsoft want to accomplish I can only guess..))
"I couldn't give him (Bill Gates) advice in business and he couldn't give me advice in technology." Linus Torvalds
After reading the MainWin overview on MainSoft's site, it is obvious that it is just another Win32 emulation layer, similar to Wine for Linux or Wabi for Solaris. Of course, they state on their page that MainWin is not an emulator. But all it does is to translate Win32 API calls to something that runs under Linux. The calls are executed in the MainWin layer (thanks to the Windows source code that they can use) or translated to Linux system calls. By the way, MainWin is already available for many UNIX systems, and they are just adding Linux to their list.
How is this different from Wine? On the negative side, it is closed source and probably quite expensive. On the positive side, the fact that they have access to the Windows source code means that they might be more compatible with all the undocumented Win32 features that are used by some MS applications.
I don't think that there is anything really exciting about this announcement. Win32 emulators have existed for quite a while on various UNIX systems, and all of them have their drawbacks. This one might be better in some areas and worse in some others, but it will never replace a native port of the applications to Linux.
If MicroSoft (not MainSoft) starts publishing press releases encouraging developers to work only on Win32 because it is portable to all environments including Linux, then we may have something to respond to. But I don't think that any serious company would stop porting their products to Linux because some small company provides a (closed and expensive) emulation layer for Win32 apps.
-Raphaël
Which one? After all, applications for one rarely support the other, and the majority of X apps don't support either. And I wouldn't call them useless for not supporting that (some of us have no need for tony panels to run X).
It doesn't implement half the features you would expect: eg. CGI programs generating multipart MIME output is handled fine by Netscape, but IE fails miserably.
Similarly the JavaScript handling is abysmal, document.domain doesn't work at all and plenty of simple JS is screwed up completely.
Why trust MS to implement standards properly and not just the ones they want to - to try and warp the market yet again?
To be honest, I'm very skeptical to this "emulating windows"-thing. Remember OS/2? Why should people develop for OS/2 when it was able to run windows programs? Isn't it possible that the same thing can happen to Linux too, if it become capable of emulating windows?
:-)
I said skeptical, not afraid - this because I thrust the Linux/Open Source community to be able to avoid the trap... one way or another...
I would like to see an open Win32 to UNIX transplatform development kit. Wine is not (IMO at least for a time to come) a good solution for Win32 interoperability. For one it's slow, as it has to emulate the Windows environment which is a cludge to begin with and two, emulation in any form leads to object incompatibility. Windows apps were only designed on Windows. So apps that use special interfaces which wine cannot supply either because the issues are too complex to emulate (like driver dependent software) or require some system resource, are then non-operational in the wine environment. In a desktop environment you want conformity among your applications. Such as a common toolkit, application integration, and standard API. A development kit such as I mentioned could optimize the win32 API translation and standardize on a toolkit making it practical to port Win32 to UNIX. I'm sure there's plenty of issues but definitely worth looking into.
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This space for rent. Call 1-800-SIGADVT to place your ad.
As the Linux movement becomes more successful in its goal of world domination but before Microsoft fizzles out *grin*, I predict the following scenario:
Microsoft becomes a Linux distributor themselves; it will either acquires Mainsoft or port their slowly dying Win32 API (Hmm... Win64 by then?) to Linux themselves; their Linux distribution would be the only one in the market that comes with their Office suite and other tools familiar to corporate users... ;-p
Maybe I am suffering from both dementia and paranoia but I think this Mainsoft announcement bodes both good and evil.
Does anyone really want to run M$ closed source apps on Linux?? Why should I want to use them? Use Open Source!
I don't get it.. when I read the article I was thinkin', "That would be cool." But most of you posters seem to think otherwise. I don't see why.... Maybe because I'm a recent Linux convert still trying to get along without Windows aps....
Does anyone know how restricted MainSoft's use of Windows source code is?
The number one asset that microsoft has is the windows API. Because microsoft defines the API they are able to include hidden calls that only they know about. Some of these calls are simply faster implementations of other calls which are already documented. Others are unique. Either way it gives their applications an out of the box advantage over anything a competitor might develop. Wine threatens this hidden control by exposing the existence and nature of each call. Some of these calls have even been implemented in wine. Wine also has a slight chance of someday competing with microsoft in defining the windows API itself. If wine implements new and better calls that developer's make use of, Microsoft's control of the API will be threatened. Microsoft of course does not like this but they cannot directly attact wine because of the boiling water they are already in for anti-trust violations. So rather than attack wine they simply "embrace and extend," all to prevent the windows API from becoming open. Gates is a tricky SOB and that is also the kind of person he hires. The model Microsoft follows is that business is a form of warfare. Those of us who want to see Linux/*BSD/whatever succeed need to remember that and pay attention to what our customer's want. If we don't give it to them, MS surely will, even if their version is bloated and buggy.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
How does it feel to be assimilated?
Java developers know. As we enter the adjusted millenium, we will not yet have a decent Java 1.2 Virtual Machine in the major web browsers or on any alternative platforms except Solaris. And the penguins all like perl. Hopefully all that will change.
If the Justice Department does nothing, will we have Windows 2005 with a Linux kernel that sits on 90% of the desktops? To be better, Linux needs applications, and that's where Java should come in.
As Java developers turn to Linux, I hope Linux developers and Open Source developers assimilate with open arms.
errr
/. moderator ;^)
I heard that javascript was sort of invented by netscape (?). No wonder that implementation of JS in IE5 isn't perfect. You can't blame IE5 for not being "NS-compliant". If you ask me, webauthors should write HTML4 compliant source, that can be handled by any browser. In what way do you help the visitor of your homepage if his/her browser accidentally doesn't support your fancy gadgetteria?
Anyway this is way off topic so apologies for that mr.
The open source movement is driven by the work of people who use what they create. This is why we have great operating systems like linux and *BSD. Great development tools like gcc. But what we don't have are a lot of great open source end user applications. There is gimp and I'm sure there are a few more examples of great open source apps, but not many. The open source model works best for the underlying layers used to create and run applications, not the applications themselves. This is why we probably won't ever see a truly great open source word processor or spreadsheet or whatever that is not in some way a commercial venture. Programmers have to eat and most of us do like money. There is little incentive to create things that you yourself won't use "just because." There is a lot of incentive to create tools to make tools to make applications you are going to use or are being paid to develop. That is where open source has always been and that is where it will be in the future.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I don't have direct experience of Mainwin but my company is porting its software to Solaris using this. We already ported an earlier product in about 2-3 weeks after some initial hiccups.
It lets you choose a Motif-like or Windows-like look and feel at run time, which is quite neat. It includes all the DCOM, windows internationalisation, MFC and other things that people use a lot above the Win32 APIs. Overall it looks pretty complete, as it should be since a big chunk of it is licensed Windows NT code.
It's not clear if the ported apps look as native-like as they could, but it seems like a good tool for porting apps quickly.
I think WINE is quite a way behind this, not surprisingly, but with Corel's fixes and updates could perhaps become more competitive.
In the long run, I think many companies will do native Linux ports - at least Mainwin lets the software get onto Linux. If/when Linux app demand explodes, companies will have the justification to do native ports to Linux for performance, better look and feel, etc.
Right now, I run VMware as a way of running WinNT apps on top of Linux.
I'm gradually moving apps such as AIM over to Linux - but gaim requires glibc2.1, and my manual install of that failed, so I need Linux 2.2... In the mean time, AIM on Windows on VMware works well - I even have sound working to alert me to switch to Windows when someone comes online.
MainWin and other commercial emulators are important to get users onto Linux. Once they are there, they'll discover that there's a bunch of free software (beer and liberty, almost a catchphrase!) and start using that as well. Often they'll start using the native GUI tools immediately if they are good enough, it's just that they still need Office and so on.
WINE is a great project and will be very significant, but I think it needs a few more years and/or some serious funding to make it really happen. Maybe Corel and other companies will use WINE instead of Mainwin to do this, we shall see.
The interesting thing is that NT on VMware+Linux is MUCH more stable than NT on my laptop - it hardly ever crashes, perhaps because the virtual hardware environment is quite basic and well-tested. And Office auto-save is much faster in this environment, even though VMware is writing to disk via separate async I/O processes. So there are good reasons to use Linux even if running Windows apps under an emulator...#
Sigh... The more attention Linux gets, the more polluted it gets (both in code and community), and the more I think about switching to FreeBSD (or NetBSD, for the hell of it). There's something to be said about the elitist attitude that would stop poorly designed apps and programs (like these) from being run.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Go reguritate that MS fud somewhere else. You really ought to have more respect for yourself. At least learn what you're talking about before you open your mouth. NT is indirectly based off of VMS which is itself 30 odd year old technology. C which windows itself is written in, originated with the second version of unix in 1970. C++ first appeared 15 years ago. TCP/IP which is what drives the internet, is 25 years old itself. The basic design for the CRT in your computer monitor dates back to when Eisenhower was president. Of course all of these things have been improved over time, just like Unix. NT is an attempt to copy unix in many ways. Many of the functions and features it implements are open standards that originate with unix. If unix is so old and decrypet(sp) how come Microsoft can't come up with something better?
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Shortly after IE was released for Solaris, several people in my department tried it out. We were sick of Netscape crashes and bloat and speed problems, we liked a couple of features IE had, we wanted to be able to test sites in multiple browsers.
It was a complete joke. The process took about 30MB, largely non-shared, and was slow as hell. (Netscape at the time was well under 10MB, as was IE natively on Win32.) We abandoned it as unusable; as far as we could tell, its only purpose was to allow MS to say "IE runs on all platforms, even Unix!". (Unix == Solaris in marketroid-speak.)
Perhaps someone who has used IE under Unix more recently could comment on size and speed. If it's anything like it was back then, don't expect any useful applications to come out of this announcement.
Alan
A BSD user calling others elitist! Now I can laugh all the way home, this will keep me entertained for hours.
As long as Windoze is still running, so is IE. ;)
I disagree with one of the previous replier's comment about Licq, however. I use the windoze icq at work, and it is slow as christmas and unstable as hell. But the terribly beta version of Licq I use at home is fast and solid.
But back on topic, I guess I am lucky, because I don't have any applications that hold me in the windoze world.
What more do you need than emacs any way. Heh.
This sig is false.
Same goes for MainWin. If they don't provide a stable system that can run just about any Windows app then they will not succeed. OpenSource won't even come into play with this - these guys are MS partners: They can produce code that's more compatible, because they probably have licenses to use the original source from MS. Don't kid yourself, they've got the upper hand. And as for customization, well I'd like my programs to work first, before I start worrying about theming, okay?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
... is because unlike Navigator, it doesn't go down more often than an over-worked hooker. Netscape: Putting the 'K' in 'Kwality'
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Hmm thats twice, two knives.. third time lucky? IE5 to linux - what a great idea, something as good as - but without all the security holes-- nahhh
Softway Group that used to own Interix before Microsoft bought it, also owns Mainsoft.
Kinda interesting that the group owns both sides of the market: One for running unix apps on NT, and one for running win32 apps on unix.
I wonder if MS is going to purchase Mainsoft too?
Running Win32 apps on Linux is one thing, it would be cool if VxDs can run natively on Linux too.
Although Linux supports a lot of hardware these days, it is still nowhere near what darn M$ is supporting.
One can see, of course, that with all of the financial and technical support that IBM, Sun, Oracle, HP and SGI (among other big boys) have finally given to Microsoft this year, there are more reasons than ever to switch to Windows! Especially the support issue. Finally someone will be able to help us when Windows breaks and that's a real incentive for me. I'll never forgive Torvalds - because of Linux I lost touch with that smart little tech support girl (we had to let her go) because we didn't have enough problems. With Windows I won't be lonely anymore.
You know, I'm glad. I always hated that darned Linux stability and am really looking forward to being able to waste time at work again with the most trusted excuse in the world - my computer crashed. And another thing, I really needed a reason to spend more money in the computer department and now that we're switching to Windows I'll get my wish. I mean, if a computer just sits there and does what you want, what good is that? I can't spend any extra money because of that, and not spending money is just plain anti-capitalist and anti-American and I'm very grass roots patriotic. And another thing- I'm really looking forward to the anti-virus industry once again taking off. I've got a lot of stock that's nearly worthless, but with everyone switching to Windows those virus alerts mean money in my pocket (and also allows me to get more work done).
Things are really looking up for Windows lately, with everyone switching to 2000 when it comes out. I was so tired of using Alpha's and SPARC's and am really looking forward to the tried and true x86 boxes. This way, with slower processors, more time will be spent getting work done and my superiors love that. We'll have to switch everything over to new hardware, which means we'll get even more work done. If I'm that productive I'm sure to get promoted!
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It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.
I am still faily new to the linux seen and use my PC is dual boot mode as there are features of both windows and linux that I like. StarOffice caters for all my workin needs (I am a student). But, windows does have some /very/ good applications such as Bryce and 3dstudio max (ok and games) and IE5 (sans security holes) is much better that Netscrape 4.7 IMHO. If M$ want to develop for linux fine by me as they are the biggest software developers in the world and may to something to help our crusade, what must not happen is M$Linux2001. -
and the students of today are the leaders of tomorrow. No comment either of us makes will hold linux back, but you haven't learned that.
in case you wanted another reason. Don't use it myself, this is just what colleagues tell me.
Running Win32 apps on Linux is one thing, it would be cool if VxDs can run natively on Linux too.
Although Linux supports a lot of hardware these days, it is still nowhere near what darn M$ is supporting.
Get back to your homework..
./excel
./excel
ERROR: You must be root to run this.
ok...
su
password
*computer works really hard for five minutes*
Your hard drive has been formatted. Thank you for using Microsoft Products.
*Computer works for a minute*
Welcome to Microsoft Windows 2000 install...
In other words: As if I'm gonna let Microsoft products touch my sweet little machine!!!
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
jdube is who I am.
Also, Redhat has signed a ISV relationship with mainsoft. Which side are these guys on? http://www.redhat.com/part ners/press_partner_mainsoft.html just found that interesting. -bob
Bob Callaway
There are almost a half dozen implementations of the win32 API on *NIX platforms already.
The only one I can think off the top of my head is (was) WINdu by Bristol Technologies. They tried to play rough with microsoft; ended up suing M$ and getting their source license taken away.
Could Microsoft be having some tricks up it's sleeves yet again? By allowing direct and easy porting of closed-source Windows program over to Linux, it is introducting more and more close-source influence in Linux, and open-sourced in particular. These programs already have a good fame coming from users in Windows, so they are going to sell good under Linux. More and more Linux users migrate over to these closed-source programs, and BINGO! Open-source development and usership under Linux dies down. Nobody no longer sees it worthwhile to develope under open-source as real good alternatives now exist under this porting layer.
Microsoft probably considers open-source to be a big competitior, and headache. To stamp out competition, as it always does when it can't handle that tweeeeeny bit of competition, the application world returns to the closed-source high price licensing nonsense.
Maybe Microsoft can start learning how to handle competition without resorting to low-down tactics such as buying the new company over, or introducing FUD? We could start by providing EXORBITANT psychiatric session for Bill Gates and fellow colleagues?
I think people really aren't seeing the point to MainWin, Wind/U, and other such products. The main argument that people seem to be making here against these products is that it presents people with a really bad porting strategy, because of dependence on Microsoft's architecture, performance hits, etc. While I do agree with all of this, people seem to not realize that there are good things about it too, and I'm going to tell you why. I'm going to illustrate this with a personal example here. Over the summer I worked as a summer student for a company that started off a couple of years ago making a product for Windows. However, after a couple of years of success in the market (number one market share), some VERY important customers (read: big cellular tech companies) indicated that they would like to see Solaris and HP/UX versions of our software. Up until then they had been using tools which had been very inferior to our product, and they wanted to get their hands on what we had to offer. However, they were not about to go restructuring their whole network and switch from UNIX to Windows just to get our tools. So it was decided that our company damn well better give them what they wanted, because these companies's business is VERY important to our parent company, as even though these companies might only buy 100 copies of our software, they use our software to write code for the gazillions of dollars in chips that they buy from our parent company, so even though we could end up losing money on the software itself, the cost recouped in chip sales would blow that away. So, ok, our company now has to do UNIX ports. However, the program has already been written to use MFC. Ideally if you knew you were going to do a port you would design your code with an appropriate abstraction layer so that you could do a proper job of the port, but when they wrote the program they hadn't had any indication that they would have to do this. What's more is that the company is pretty small... 30 people. The company doesn't have the resources to devote to rearchitecting the entire program so that "proper" ports can be made. What's more is that they have deadlines still to meet for their Windows product line, and those have to be met at the same time... they can't be holding up production. So what do they do? They buy Bristol's Wind/U to do the port. In theory this allows you to just drop in your Win32 code and recompile it, and voila you have a UNIX solution. In practice this doesn't happen, as the Wind/U toolkit has bugs, and in our case there were lots of Intel/Windows specific assumptions made when the program was written, and these things all had to be worked around or fixed. But the result was that in less than four months a team of three developers (two of which were just summer co-ops, of which I was one) managed to port a 300,000 line program, and what's more, we managed to fix bugs that were in the original release, as well as add some UNIX specific behaviour and functionality (which you can't do if you just emulate a program under Wine). If we had tried to rearchitect the whole thing, it probably would have taken at least twice the number of people and taken probably more than three times as long. To be honest, those factors would likely have prevented the thing from EVER being ported. The company (which does tend to be Windows-centric unfortunately), would probably just have told those customers to go invest in some Windows hardware and hope they listened. Products like MainWin and Wind/U will allow products to be ported that would otherwise never get ported at all. I don't know about the rest of you, but I would say that's a good thing. It's better to have a port even though it may not be optimally architected, than to have no port at all.
These things have been around forever yet we don't see any Windows apps anyway. For around $1000 you could have gotten a Win32 environment years ago but no-one did. There's a bigger demand for a Linux environment on Win32 as we have many unfinished tools for this. Cygwin never supported threads. Mingwin was abandonned two years ago.
Sorry about the lack of paragraphs there. Should have used Plain Old Text.
RedHat has named Mainsoft as an ISV partner. I am wondering which game Mainsoft is playing, as they have ties to both MS and RH. Any suggestions? http://www.redhat.com/part ners/press_partner_mainsoft.html -bob
Bob Callaway