I think it would raise the level of discussion if people making such postings would first try a microkernel-based operating system
Which one? I don't know of any stable microkernel-based OS. Is there one? Is there one with at least 10% of the features that Linux and BSD based OSs have?
your only screwing yourself if you don't pick the right OS for your business needs, and right now that means windows and MS for most people.
Your argument is completely flawed. You start saying that you have to pick the right OS for your business needs, and then you say that for most people it is Microsoft, in a way to imply that everyone should go with Microsoft since it's good for most so it will be good for you? It doesn't make sense. You say: 1) You should pick what is good for you; 2) Most people pick this, so you should pick it too.
The problem today is that Microsoft has a monopoly for so long that people start thinking that their way is the only way... Stop thinking like this now! Save yourself! I have news for you: the earth is round! Break out of this cage of thought. With Linux and FOSS you can provide desktops, office suites, e-mail applications, web browsers. You have management tools such as LDAP servers. It's not exactly like MS Office, MS Outlook, MS Exchange and MS AD, but it works, it's stable, people are using it, you can get support for it. As the parent said, you should "pick the right OS for your business needs", so evaluate what Linux and FOSS has to offer, and pick it if you think it may be right for you.
yes there are vendors like red hat, but have you looked at their prices? it makes windows look cheap.
No it doesn't. Red Hat will charge you for high-quality phone support, which means if you have issues with their software you can call them and they'll help you to fix it. It's not cheap, but if you account for all the costs of Microsoft, you'll see that Red Hat is much cheaper. With Microsoft, you have costs of licenses for the OS, licenses for the Office suite, support contract with Microsoft, subscription for anti-virus, license upgrades whenever Microsoft decides you should buy a new product (even if you don't need the new features, you'll end up having to buy it), costs of hardware more powerful to run their bloated software, and cost of administrating a Windows environment (virus and spyware, reinstalling machines, managing licenses, and so on, and so on, and so on).
Red Hat is certainly cheaper than that. But even then, if you can't afford it, you still can choose Ubuntu or SuSE. Heck, you can even go with CentOS, which is for all purposes a clone of Red Hat without the support contract. With Linux you choose how much you want to spend, and it will fit to your budget.
For OSS to move forward, they need to drop the stupid ego trip and look at what MS do RIGHT, or OSS will always be the poor mans 2nd choice.
On the contrary.
There are misguided FOSS attempts on going after what Microsoft is doing, but overall all they achieve is a loss of time for everyone. Why lose time replicating crappy technology? In this bag, I include, for instance, Mono and Moonlight. And, of course, the efforts on implementing MSOOXML, by Gnome, for instance. MSOOXML should be seen as a deprecated legacy format, for which only a half-assed converter should be created.
Take Samba, for instance. It's a great piece of software! But for what? For implementing a proprietary file sharing protocol, that is so flawed that it has to be changed with every major version of Microsoft's OS, many times with incompatibilities with previous versions. I mean, of course Samba made viable the implementation of Linux on the enterprise, on Windows networks, and should be praised for that. But, overall, isn't it a waste for these very talented guys to lose all this time coding this crappy protocol, when they could in fact be putting their effort on something other than following what Microsoft is doing?
Microsoft make lots of very good products, it's not fair to bag them on -everything-
I don't agree. I don't know any Microsoft product that I could call "very good".
The reason to "bag them" is not because of their products, but because of their business practics, which are not based on competing on merits, but on spreading FUD and locking in customers as much as they can. Just see ODF/MSOOXML and the OLPC/Classmate for two great examples of why Microsoft is not to be trusted.
This is just their attempt to say 'everyone is doing it'.
Well, the difference is that others are not playing dirty. Or, at least, there's no evidence of it. Contrary to Microsoft's dirty moves, like the Swedish vote, for which there's a leaked e-mail on the affair.
The maximum that Microsoft could say was that IBM bloggers were criticizing MSOOXML. Well, are those the dirty tactics IBM is employing to expose MSOOXML? Some blogs that actually expose the flaws in the format and in the process of standardization?
That's great, but maybe you could appreciate what you have gotten for free and give maybe 10% of what you were paying before back to those open source projects?
Or better yet, contribute code. With 10% of what you were paying for licenses, you can hire or pay developers to improve open source projects, you may even choose the features that you need. You contribute them so that others with the same needs may use them as well.
Open source economics is based on the fact that code is worth more than money. Code you may share as much as you want. Money you may only split.
I never laughed as much as reading this. Best. FUD. Ever. Thanks, Microsoft, for making my day with this great joke!!!
Let's see it point by point, from TFA:
Microsoft senior director of XML technology
WTF? Director of XML technology? Why would a sane mind company need something like that? Oh, maybe before joining Microsoft he was Senior Director of Steering Wheels at Ford.
If it was not for IBM, it would have been business as usual for this standard.
Yes, it would have been business as usual. Ballot stuffing, buying votes, even buying whole countries to join as P-members at the last minute. All business as usual for Microsoft.
Microsoft claims its competitor has since opted for more covert tactics to influence the ISO vote...
...as opposed to the open tactics mentioned above, used by Microsoft to influence the ISO vote.
Nicos Tsilas, senior director of interoperability and IP policy at Microsoft
AKA Senior Director of Lock-in and Extortion
...said that IBM and the likes of the Free Software Foundation have been lobbying governments to mandate the rival OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard to the exclusion of any other format.
Hmmm... yes, really naughty of them... making governments adopt a true ISO standard... which was openly developed...
They [IBM] are doing this because it is advancing their business model.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is pushing for MSOOXML because of their humanitarian thoughts. They truly believe that MSOOXML is the best format, and they're donating it to the world, just to show how charitable they are.
...proprietary-software model championed by Microsoft, in which the customer buys a licence in the hope that they won't require services to implement the solution.
The word hope says it all. Even if you don't really need any services, the licensing model has other shortcomings, for instance, the upgrade cycles, the artificial prices for premium features, the inability to make the product suit your needs, just to name a few. And I haven't yet seen a company buy licenses without buying support contracts, which means you keep spending money for a product that you bought already.
"IBM have asked governments to have an open-source, exclusive purchasing policy," Tsilas said.
Funny, now the argument changed... before they were saying that IBM was bad because it was pushing ODF, now IBM is bad because it's pushing Open Source. Now, let's make something really clear. ODF is not a synonymous of Open Source. Your proprietary software may well implement ODF, in fact, Corel WordPerfect supports ODF and is not Open Source.
Pushing ODF makes sense, because it protects governments from vendor lock-in. They won't need to buy software from Microsoft, they'll be able to buy it from Corel, Sun, IBM, or even download it for free directly from the Internet, using OpenOffice.org or KOffice.
Pushing Open Source to governments makes sense too, by the way. But the point is that Microsoft is changing the argument, trying to confuse ODF with Open Source, just to spread more FUD.
Our competitors have targeted this one product...
Again, more confusion. It's not one product. It's one standard. It makes sense to have one common standard that all applications use, that's what makes interoperability possible to start with. There are many products which implement the ODF standard.
...mandating one document format over others to harm Microsoft's profit stream.
Now, that's the worst argument of all. ODF is a standard and it can be implemented by everyone! No hidden clauses, not patent encumbered, no agenda. Microsoft itself is going to harm its profit stre
First, they said that 95 was buggy and that 98 fixed them. Then, 98 was too unstable and XP was rock solid. Last year, XP was too old and Vista was new and shiny. Now, Vista is bloated and MinWin is lean.
Could perhaps Microsoft decide if their products are good or bad?
When will companies realise that the answer is to stop shipping DRM? Amazon and others are doing it now with great success. Even iTunes Plus does it. Companies that base their business on DRM are condemned to a slow but certain death.
It seems that Rails set a milestone for development frameworks, and nowadays everything new has to be based or inspired or copied from Rails. Seems that Rails really made a breaktrough there, in fact, it seems to be responsable for most of Ruby's popularity. Rails has been translated several times to other languages, like Python (Django, also TurboGears to a lesser extent) and Java (Groovy to a lesser extent, now Grails that it's a ripoff even on the name).
This makes me think that sometime ago the buzzword of the moment was J2EE, and everything everyone made had to be J2EE compliant. Even C# and.NET was a big Microsoft ripoff of Java and J2EE to fight against the big migration of programmers to Java.
Which leads me to the fact that soon the buzz around Rails will be over, as much as nobody creates a new J2EE-based framework, now everything is taken for granted. So, what will be the next milestone? The next technology that will have people talking? Have everyone trying to clone its own?
Actually, I remember that I never really liked Netscape 4. Netscape 3 was really great! Light, fast, simple. Then Netscape 4 they renamed it from "Navigator" to "Communicator", you had e-mail and news and whatnot, it was really bloated and slow.
I remember that I kept a copy of Navigator 3 that I always used. But then websites with CSS started to appear, and they were only supported under 4.
IE3 was the worst of all. Their support for CSS was the biggest pile of bugs ever. Just to give you an idea, it's been 2 times better on each version after 3, and even now in IE7 it's far from good. Imagine 2^(7-3)=16 times worse than that!
I even remember using IE2 on NT 3.51 IIRC. It was simple and not bloated, more in the lines of Netscape 3. However, at that time no one would consider anything other than Netscape. It's sad how the history turned out after that, but it's good to see the way it's going nowadays!
Well, that's the same argument against FOSS, that it will kill economy and that it's not a viable business model. Yet, all the big ones (IBM, Sun, Oracle) are incorporating more and more FOSS in their businesses, and having profit from it.
If you want real innovation on the music industry you have to start breaking the model that treats consumers as if they were cattle. For an example of something really interesting and newsworthy on this area, see the success that Radiohead had by distributing their latest album on the Internet, in a model that the consumer chooses the price he deems right for it.
they will require that my pages work ok on ie(6|7|8), firefox and opera.
Then the tag won't serve your purpose. It won't make IE6 or IE7 render like IE8 would. The objective of the tag is the opposite, is for newer versions keep rendering broken pages as they render in broken versions of the browser.
As long as you'll need to support IE6 (or IE7 for what it's worth) you won't need the tag at all.
When computers were invented, they were supposed to solve problems. Today, companies have huge IT departments just to solve computer problems that didn't existed before computers.
When FOSS started, its purpose was to write software to solve problems. Today, we're seeing FOSS written to solve FOSS problems, like licensing issues.
You realize that Windows is probably running about 5 different toolkits at once right?
Exactly my point!
Any step I can take to reduce the bloat, I'll take it!
Openoffice uses its own toolkit called VCL... Firefox uses XUL and XBL...
All of them running over Gtk. If I want to change anything on the interface, I can go to.gtkrc* and do it, it will reflect on every software using Gtk, but not on any software using Qt. That's what I mean with "I simply find stupid the idea of having two different installed toolkits on the same computer". It hurts much more than it helps.
Actually, you can develop all your software using the GPL version (without distributing it) and then decide to distribute it under a commercial license.
The GPL actually requires that when you distribute a software you distribute the source code with it.
If you never distribute the software developed with the GPL version of Qt, you'll never have to give away your source.
When you have the finished version ready, you may purchase Qt license and distribute it commercially as closed source or anyway you want.
If they port Firefox to Qt, I might consider switching.
Until then, Gtk is the only toolkit that can run everything I need on a computer. I simply find stupid the idea of having two different installed toolkits on the same computer, so until Qt can run Firefox and, less importantly but still somewhat relevant, OpenOffice (KOffice might be a good alternative though) and Gimp (don't know any good one in Qt), I won't install it.
Although Konqueror is a good browser, it's still light-years behind Firefox. Firefox is my bread and butter nowadays, as I suspect it is for many others. I couldn't live with it, and as long as this is true, I couldn't be without Gtk either.
Actually Office 2007 is one of my pet peeves. Incidentally, Microsoft nowadays seems to be breaking all UI standards just for the sake of the change. For instance, you can see several rants on Vista's new Windows Explorer, IE7's lack of menu bar, and Office's infamous ribbon.
Funnily enough, sometime ago, the excuse not to adopt non-MS technology was that the interface doesn't follow Windows guidelines, it doesn't integrate with Windows as well as Microsoft applications (this was always a complaint with Lotus Notes on a company I worked for).
Now, Microsoft is making this problem irrelevant, since their own software doesn't follow Windows guidelines anymore. Heck, not even the different families of Windows apps are not consistent. If you see Office, IE, Messenger, WMP, it looks like each one of them was made by a completely different software vendor.
Most Office users are writing away at their documents, computing their departments next year budget and so on, after just 5 minutes of playing with Word and Excel.
I wouldn't ever do my budgets with Excel. Specially as I have to buy for my company 850 software licenses that cost $77.10 each, which totals $100,000.00!!!
The real problem is that corporate high fliers will read it & take it for a "reasoned & studied, impartial report"
I don't think so. Recently with Office 2007 and specially Vista I've seen that companies are really trying to avoid the upgrades as much as possible. Maybe it's the recession, but the thing is that right now companies are really considering not giving Microsoft a load of money for upgrades that bring few worthy features many new problems, and are considering alternatives instead.
Nowadays companies are not blindly eating whatever Gartner et al. feed them anymore.
Some folks on here seem to be taking issue with the statement that ODF is "indirectly controlled" by Sun. But, as far as I understand it, that's pretty much the case. Last I heard, the vast majority of work on OpenOffice.org is done by Sun employees. The codebase is just too complex for amateurs to get their heads around.
Not true. While Sun "indirectly controls" the development of OpenOffice.org, the file format is owned by Oasis, which is a "not-for-profit consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society" (according to their own website). Although Sun is a member of Oasis, it's not alone there, so Sun will never be able to hijack the file format all by themselves, because the other members won't allow it.
Among the other members of Oasis is IBM, which, with its Lotus Symphony office suite, has interest in ODF as well. So, for the sake of the argument, IBM has as much interest and power to control ODF as Sun has. But none of them can do anything without the consent of the other (and even other members), since the file format is not owned by any of them.
As far as ODF "only supporting a fraction of what enterprises need," well, that's probably true.
Oh, yeah... ODF doesn't support, for instance, the enterprisey feature of autoSpaceLikeWord95.
It's completely BS that ODF doesn't support what enterprises need. This is just the kind of FUD that Microsoft tries to push. They include new "features" in their office suite (and all their software) and sell them as "what the enterprise needs", when in fact it's just to increase the lock-in. I'm glad to see that most enterprises are starting to look at Vista and Office 2007 for what they're worth, they're seeing that it's not worth to upgrade, and they're starting to look at alternatives.
What are these features that "enterprises need" anyway? VBA? It's going away in Microsoft as well.
Well, this news are for Open Office (and other open source office suites) what Vista was for Linux! If Microsoft continues shooting itself on its foot, open source software will have no trouble at all to gain its deserved market share!
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Which one? I don't know of any stable microkernel-based OS. Is there one? Is there one with at least 10% of the features that Linux and BSD based OSs have?
Your argument is completely flawed. You start saying that you have to pick the right OS for your business needs, and then you say that for most people it is Microsoft, in a way to imply that everyone should go with Microsoft since it's good for most so it will be good for you? It doesn't make sense. You say: 1) You should pick what is good for you; 2) Most people pick this, so you should pick it too.
The problem today is that Microsoft has a monopoly for so long that people start thinking that their way is the only way... Stop thinking like this now! Save yourself! I have news for you: the earth is round! Break out of this cage of thought. With Linux and FOSS you can provide desktops, office suites, e-mail applications, web browsers. You have management tools such as LDAP servers. It's not exactly like MS Office, MS Outlook, MS Exchange and MS AD, but it works, it's stable, people are using it, you can get support for it. As the parent said, you should "pick the right OS for your business needs", so evaluate what Linux and FOSS has to offer, and pick it if you think it may be right for you.
yes there are vendors like red hat, but have you looked at their prices? it makes windows look cheap.No it doesn't. Red Hat will charge you for high-quality phone support, which means if you have issues with their software you can call them and they'll help you to fix it. It's not cheap, but if you account for all the costs of Microsoft, you'll see that Red Hat is much cheaper. With Microsoft, you have costs of licenses for the OS, licenses for the Office suite, support contract with Microsoft, subscription for anti-virus, license upgrades whenever Microsoft decides you should buy a new product (even if you don't need the new features, you'll end up having to buy it), costs of hardware more powerful to run their bloated software, and cost of administrating a Windows environment (virus and spyware, reinstalling machines, managing licenses, and so on, and so on, and so on).
Red Hat is certainly cheaper than that. But even then, if you can't afford it, you still can choose Ubuntu or SuSE. Heck, you can even go with CentOS, which is for all purposes a clone of Red Hat without the support contract. With Linux you choose how much you want to spend, and it will fit to your budget.
On the contrary.
There are misguided FOSS attempts on going after what Microsoft is doing, but overall all they achieve is a loss of time for everyone. Why lose time replicating crappy technology? In this bag, I include, for instance, Mono and Moonlight. And, of course, the efforts on implementing MSOOXML, by Gnome, for instance. MSOOXML should be seen as a deprecated legacy format, for which only a half-assed converter should be created.
Take Samba, for instance. It's a great piece of software! But for what? For implementing a proprietary file sharing protocol, that is so flawed that it has to be changed with every major version of Microsoft's OS, many times with incompatibilities with previous versions. I mean, of course Samba made viable the implementation of Linux on the enterprise, on Windows networks, and should be praised for that. But, overall, isn't it a waste for these very talented guys to lose all this time coding this crappy protocol, when they could in fact be putting their effort on something other than following what Microsoft is doing?
Microsoft make lots of very good products, it's not fair to bag them on -everything-I don't agree. I don't know any Microsoft product that I could call "very good".
The reason to "bag them" is not because of their products, but because of their business practics, which are not based on competing on merits, but on spreading FUD and locking in customers as much as they can. Just see ODF/MSOOXML and the OLPC/Classmate for two great examples of why Microsoft is not to be trusted.
Well, the difference is that others are not playing dirty. Or, at least, there's no evidence of it. Contrary to Microsoft's dirty moves, like the Swedish vote, for which there's a leaked e-mail on the affair.
The maximum that Microsoft could say was that IBM bloggers were criticizing MSOOXML. Well, are those the dirty tactics IBM is employing to expose MSOOXML? Some blogs that actually expose the flaws in the format and in the process of standardization?
Or better yet, contribute code. With 10% of what you were paying for licenses, you can hire or pay developers to improve open source projects, you may even choose the features that you need. You contribute them so that others with the same needs may use them as well.
Open source economics is based on the fact that code is worth more than money. Code you may share as much as you want. Money you may only split.
I never laughed as much as reading this. Best. FUD. Ever. Thanks, Microsoft, for making my day with this great joke!!!
Let's see it point by point, from TFA:
Microsoft senior director of XML technology
WTF? Director of XML technology? Why would a sane mind company need something like that? Oh, maybe before joining Microsoft he was Senior Director of Steering Wheels at Ford.
If it was not for IBM, it would have been business as usual for this standard.
Yes, it would have been business as usual. Ballot stuffing, buying votes, even buying whole countries to join as P-members at the last minute. All business as usual for Microsoft.
Microsoft claims its competitor has since opted for more covert tactics to influence the ISO vote...
...as opposed to the open tactics mentioned above, used by Microsoft to influence the ISO vote.
Nicos Tsilas, senior director of interoperability and IP policy at Microsoft
AKA Senior Director of Lock-in and Extortion
...said that IBM and the likes of the Free Software Foundation have been lobbying governments to mandate the rival OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard to the exclusion of any other format.
Hmmm... yes, really naughty of them... making governments adopt a true ISO standard... which was openly developed...
They [IBM] are doing this because it is advancing their business model.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is pushing for MSOOXML because of their humanitarian thoughts. They truly believe that MSOOXML is the best format, and they're donating it to the world, just to show how charitable they are.
...proprietary-software model championed by Microsoft, in which the customer buys a licence in the hope that they won't require services to implement the solution.
The word hope says it all. Even if you don't really need any services, the licensing model has other shortcomings, for instance, the upgrade cycles, the artificial prices for premium features, the inability to make the product suit your needs, just to name a few. And I haven't yet seen a company buy licenses without buying support contracts, which means you keep spending money for a product that you bought already.
"IBM have asked governments to have an open-source, exclusive purchasing policy," Tsilas said.
Funny, now the argument changed... before they were saying that IBM was bad because it was pushing ODF, now IBM is bad because it's pushing Open Source. Now, let's make something really clear. ODF is not a synonymous of Open Source. Your proprietary software may well implement ODF, in fact, Corel WordPerfect supports ODF and is not Open Source.
Pushing ODF makes sense, because it protects governments from vendor lock-in. They won't need to buy software from Microsoft, they'll be able to buy it from Corel, Sun, IBM, or even download it for free directly from the Internet, using OpenOffice.org or KOffice.
Pushing Open Source to governments makes sense too, by the way. But the point is that Microsoft is changing the argument, trying to confuse ODF with Open Source, just to spread more FUD.
Our competitors have targeted this one product...
Again, more confusion. It's not one product. It's one standard. It makes sense to have one common standard that all applications use, that's what makes interoperability possible to start with. There are many products which implement the ODF standard.
...mandating one document format over others to harm Microsoft's profit stream.
Now, that's the worst argument of all. ODF is a standard and it can be implemented by everyone! No hidden clauses, not patent encumbered, no agenda. Microsoft itself is going to harm its profit stre
First, they said that 95 was buggy and that 98 fixed them. Then, 98 was too unstable and XP was rock solid. Last year, XP was too old and Vista was new and shiny. Now, Vista is bloated and MinWin is lean.
Could perhaps Microsoft decide if their products are good or bad?
When will companies realise that the answer is to stop shipping DRM? Amazon and others are doing it now with great success. Even iTunes Plus does it. Companies that base their business on DRM are condemned to a slow but certain death.
It seems that Rails set a milestone for development frameworks, and nowadays everything new has to be based or inspired or copied from Rails. Seems that Rails really made a breaktrough there, in fact, it seems to be responsable for most of Ruby's popularity. Rails has been translated several times to other languages, like Python (Django, also TurboGears to a lesser extent) and Java (Groovy to a lesser extent, now Grails that it's a ripoff even on the name).
This makes me think that sometime ago the buzzword of the moment was J2EE, and everything everyone made had to be J2EE compliant. Even C# and .NET was a big Microsoft ripoff of Java and J2EE to fight against the big migration of programmers to Java.
Which leads me to the fact that soon the buzz around Rails will be over, as much as nobody creates a new J2EE-based framework, now everything is taken for granted. So, what will be the next milestone? The next technology that will have people talking? Have everyone trying to clone its own?
Actually, I remember that I never really liked Netscape 4. Netscape 3 was really great! Light, fast, simple. Then Netscape 4 they renamed it from "Navigator" to "Communicator", you had e-mail and news and whatnot, it was really bloated and slow.
I remember that I kept a copy of Navigator 3 that I always used. But then websites with CSS started to appear, and they were only supported under 4.
IE3 was the worst of all. Their support for CSS was the biggest pile of bugs ever. Just to give you an idea, it's been 2 times better on each version after 3, and even now in IE7 it's far from good. Imagine 2^(7-3)=16 times worse than that!
I even remember using IE2 on NT 3.51 IIRC. It was simple and not bloated, more in the lines of Netscape 3. However, at that time no one would consider anything other than Netscape. It's sad how the history turned out after that, but it's good to see the way it's going nowadays!
Well, that's the same argument against FOSS, that it will kill economy and that it's not a viable business model. Yet, all the big ones (IBM, Sun, Oracle) are incorporating more and more FOSS in their businesses, and having profit from it.
If you want real innovation on the music industry you have to start breaking the model that treats consumers as if they were cattle. For an example of something really interesting and newsworthy on this area, see the success that Radiohead had by distributing their latest album on the Internet, in a model that the consumer chooses the price he deems right for it.
Then the tag won't serve your purpose. It won't make IE6 or IE7 render like IE8 would. The objective of the tag is the opposite, is for newer versions keep rendering broken pages as they render in broken versions of the browser.
As long as you'll need to support IE6 (or IE7 for what it's worth) you won't need the tag at all.
When computers were invented, they were supposed to solve problems. Today, companies have huge IT departments just to solve computer problems that didn't existed before computers.
When FOSS started, its purpose was to write software to solve problems. Today, we're seeing FOSS written to solve FOSS problems, like licensing issues.
Doesn't it kind of defeat the point?
Wasn't NOAA evil? I thought that was RIAA's submarine division. ;-)
Exactly my point!
Any step I can take to reduce the bloat, I'll take it!
Openoffice uses its own toolkit called VCL... Firefox uses XUL and XBL...All of them running over Gtk. If I want to change anything on the interface, I can go to .gtkrc* and do it, it will reflect on every software using Gtk, but not on any software using Qt. That's what I mean with "I simply find stupid the idea of having two different installed toolkits on the same computer". It hurts much more than it helps.
Actually, you can develop all your software using the GPL version (without distributing it) and then decide to distribute it under a commercial license.
The GPL actually requires that when you distribute a software you distribute the source code with it.
If you never distribute the software developed with the GPL version of Qt, you'll never have to give away your source.
When you have the finished version ready, you may purchase Qt license and distribute it commercially as closed source or anyway you want.
Of course you can make a GPL (v2 or v3) application which is defective by design. You just can not prevent anyone from fixing it!
If they port Firefox to Qt, I might consider switching.
Until then, Gtk is the only toolkit that can run everything I need on a computer. I simply find stupid the idea of having two different installed toolkits on the same computer, so until Qt can run Firefox and, less importantly but still somewhat relevant, OpenOffice (KOffice might be a good alternative though) and Gimp (don't know any good one in Qt), I won't install it.
Although Konqueror is a good browser, it's still light-years behind Firefox. Firefox is my bread and butter nowadays, as I suspect it is for many others. I couldn't live with it, and as long as this is true, I couldn't be without Gtk either.
Actually Office 2007 is one of my pet peeves. Incidentally, Microsoft nowadays seems to be breaking all UI standards just for the sake of the change. For instance, you can see several rants on Vista's new Windows Explorer, IE7's lack of menu bar, and Office's infamous ribbon.
Funnily enough, sometime ago, the excuse not to adopt non-MS technology was that the interface doesn't follow Windows guidelines, it doesn't integrate with Windows as well as Microsoft applications (this was always a complaint with Lotus Notes on a company I worked for).
Now, Microsoft is making this problem irrelevant, since their own software doesn't follow Windows guidelines anymore. Heck, not even the different families of Windows apps are not consistent. If you see Office, IE, Messenger, WMP, it looks like each one of them was made by a completely different software vendor.
No it doesn't! More important than having a cool UI is adhering to current UI standards and doing things the way users expect them.
In most cases, great UI improvements are the incremental ones, not the revolutionary ones.
Firefox is already on the right track. Change it just for the sake of changing it would be bad.
Damn it!
Now they will rewrite it in Java. It will no longer be the fastest database engine, after the rewrite, it will certainly be the slowest.
;-)
I wouldn't ever do my budgets with Excel. Specially as I have to buy for my company 850 software licenses that cost $77.10 each, which totals $100,000.00!!!
I don't think so. Recently with Office 2007 and specially Vista I've seen that companies are really trying to avoid the upgrades as much as possible. Maybe it's the recession, but the thing is that right now companies are really considering not giving Microsoft a load of money for upgrades that bring few worthy features many new problems, and are considering alternatives instead.
Nowadays companies are not blindly eating whatever Gartner et al. feed them anymore.
Not true. While Sun "indirectly controls" the development of OpenOffice.org, the file format is owned by Oasis, which is a "not-for-profit consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society" (according to their own website). Although Sun is a member of Oasis, it's not alone there, so Sun will never be able to hijack the file format all by themselves, because the other members won't allow it.
Among the other members of Oasis is IBM, which, with its Lotus Symphony office suite, has interest in ODF as well. So, for the sake of the argument, IBM has as much interest and power to control ODF as Sun has. But none of them can do anything without the consent of the other (and even other members), since the file format is not owned by any of them.
As far as ODF "only supporting a fraction of what enterprises need," well, that's probably true.Oh, yeah... ODF doesn't support, for instance, the enterprisey feature of autoSpaceLikeWord95.
It's completely BS that ODF doesn't support what enterprises need. This is just the kind of FUD that Microsoft tries to push. They include new "features" in their office suite (and all their software) and sell them as "what the enterprise needs", when in fact it's just to increase the lock-in. I'm glad to see that most enterprises are starting to look at Vista and Office 2007 for what they're worth, they're seeing that it's not worth to upgrade, and they're starting to look at alternatives.
What are these features that "enterprises need" anyway? VBA? It's going away in Microsoft as well.
Well, this news are for Open Office (and other open source office suites) what Vista was for Linux! If Microsoft continues shooting itself on its foot, open source software will have no trouble at all to gain its deserved market share!