...which would be great--if.NET were supposed to be a Java replacement. Which it's not. It's supposed to be much more than that. In fact, it's probably closer to CORBA than it is to Java. And again, a lot of intelligent people have questioned the wisdom of reinventing--in proprietary form, mind you--concepts that are already well-formed and well-implemented in other tools.
.NET languages and Java are both compiled to bytecode and are supposed to do WORA. Both can be used to make CORBA programs.
And what kind of crack are you smoking today?.NET is no more "free" than Java, and is probably less "free," in every meaningful sense of the word. It is an architecture designed expressly to give Microsoft a way to dominate internet commerce. It is the antithesis of free.
The point I was trying to make was that we don't have an alternative yet. Mono has the potential to be finished before we get a free Java 2 platform.
So what? Creating a free alternative to windows networking took a lot of time too, but people seem to use it. The advantage that everyone overlooks here is that.NET isn't deployed! No one is using it for anything yet! And that means that there's time to compete with microsoft. Once.NET is deployed somewhere...well, then it gets harder...
I'm not sure what free alternative to windows networking you are talking about. NTFS was not created because we needed to compete with Microsoft, SAMBA was created to be compatible with Windows and it got Linux into a lot of companies. Also, we're not in the bussiness of creating new technologies for the sake of competing, free software is supposed to be about creating or cloning the technology that is needed. That Microsoft will make.NET huge I think is obvious, it will be asked for.
Perhaps, but I still fail to see what Slashdot has to do with Mozilla/Mono succeeding or failing. It's like saying A is good because of Z, so B must be bad because it doesn't have Z.
Remember how depressing it was when slashdot used to post articles about mozilla at around m14 or so. Everytime people would post about how crashy and buggie and slow it was. But the good thing about that was that most people recognized the need for Mozilla and how it was perhaps Linuxs best shot at getting a working web browser.
So you're saying we should thank the Slashdot trolls for bitching about Mozilla? I think think they have far less to do with Mozilla's current excellence than you think; after all, the Mozilla people have always said things would improve a lot before 1.0.
I haven't understood Ximian's strategy from the start. Some important people have already noted that.NET isn't that technically great, that it may or may not be a big security risk, and that it definitely looks like an attempt to kill Java. So why is Ximian so eager to buy into it?
I bet you said the same thing about Java and that hasn't died because you wished so, did it? Face it,.NET is at least as good as Java, supports more languages, is said to have the potential to be faster and has the support of Microsoft. For Java OTOH we have no Free alternatives, unless you're willing to settle for Java1.1.
There may be a lot to.NET, but given that it's a nascent collection of tools, and that it has no foothold in the consumer market (other than hype), wouldn't it be a better strategy to produce a competing free alternative? Tripping the giant always seems better than sleeping with it...
Creating a Free alternative from scratch would take a lot of time. By the time that would ever be completed we would already be forced to support.NET.
The data were on magnetic tapes, and written in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died.
Ha! Can't you see? This is just shameless XML propaganda by NASA. Don't believe them though, obscure binary formats that only you know are just harmless job insurence.
I think Petreley is right. If Ximian doesn't duplicate Passport, and MS changes the interface, the whole thing is useless as a complete open-source alternative. Sort of like what AOL does to the AIM interface every time they want to lock someone out.
As far as I know anyone can set up a Passport server. There's also an alternative technology already, and it looks very nice IMHO. I'm not sure what the author of that article espects of Ximian, should they spoof the Microsoft passport server perhaps?
About Mono itself, I honestly just don't see what's wrong with creating technology. We (well, not I:D) have made Wine, Word-compatible word processors and ActiveX support for Konqueror and Mozilla (the latter is for-pay though), and this has done nothing than benifit us. Supporting a technology isn't going to do any harm to us, not supporting something could be desastrous OTOH.
Last time I checked, icq was a heavily modified IRC.
The first couple of points I could come up with why using IRC as the basis for an IM system would be a bad idea:
IRC doesn't have a standard system for registering nicknames. Nevermind a system that stores names, sex, birthday, e-mail, location, homepage, etc. These systems (say NickServ) also tend to be offline a lot.
You don't want nick (ID) changes on an IM system
You thought netsplits on IRC were annoying
No offline messages unless using some sort of bot, but these tend to be offline a lot
Most messages would have to be sent via DCC to make it more scalable. Makes using IRC kinda pointless
IRC channels functionality would only be used for group chats (and how many people do that anyway), why use IRC then? (note that IRC channels are very different from ICQ groups)
No wonder employers wouldn't want to take on new employees.
every single termination... has to be agreed by the employee's council.
Ugh. Don't europeans understand that this is a huge disincentive to hiring aditional workers?
I'm by no means an expert on this but if you need additional workers for a short term then wouldn't the logical thing to do, be to offer them a short-term contract? Working with an interim and renewing the contracts on a weekly basis would seem like the way to go.
I thought you were trolling too but I came accross one of your previous posts, which convinced me you are for real.
However, I still disagree with you:). The reason for that is that Mono in itself would be an interesting platform, even if its not compatible with.NET.
tal197 was comparing go-gnome to installing from downloaded RPMs or DEBs, or installing from source. All these methods are equally safe since they usually don't come with a signature.
If you need safety you could have someone mirror them and put a signature online, or you could inspect the source of the scripts.
At least to me Bill Clinton did make the USA look good. The only problem I had with him is that he was religious, but many USians seem to be. What did make the US look bad was the US media's reaction to the Lewinski thing as well as the impeachment procedure against Clinton.
But even that didn't make you look as bad as last elections, the decision to restart the Star Wars program or the idea that there's no need to protect the ozon layer.
Um, if it helps against having this post marked down as flamebait: our politicians are idiots too, the only difference is that we're not as powerful as the US (mind you, we would take care of the environment and probably not do something like the Star Wars program).
You have a commercial application that ONLY works with MySQL and ships the application with the MySQL server. This is because we view this as linking even if it is done over the network.
I find this questionable and I'm unsure if this would stand in court... then again, people express the same worries over the GPL. Since there's an alternative I'd say you're right and it's better to go with pgsql.
That's just not true, their APIs are LGPL'd. Since you're not linking against MySQL itself you're free to license your program as you wish and distribute it as you wish (of course keeping the GPL and LGPL licenses for MySQL and the API you use).
It
seems that people here don't want.NET, but it seems that we are all going along with it and supporting it.
You make the mistake of assuming all Slashdotters want the same. Most posts here are trolls (well, it certainly feels like it), don't forget about the silent crowd.
.NET is good as long as Microsoft doesn't get too much control because of it. A potential dangerous thing would be if Microsoft gets all developers to use Password (which is part of something called Hailstorm), I espect new monopolies to arise in.NET land.
But.NET will likely become huge whether or not Linux supports it. For our own sake, however, we should get with it soon so we don't get locked out (remember when we didn't have any decent browsers? This could be similar).
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not
signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or
distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are
prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by
modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the
Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and
all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying
the Program or works based on it.
In other words, if you do not accept the GPL you're granted the same rights as the default copyright, which is more restrictive than the GPL.
Color?? Excuse me for breathing, but I'm using a paper teletype and MAN it's hard enough to use Lynx on this thing without all the frilly escape codes.
Using colors on the shell is quite useful if you telnet/ssh into other boxes. That way you can easily spot what computer you're working on and not screw up on the wrong computer:).
The answer would be that there is an attempt at protection (DMCA anyone?), namely the User-Agent thing. It's as effective as DeCSS and Microsoft's previous attempt to make you accept a license before seeing the Kerberos extensions.
This reminds me of the time when people explained how to circumvent the click-through-license to the Microsoft Kerberos extensions (righ^W) and Microsoft was about to sue Slashdot over it.
Let's just hope history doesn't repeat itself here.
Linux has more desktops than FreeBSD, but FreeBSD has more servers.
I'm going to assume you mean that FreeBSD is installed on more servers than it is installed on desktops.
This might very well be true but Linux still has a lot more servers than FreeBSD (according to the survey you just pointed out).
That Windows runs on 50% of the servers, to me, points out the importance of the desktop. People want to run the same (class of) OS on their servers as they run on their desktops.
"It's an attack on Linux, which has market share as an operating system. FreeBSD has no market share, so they say, 'Oh, that's the good one,' " de Icaza said.
First of all, it's an outright lie. FreeBSD certainly has a market share. Ever heard of Yahoo!, Miguel? Secondly, FreeBSD does not have the anti-big-business licensing (ie no closed source--yes, this can be anti-big-business) that Linux has.
I believe Linux has more market share than FreeBSD and is therefore the greater threat to Microsoft. This seems to be especially true for the desktop, an important position for Microsoft to keep a lock on.
You are correct when you say that FreeBSD has a better license for closed-source companies than Linux with its GPL, but that doesn't mean the GPL is anti-big-business (saying A is better than B doesn't make B bad). Also, to Microsoft *BSD code is a great resource that they can take from without returning anything, no wonder they approve the BSD license while trying to fight the GPL license made to prevent this 'abuse'.
Slashdot Mirror
And what kind of crack are you smoking today? .NET is no more "free" than Java, and is probably less "free," in every meaningful sense of the word. It is an architecture designed expressly to give Microsoft a way to dominate internet commerce. It is the antithesis of free.
The point I was trying to make was that we don't have an alternative yet. Mono has the potential to be finished before we get a free Java 2 platform.
So what? Creating a free alternative to windows networking took a lot of time too, but people seem to use it. The advantage that everyone overlooks here is that .NET isn't deployed! No one is using it for anything yet! And that means that there's time to compete with microsoft. Once .NET is deployed somewhere...well, then it gets harder...
I'm not sure what free alternative to windows networking you are talking about. NTFS was not created because we needed to compete with Microsoft, SAMBA was created to be compatible with Windows and it got Linux into a lot of companies. Also, we're not in the bussiness of creating new technologies for the sake of competing, free software is supposed to be about creating or cloning the technology that is needed. That Microsoft will make .NET huge I think is obvious, it will be asked for.
Perhaps, but I still fail to see what Slashdot has to do with Mozilla/Mono succeeding or failing. It's like saying A is good because of Z, so B must be bad because it doesn't have Z.
So you're saying we should thank the Slashdot trolls for bitching about Mozilla? I think think they have far less to do with Mozilla's current excellence than you think; after all, the Mozilla people have always said things would improve a lot before 1.0.
I bet you said the same thing about Java and that hasn't died because you wished so, did it? Face it, .NET is at least as good as Java, supports more languages, is said to have the potential to be faster and has the support of Microsoft. For Java OTOH we have no Free alternatives, unless you're willing to settle for Java1.1.
There may be a lot to .NET, but given that it's a nascent collection of tools, and that it has no foothold in the consumer market (other than hype), wouldn't it be a better strategy to produce a competing free alternative? Tripping the giant always seems better than sleeping with it...
Creating a Free alternative from scratch would take a lot of time. By the time that would ever be completed we would already be forced to support .NET.
Ha! Can't you see? This is just shameless XML propaganda by NASA. Don't believe them though, obscure binary formats that only you know are just harmless job insurence.
As far as I know anyone can set up a Passport server. There's also an alternative technology already, and it looks very nice IMHO. I'm not sure what the author of that article espects of Ximian, should they spoof the Microsoft passport server perhaps?
About Mono itself, I honestly just don't see what's wrong with creating technology. We (well, not I :D) have made Wine, Word-compatible word processors and ActiveX support for Konqueror and Mozilla (the latter is for-pay though), and this has done nothing than benifit us. Supporting a technology isn't going to do any harm to us, not supporting something could be desastrous OTOH.
Of course a resonable admin can turn of those unnecesary services himself/herself. A newbie OTOH is not likely to install OpenBSD.
However, I still disagree with you :). The reason for that is that Mono in itself would be an interesting platform, even if its not compatible with .NET.
-- A GNOME Fan. :-P
If you need safety you could have someone mirror them and put a signature online, or you could inspect the source of the scripts.
Also Ximian is getting into Mono because it enables code reuse across different programming languages.
Skimming through the Mono mailing list I've seen people talking about porting Mono to MacOS-X and Windows already.
Fortunately there's an alternative provided by IBM and put under a non-profit organisation. I'm hoping this will get big.
But even that didn't make you look as bad as last elections, the decision to restart the Star Wars program or the idea that there's no need to protect the ozon layer.
Um, if it helps against having this post marked down as flamebait: our politicians are idiots too, the only difference is that we're not as powerful as the US (mind you, we would take care of the environment and probably not do something like the Star Wars program).
That's just not true, their APIs are LGPL'd. Since you're not linking against MySQL itself you're free to license your program as you wish and distribute it as you wish (of course keeping the GPL and LGPL licenses for MySQL and the API you use).
But .NET will likely become huge whether or not Linux supports it. For our own sake, however, we should get with it soon so we don't get locked out (remember when we didn't have any decent browsers? This could be similar).
What I meant was that you fall down on the default copyright restrictions, being that you cannot do anything with the code.
The answer would be that there is an attempt at protection (DMCA anyone?), namely the User-Agent thing. It's as effective as DeCSS and Microsoft's previous attempt to make you accept a license before seeing the Kerberos extensions.
Let's just hope history doesn't repeat itself here.
That Windows runs on 50% of the servers, to me, points out the importance of the desktop. People want to run the same (class of) OS on their servers as they run on their desktops.
You are correct when you say that FreeBSD has a better license for closed-source companies than Linux with its GPL, but that doesn't mean the GPL is anti-big-business (saying A is better than B doesn't make B bad). Also, to Microsoft *BSD code is a great resource that they can take from without returning anything, no wonder they approve the BSD license while trying to fight the GPL license made to prevent this 'abuse'.