Sun is already missing the opportunity of "doing their best to promote open source for Solaris" by not releasing it under the GPL.
It does not make sense to try to compete against GPL'd software in an open standards environment.
There was a propose for that, if memory doesn't fail me it was by Bill Joy around 1.994, before GNU/Linux became too popular to be overcomed... that could have not only advanced the free software movement but also gained a much more visible situation for Sun Solaris, sold gobs of Sun Sparc machines, and prevented Microsoft Windows NT advances in market~ and mindshare.
> I appreciate the concepts of OOP and see its applicability in managing records
Then unfortunately you haven't quite understood neither OOP, nor databases -- and databases are essential to many kinds of programming, including engineering.
Please read http://www.firstsql.com/dbdebunk/, as well as Fabian Pascal's articles at http://searchdatabase.techtarget.com/tipsIndex/0,2 89482,sid13_tax284872,00.html -- there are also some interesting articles at http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Databases/Relat ional/ and subdirectories, including an early version of the Third Manifesto.
The evaluation on whether it is done or not certainly depends on the goals. As far as OpenStep compliance goes they have gone pretty far, considering for comparision how much more popular Wine is and how long both projects have gone.
> there's no QuickTime, AppleScript and a bunch of other stuff that Mac apps use.
AppleScript depends on Apple Events, which are part of Carbon. Until important free Cocoa (OpenStep) applications begin to make use of it, it's out of scope.
As for QuickTime as far as I know there is a problem with codec patents, as well as it also being part of Carbon. I don't know about the engine itself if it's part of or even available to Cocoa products (the same holds true for Apple Events and ~Script), please enlighten us.
> As for the Microsoft products for the Mac, they weren't ported. Office 98 was written from the ground up for the Mac
Obviously they weren't written from scratch -- that would have delayed Office 98 for years --, neither just evoluted from the previous versions that were direct descendants of the original Mac programs -- it would also have taken too long, unless Microsoft have followed their usual practice of having parallel development teams
In this case parallel development would have meant one team developing, for example, the Microsoft Word for the Mac version 6 as a port from Windows (the one that got launched and failedO), while the other continued developing the native Mac version that got bundled in Office 98.
I do not have enough information on whether the basis for Office 98 was the Microsoft Windows versions or the former Mac versions, but obviously Microsoft doesn't like doing anything from scratch. If you call that a port, a code merge or whatever is irrelevant.
> Apple and Microsoft used to have a very cosy relationship
True. This still seems too much for me, but one should never underestimate corporate stupidity!
About Microsoft Word for Unix and Mac... you have great information! We should really look for more of this, it's some greate piece of knowledge that can be very instrumental in informing everyday decisions on computing and the companies behind it.
> Excel was first on the Mac but it was designed
> by Apple and given to MS because Apple had to
> have a killer app
That seems unlikely... why then Apple just didn't sell Apple Excel licenses like they do today with AppleWorks?
But it would not be totally absurd... often Microsoft's success has been more due to its competitors and (or) partners blunders than to its own competence, and Apple has been (and is) specially guilty of this charge.
> Word as we know it today (the multi-font
> proportional spacing,hierarchical memory
> structures) started life as a rewrite of
> something else (word for dos?) and it ran under
> real Unix[tm]. I remember MS Word for Unix
> running on an AT&T 3b2 and displaying on a vt100
> clone back in 1987
That is very interesting... but can we be sure of what started first, Word for the Mac or for MS-DOS, OS/2, Unix, whatever? It would be nice to have a timeline, some documentation... that could be very hard since proprietary PC software companies are communist-like in their habit of rewriting or simply erasing history.
Also, couldn't you be just remembering Satellite WordPerfect instead? Anyway if such a beast really existed it is more likely to have been a direct port from OS/2 character cell mode than the real antecessor to Microsoft Word for the Macintosh or for Microsoft Windows.
> I had forgotten that Excel began its life on the Macintosh
That's easy to forget... I do not know any good source for such historical computing information.
> does that make all Excels a port from Mac?
Perhaps only in concept... probably the source code has changed altogether over the years since the w32 version became the reference one.
> I wonder whether Word was originally developed for Mac?
As far as I remember, yes. Again I miss a good reference for such matters. There was a MS-DOS and OS/2 version, but it shared nothing but the name with the Macintosh and w32 versions.
> I recall M$ Word for Mac in the late eighties as unwieldy and crash-prone
Again I'm not sure, but that wasn't when System 6 revealed lots of bugs hidden by System 5 and before that?
> Many of us back then preferred MacWrite
As usual the issue is not what one or other person prefers, but which piece of software had someone behind it really intent on succeeding.
OTOH, just as an educated guess it seems to me that, should there be need, a POSIX implementation of Carbon would be easier than WINE, just because of the higher quality and consistency of the target. But with Mac developers going for Cocoa (OpenStep), I doubt there will ever be such a need.
Unless -- and that's next to impossible -- Microsoft Windows failed, and their main claim to a monopoly became Microsoft Office v.X, and they decided not to port it to Cocoa -- that could be if they decided this would restrict it better to the Macintosh.
Or if someone reached the not-so-farfetched conclusion that w32 is too much of a moving target, and decided instead to implement Carbon on POSIX. Provided again that Microsoft wouldn't port their Office v.X to Cocoa.
About NIB, check http://gnustep.org./ if you are really curious. If my memory doesn't fail me they were trying to get compatible with Apple NIBs.
BTW, Red Hat may be the most popular distribution of GNU/Linux in US enterprises, but (1) it is not a standard, (2) being popular means nothing technicallly, (3) HP is an US company, but it has global reach, and (4) HP has also the technical, government, educational and domestic markets to cater to.
Thanks for the timely information, Bruce... but it still doesn't answer my question.
Does HP commitment to Debian does not translate into Debian being used as a development, reference and first release platform? Or this has happened for some technical reason? Or for historical ones, like the effort being started before HP's Debian commitment?
...whatever happened to that commitment? I mean, were there any technical or (and) historical reasons for choosing Red Hat, or is that yet another instance of choice by misinformation or herd instinct?
Proprietary software is also written in C and C++, and sometimes even Assembler.
VBS is not used in free software, Gnome Basic is being developed, as well as OpenOffice Basic, but they close VBA security holes.
Also security is a problem not only because of the scripting languages, but also what they are allowed to do in programs -- including OS's. Also perl, Scheme and the uses made of them are much safer than the equivalent proprietary (read Microsoft) systems.
Finally, OpenBSD does code review, and some of it trickle up to maintainers of the packages. Debian also tries to do some code review (albeit still limited in scope), and there's a specialized team for the Linux kernel.
>...Carbon an Cocoa which are distinctly Macintosh libraries
An older version of Carbon (the so-called Macintosh Toolbox) already exists, and is called Mac-on-Linux. As for Cocoa, it's GNU GPL'd POSIX implementation is GNUStep.
> porting Office [...] to Linux probably would be just as much of an undertaking as porting it to Mac
You mean, porting it *from* the Mac... Microsoft Excel, Word and PowerPoint were all created in and for the Mac, later ported to Microsoft Windows, and only after some years ported back to the Mac -- at least PowerPoint was acquired from other company, but the fact is that the original Macintosh versions worked better than today's Microsoft Windows versions and their Mac ports. In fact this was true even of Microsoft Word for DOS and OS/2 -- being simpler and better thought, it was more precise and failed less than today's versions for Microsoft Windows.
Also significantly, the most ambitious and unsatisfactory of them all is the only one created on Microsoft Windows: Microsoft Access and its Jet engine.
Basically it means, system requirements like memory, processor power, I/O channels being available, it can compile and run any application created for not only GNU/Linux but any reasonably compliant POSIX-compatible API -- that goes from z/OS (ex-OS/390, ex-MVS/ESA) Unix services to Cygwin under Microsoft Windows.
Please go check http://news.gnome.org/, people -- the free servers continue to exist. Only access to new, faster, bigger bandwidth servers are charged.
Presumably this could even make the free servers faster for users who choose not to subscribe, since the existing servers may be somewhat offloaded.
In any case, the same service exists in Debian -- and it covers the whole operating system, not only Gnome.
CS Lewis published That Hideous Strength in 1.945; in it you have a nice description of a real-time-updated hypertext system which name I can't remember... besides a threatening description of big, idealistic, powerful bureaucracy!
Go for http://www.firstsql.com/dbdebunk/... there Fabian Pascal, Chris J Date and occasionally Hugh Darwen, the greatest living experts on database management systems, constantely debunk the need for object, hierarchical and network databases, includin XML... all we need is a properly implemented relational database management systems, something better than SQL.
The only known problem with SGML, X.500 and CORBA is that SGML and X.500 were too complex for Microsoft programmers, and CORBA besides that was also too open for Microsoft corporation.
SOAP on the other hand may be seen as forcing a Web view on the world...
Simple. XML was to be used to text encoding -- never for data management. Text encoding can very well lead to data transmission, but even there a well-defined and agreed upon plain text file usually suffices -- banking in Brazil have all document exchange fully automated for decades now using just plain text files. Now XML for data management... it is regression to thirty years ago when we did not have relational theory to really understand data.
The issue is that even people who implement DBMS usually get the theory -- and the words -- wrong.
The fact remains that normalization is a logical concept, thus can't be done or reversed at the physical level. What usually goes for the name of denormalization is just physical design, and the confusion arises because SQL and other systems lack the distinction and mapping between physical and logical layers of the database.
GNOME is not commercial, it just has corporate sponsors. Most GTK libraries are LGPL, that allows for proprietary applications but keep the libraries free.
As for KDE, Qt is GPL but is also sold commercially as proprietary software. That is better than nothing but potentially allows for applications to use closed versions incorporating modifications not available to the free software.
Cannibalizing technology is good, buying patents and technology is Intel's right and good for their customers. The issue is that no amount of cannibalizing will fix an architecture. It can ameliorate a product, but an architecture must be done right from the start.
Fact one: what distinguishes Alpha from IPF is not some "pieces" that could be copied over, but a superior design and architecture. In order to take advantage of that, Intel would have to dump IPF and start over, effectively selling Alpha under a different name. That would be an unthinkable about-face.
There is a very nice Alpha-EPIC comparision white paper from Digital, a shame I don't have the URL.
Fact two: the deal just preceded the HP-Compaq one. It's a marchitecture thing.
...one would want to have richer graphics and a new interface to Emacs.
Something like giving Emacs new interfaces was done in the eighties or early nineties, I think by Borland. Essentially it was Emacs emulating not only vi but also Word, WordPerfect and other DOS word processors.
I think I saw such a project some months ago. Can't remember where. With LISP being supposedly so superior to Java and anything else, structured or OO, Emacs victory should be a given if enough people get interested and coordinated.
Slashdot Mirror
Sun is already missing the opportunity of "doing their best to promote open source for Solaris" by not releasing it under the GPL.
It does not make sense to try to compete against GPL'd software in an open standards environment.
There was a propose for that, if memory doesn't fail me it was by Bill Joy around 1.994, before GNU/Linux became too popular to be overcomed... that could have not only advanced the free software movement but also gained a much more visible situation for Sun Solaris, sold gobs of Sun Sparc machines, and prevented Microsoft Windows NT advances in market~ and mindshare.
> I appreciate the concepts of OOP and see its applicability in managing records
2 89482,sid13_tax284872,00.html -- there are also some interesting articles at http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Databases/Relat ional/ and subdirectories, including an early version of the Third Manifesto.
Then unfortunately you haven't quite understood neither OOP, nor databases -- and databases are essential to many kinds of programming, including engineering.
Please read http://www.firstsql.com/dbdebunk/, as well as Fabian Pascal's articles at http://searchdatabase.techtarget.com/tipsIndex/0,
> Except it's not done
The evaluation on whether it is done or not certainly depends on the goals. As far as OpenStep compliance goes they have gone pretty far, considering for comparision how much more popular Wine is and how long both projects have gone.
> there's no QuickTime, AppleScript and a bunch of other stuff that Mac apps use.
AppleScript depends on Apple Events, which are part of Carbon. Until important free Cocoa (OpenStep) applications begin to make use of it, it's out of scope.
As for QuickTime as far as I know there is a problem with codec patents, as well as it also being part of Carbon. I don't know about the engine itself if it's part of or even available to Cocoa products (the same holds true for Apple Events and ~Script), please enlighten us.
> As for the Microsoft products for the Mac, they weren't ported. Office 98 was written from the ground up for the Mac
Obviously they weren't written from scratch -- that would have delayed Office 98 for years --, neither just evoluted from the previous versions that were direct descendants of the original Mac programs -- it would also have taken too long, unless Microsoft have followed their usual practice of having parallel development teams
In this case parallel development would have meant one team developing, for example, the Microsoft Word for the Mac version 6 as a port from Windows (the one that got launched and failedO), while the other continued developing the native Mac version that got bundled in Office 98.
I do not have enough information on whether the basis for Office 98 was the Microsoft Windows versions or the former Mac versions, but obviously Microsoft doesn't like doing anything from scratch. If you call that a port, a code merge or whatever is irrelevant.
> Apple and Microsoft used to have a very cosy relationship
True. This still seems too much for me, but one should never underestimate corporate stupidity!
About Microsoft Word for Unix and Mac... you have great information! We should really look for more of this, it's some greate piece of knowledge that can be very instrumental in informing everyday decisions on computing and the companies behind it.
> Excel was first on the Mac but it was designed
> by Apple and given to MS because Apple had to
> have a killer app
That seems unlikely... why then Apple just didn't sell Apple Excel licenses like they do today with AppleWorks?
But it would not be totally absurd... often Microsoft's success has been more due to its competitors and (or) partners blunders than to its own competence, and Apple has been (and is) specially guilty of this charge.
> Word as we know it today (the multi-font
> proportional spacing,hierarchical memory
> structures) started life as a rewrite of
> something else (word for dos?) and it ran under
> real Unix[tm]. I remember MS Word for Unix
> running on an AT&T 3b2 and displaying on a vt100
> clone back in 1987
That is very interesting... but can we be sure of what started first, Word for the Mac or for MS-DOS, OS/2, Unix, whatever? It would be nice to have a timeline, some documentation... that could be very hard since proprietary PC software companies are communist-like in their habit of rewriting or simply erasing history.
Also, couldn't you be just remembering Satellite WordPerfect instead? Anyway if such a beast really existed it is more likely to have been a direct port from OS/2 character cell mode than the real antecessor to Microsoft Word for the Macintosh or for Microsoft Windows.
> I had forgotten that Excel began its life on the Macintosh
That's easy to forget... I do not know any good source for such historical computing information.
> does that make all Excels a port from Mac?
Perhaps only in concept... probably the source code has changed altogether over the years since the w32 version became the reference one.
> I wonder whether Word was originally developed for Mac?
As far as I remember, yes. Again I miss a good reference for such matters. There was a MS-DOS and OS/2 version, but it shared nothing but the name with the Macintosh and w32 versions.
> I recall M$ Word for Mac in the late eighties as unwieldy and crash-prone
Again I'm not sure, but that wasn't when System 6 revealed lots of bugs hidden by System 5 and before that?
> Many of us back then preferred MacWrite
As usual the issue is not what one or other person prefers, but which piece of software had someone behind it really intent on succeeding.
Thanks for the information, I stand corrected.
OTOH, just as an educated guess it seems to me that, should there be need, a POSIX implementation of Carbon would be easier than WINE, just because of the higher quality and consistency of the target. But with Mac developers going for Cocoa (OpenStep), I doubt there will ever be such a need.
Unless -- and that's next to impossible -- Microsoft Windows failed, and their main claim to a monopoly became Microsoft Office v.X, and they decided not to port it to Cocoa -- that could be if they decided this would restrict it better to the Macintosh.
Or if someone reached the not-so-farfetched conclusion that w32 is too much of a moving target, and decided instead to implement Carbon on POSIX. Provided again that Microsoft wouldn't port their Office v.X to Cocoa.
About NIB, check http://gnustep.org./ if you are really curious. If my memory doesn't fail me they were trying to get compatible with Apple NIBs.
BTW, Red Hat may be the most popular distribution of GNU/Linux in US enterprises, but (1) it is not a standard, (2) being popular means nothing technicallly, (3) HP is an US company, but it has global reach, and (4) HP has also the technical, government, educational and domestic markets to cater to.
Thanks for the timely information, Bruce... but it still doesn't answer my question.
Does HP commitment to Debian does not translate into Debian being used as a development, reference and first release platform? Or this has happened for some technical reason? Or for historical ones, like the effort being started before HP's Debian commitment?
> Perhaps they realized that RedHat is the _standard_ in enterprise Linux for a reason?
Perhaps. But my question is exactly, which would be such a reason?
...whatever happened to that commitment? I mean, were there any technical or (and) historical reasons for choosing Red Hat, or is that yet another instance of choice by misinformation or herd instinct?
Proprietary software is also written in C and C++, and sometimes even Assembler.
VBS is not used in free software, Gnome Basic is being developed, as well as OpenOffice Basic, but they close VBA security holes.
Also security is a problem not only because of the scripting languages, but also what they are allowed to do in programs -- including OS's. Also perl, Scheme and the uses made of them are much safer than the equivalent proprietary (read Microsoft) systems.
Finally, OpenBSD does code review, and some of it trickle up to maintainers of the packages. Debian also tries to do some code review (albeit still limited in scope), and there's a specialized team for the Linux kernel.
> ...Carbon an Cocoa which are distinctly Macintosh libraries
An older version of Carbon (the so-called Macintosh Toolbox) already exists, and is called Mac-on-Linux. As for Cocoa, it's GNU GPL'd POSIX implementation is GNUStep.
> porting Office [...] to Linux probably would be just as much of an undertaking as porting it to Mac
You mean, porting it *from* the Mac... Microsoft Excel, Word and PowerPoint were all created in and for the Mac, later ported to Microsoft Windows, and only after some years ported back to the Mac -- at least PowerPoint was acquired from other company, but the fact is that the original Macintosh versions worked better than today's Microsoft Windows versions and their Mac ports. In fact this was true even of Microsoft Word for DOS and OS/2 -- being simpler and better thought, it was more precise and failed less than today's versions for Microsoft Windows.
Also significantly, the most ambitious and unsatisfactory of them all is the only one created on Microsoft Windows: Microsoft Access and its Jet engine.
Basically it means, system requirements like memory, processor power, I/O channels being available, it can compile and run any application created for not only GNU/Linux but any reasonably compliant POSIX-compatible API -- that goes from z/OS (ex-OS/390, ex-MVS/ESA) Unix services to Cygwin under Microsoft Windows.
Please go check http://news.gnome.org/, people -- the free servers continue to exist. Only access to new, faster, bigger bandwidth servers are charged.
Presumably this could even make the free servers faster for users who choose not to subscribe, since the existing servers may be somewhat offloaded.
In any case, the same service exists in Debian -- and it covers the whole operating system, not only Gnome.
CS Lewis published That Hideous Strength in 1.945; in it you have a nice description of a real-time-updated hypertext system which name I can't remember... besides a threatening description of big, idealistic, powerful bureaucracy!
It's the third book in Lewis' so-called Space Trilogy, which begins with Out of the Silent Planet.
He is also one of the first authors to describe good aliens.
Why do we need Red Hat Network when we have all software we need thru Debian GNU CDs, mirrors network, dpkg package manager with full dependency management, apt to get all this software and install it, everything documented and supported?
What's more, Debian creates communities.
Go for http://www.firstsql.com/dbdebunk/... there Fabian Pascal, Chris J Date and occasionally Hugh Darwen, the greatest living experts on database management systems, constantely debunk the need for object, hierarchical and network databases, includin XML... all we need is a properly implemented relational database management systems, something better than SQL.
The only known problem with SGML, X.500 and CORBA is that SGML and X.500 were too complex for Microsoft programmers, and CORBA besides that was also too open for Microsoft corporation.
SOAP on the other hand may be seen as forcing a Web view on the world...
Simple. XML was to be used to text encoding -- never for data management. Text encoding can very well lead to data transmission, but even there a well-defined and agreed upon plain text file usually suffices -- banking in Brazil have all document exchange fully automated for decades now using just plain text files. Now XML for data management... it is regression to thirty years ago when we did not have relational theory to really understand data.
The issue is that even people who implement DBMS usually get the theory -- and the words -- wrong.
The fact remains that normalization is a logical concept, thus can't be done or reversed at the physical level. What usually goes for the name of denormalization is just physical design, and the confusion arises because SQL and other systems lack the distinction and mapping between physical and logical layers of the database.
You are not precise enough.
GNOME is not commercial, it just has corporate sponsors. Most GTK libraries are LGPL, that allows for proprietary applications but keep the libraries free.
As for KDE, Qt is GPL but is also sold commercially as proprietary software. That is better than nothing but potentially allows for applications to use closed versions incorporating modifications not available to the free software.
Cannibalizing technology is good, buying patents and technology is Intel's right and good for their customers. The issue is that no amount of cannibalizing will fix an architecture. It can ameliorate a product, but an architecture must be done right from the start.
Fact one: what distinguishes Alpha from IPF is not some "pieces" that could be copied over, but a superior design and architecture. In order to take advantage of that, Intel would have to dump IPF and start over, effectively selling Alpha under a different name. That would be an unthinkable about-face.
There is a very nice Alpha-EPIC comparision white paper from Digital, a shame I don't have the URL.
Fact two: the deal just preceded the HP-Compaq one. It's a marchitecture thing.
...one would want to have richer graphics and a new interface to Emacs.
Something like giving Emacs new interfaces was done in the eighties or early nineties, I think by Borland. Essentially it was Emacs emulating not only vi but also Word, WordPerfect and other DOS word processors.
I think I saw such a project some months ago. Can't remember where. With LISP being supposedly so superior to Java and anything else, structured or OO, Emacs victory should be a given if enough people get interested and coordinated.