Well, true, they can afford true software engineering. But so often they just don't bother. When you find properly engineered Open Source Software, nine times out of ten it came from the government or aerospace...
Don't let their monopoly status or proprietary anti-unix stance lead you astray. Microsoft does some pretty good coding. They are far from perfect, but in the large they do correct and proper solutions.
For example, DOS. People today laugh at DOS and the problems it caused Windows on i386 machines. Many would point to it as a quick and dirty solution. But those who do fail to understand that DOS (a CPM clone) was a correct an proper solution to a 8086 with 640K RAM, and that they quickly started working on a replacement for more powerful processors.
Some correct and proper solutions from Microsoft off the top of my head (though a few may be tainted by overhype and feature creep): all early MS compilers, OS/2 (originally a MS project), NT, COM, integrated browser, and much of.NET.
p.s. I am not a Microsoft fan, being a loyal NIX fanboy and FOSS advocate, but credit has to be given where it is due.
Never Compromise Quality. It's not worth it in the long run.
If management and marketing expect you to shit code out your ass on demand, then make them give you some toilet paper in the form of a signed document saying you will not be held responsible for any stench resulting from the project.
And continue to follow the process! If you can't get your code through a review, make someone in charge sign a waiver and keep several copies of it on file.
Also write up some release notes listing all known and potential bugs, and make everyone you can find sign it.
And while you're covering your ass, get your resume in order and keep sending it out to companies with a clue. Eventually the tech sector will turn around and you can bail ship.
I'm always wondering why doesn't people use Java for such large developments
You sound just like my CEO. He knows nothing about the technical requirements of my project, but he saw a show on the Discovery Channel about Java so now we have to use Java.
Why is linux getting all that good press is the real puzzlement.
It's all about history and architecture.
History One) Bill Jolitz got lazy. He stopped applying patches and the 386BSD project was stagnating. NetBSD and FreeBSD forked off in impatience.
History Two) At just the time that BSD was removing encumbered AT&T code to create the world's first Free Software operating system, USL came along and bit the hand that fed it. Ouch! People didn't know how the trial was going to end up, so they avoided BSD. The trial was eventually won.
The end result of history was that BSD ended up being about two years behind Linux.
Architecture) Linux is not a single project. Consequently you need teams to do the integration. These teams are the distributions. Most distributions are commercial. Commercial entities advertise. The architecture of Linux leads directly to the need for advertisement. And since advertising creates advertising, IBM is heavily promoting Linux solely because people have heard of Linux.
There is no compelling need to commercialize the free BSD projects. The base operating systems are already integrated.
The end result of history and architecture is that Linux gets a lot of good press. So much so that "Linux" is becoming a meaningless synonym for "UNIX". You hear stuff like "Xfce is an alternate Linux desktop" when in fact Xfce runs on any POSIX/X11 system. Ditto for any other non-Linux-centric project. Even Apache is hailed by the press as Linux software, even though Apache is primarily developed under FreeBSD. Take a look at linuxtoday.com. 90% of the stories have little or nothing to do with the Linux kernel or surrounding operating system.
that is desktop leads to server, because it provides a good visibility in everybody's mind.
Unfortunately, you are correct. Geeks, hackers, and nerds know better. Engineers and developers know better. But these aren't the people in charge. Too many CEOs/CIOs think that if WindowsXP is good enough for their home email, then it must be good enough to run all of their mission critical enterprise servers. At my company we were even told by the CEO to use WindowsXP on our new hard realtime embedded medical diagnostics system.
There is a native Java 1.4 (and 1.2 and 1.3) for FreeBSD. There just isn't a native prebuilt binary, simply because Sun is being weird. But the source is all there and it works great.
Originally, perhaps, but with today's focus on the economy, government can no longer credibly threaten to neuter industry.
I wasn't talking about industry, I was talking about corporations. There is a difference, a huge difference.
I am so pro-business that I make Steve Forbes look like a liberal. But I do not believe in corporations. They are artificial entities created by government. There is no practical difference between the chartered corporations of yore (East India Company) and the public corporations of today (Microsoft, SCO, Redhat). Corporations have a government grant of immunity that absolves them from all responsibilities. A corporation can literally get away with criminal negligance without the owners of said corporation ever being held accountable.
Corporations have plenty of inherent power. They can fire or hire employees; this gives them power to help or destroy families.
This is not limited to corporations. Nothing prevents your small mom-n-pop donut shop from firing an employee. I've known people who have been fired from universities and farmer's cooperatives.
Companies have tons of power and inherent power, and they do abuse it.
I didn't say "companies" I said "corporations". Corporations can engage in behavior that would put a private owner of a business in jail. Consider the Exxon Valdez. One boat pilot got fired and the stock dropped a bit. Big fat hairy deal. Now suppose that the Exxon Valdez was owned by a private unincorporated business. The owners of the business would have been individually sued, and some might have gone to jail.
I have sued and won a judgement against a small one-man corporation. But I was never able to collect, because the corporation didn't have any money, and the judgement wasn't against the sole shareholder. So I got another judgement against the sole shareholder, and he filed bankruptcy with his corporation being the sole creditor. Corporations were designed to shield the business owners from their responsibilities.
The problem with corporations has nothing to do with a concentration of wealth, but everything to do with a government grant of immunity.
On the other hand, an attempt by some entity (either commercial or governmental) to arbitrarily limit the access that certain people have to the 'net would be illegal.
Boss: You can't use our computers and our network to surf porn on our time.
Employee: I'm suing you all the way to the Hague you fascist bastard, I've got rights!
In the early days of the US, the right to free speech was also considered a strange thing.
The right to free speech doesn't cost anyone anything.
But let's look at this from the property angle. All rights are property rights when you consider ownership of the self as a form of property. Speech is a property of the self, and thus free speech is a right. But the internet is a different sort of beast. You have the right to use your own computer since it is your property. You have the right to use a network if you own the network. You also have the right to use a network if you engage in a property transaction (paying a fee to the provider). If the ISP doesn't let you surf, then the ISP has broken a contract, which is a violation of your property rights. The the government steps in and tells you that you can't surf certain sites, or tells the provider that they must give the government information about you, then the government is violating property rights.
Saying that you have the right to the internet is like saying you have the right to a chicken in your pot. If it's your chicken and your pot, you certainly have the right to put the chicken in the pot. But you do not have the right to compel someone else to provide you with a chicken and a pot. What right do you have to a particular ISP's services? The answer is "none". If you want it you need to engage in a property transaction with the ISP, so that you obtain that right through a contract.
A corporation has no power but that which a government has given it.
This is not the fault of corporations, but of governments, which have decided to offer up portions of their power to the highest bidder. One way they have done this is to charter corporations. This allows the ownership of companies to be diluted to the point of meaninglessness, so that the owners' accountability for their companies' actions are zero.
p.s. This is not a US problem, but a world problem. The two richest women in the world are European heads of state with nationalized petroleum corporations.
A right is a power, not a thing. My right of free speech means I have both the power to speak and the power to prevent people from restricting my speech. Oftentimes that power takes the form of legal action, but at its heart it is still a physical power: if you attempt to clamp your hand over my mouth I will bite down really hard.
What good is the right to free speech if nobody is allowed to listen to you?
You're talking about two different rights. One is the power to speak and the other the power to listen. Both need to be protected. But you seem to imply a third right, namely the power to coerce people into listening.
I have the right of free speech, you have the right to listen to my free speech. But I do not have the right to compel you to listen. That's tyranny.
The "internet" should not be a right. It would imply the power to coerce others into giving you hardware and connectivity. It's another application of the "tax one group to payoff another" philosophy.
Stallman had been working to achieve this from the 80's and now his project wasn't getting any kind of credit even though it had been a main player in making this possible.
"Back in 1984 I started the Free Automobile project. We built a chassis, several axles, steering wheels, etc. We had built everything except the engine. Well actually, we didn't build everything, some other people built some crucial parts, but that's beside the point. We made all of our parts available under the GNU Parts License, which said no one could demand attribution, and then set up an automobile parts store where you could get all of the parts you needed for an automobile for free.
"Then this guy from Finland comes along with an engine, gets a bunch of parts from our online store, and creates the world's second complete Free Automobile system. But he calls it "Automobix" and not "GNU/Automobix". That's just not right. The autoparts store should be the one to name the automobile! Just because these new automobiles had features we had never even thought of, like file systems, boot loaders and init processes, the so called "Automobix" systems are still GNU Automobiles, and I demand that people call them that."
But then again, they've chosen their licenses so that they allow this, and it's entirely okay if Apple takes everything and never gives anything back.
The GPL expects most people to be thieves, and thus the FSF is constantly sending nastygrams to people telling them to behave or they'll sic Eben on them. But the BSD license expects that most people are honest, and gets back tons of stuff without even asking.
It disturbs me too. I like writing applications because applications are interesting. They have algorithms, interesting data structures, architectures that inspire thought, etc.
There's only so many opportunities to earn a living writing kernels, browsers and interpreters. Everyone else who's in software will be writing perl scripts for websites. Sigh.
First, Apple has given back to every Open Source project it's borrowed from. The two main examples are FreeBSD and KDE. Why aren't they giving back Aqua? Because they didn't borrow Aqua from the community!
Second, according to the Tim philosophy of Open Source, Apple is the equivalent of Compaq. It's taking commodity software and "improving" it with proprietary additions. This works great (it worked great for Compaq), but eventually the paradigm shift will occur, and people are going to say "why am I paying proprietary prices for what should be commodity goods?"
Yup, Bill Gates started Microsoft on a Monday. On Tuesday he was running an illegal, predatory monopoly. On wednesday he sold his first copy of BASIC. After than he was an unstoppable juggernaught.
Microsoft stock hasn't been skyrocketing in quite a while. Investors are getting antsy. Either Bill pays out a dividend or the investors take their money out and put under their mattresses where it will yield a higher rate of return. Bill Gates is doing this because he is greedy. He doesn't want the investors to bail on him. It's the purest sort of self-interest, known as survival.
The weird and aberrant stock market of the late '90s and early 'naughts is over. People have come to their senses and realized that if you want money in your 401K and IRA twenty or thirty years down the road when you retire, then you invest in solid stable and boring companies that pay solid stable and boring dividends.
Yeah, you're also paying more for the packaging tiny amounts of ink inside electronic reservoirs than you are for large amounts of champaigne in plain glass magnums.
We are investigating email clients to deploy as our "standard" at the college where I work. I'm trying to find out who is using Mozilla for their email.
Do you know why IExploder and Outlurk have %95+ market share? It's not because Microsoft is a monopoly, or because they are better products, or because Bill Gates is a member of the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderbergers. It's because of the herd instinct. People want to use the same software that other people in their group use. Corporations use IE/Ol because other corporations do. Geeks use Linux because other geeks do. There are rare exceptions, but by and large human beings rival cattle in their ability to be molded by the opinion of their peers.
I get the impression from your question that you're seeking to follow the herd. If you were one of the rare exceptions then you wouldn't care what other companies are using, and just deploy Mozilla. But since you're asking, it seems to me that either you or someone above you needs the assurance that using Mozilla in an organization isn't new, innovative or radical.
You're not asking about problems others have uncovered while deploying Mozilla in an organization. That's not your concern at all. Instead you merely want to know who is using it. If you want to be a individual unswayed by the unthinking opinion of your peers, then just go deploy Mozilla. But if you just want to make sure your head isn't sticking above the level of the herd too far, then stick with the Microsoft products that all the other organizations are using.
Slashdot Mirror
Or OSS community
Well, true, they can afford true software engineering. But so often they just don't bother. When you find properly engineered Open Source Software, nine times out of ten it came from the government or aerospace...
MONEY!!!
Amen! And as a capitalist I am able to look farther in the future than just next quarter. Which is why I want the correct and proper solution.
Oh! Did you mean to say "Corporate Economy" instead? That's a different matter all together. Today's marketplace certainly is not capitalistic...
Don't let their monopoly status or proprietary anti-unix stance lead you astray. Microsoft does some pretty good coding. They are far from perfect, but in the large they do correct and proper solutions.
.NET.
For example, DOS. People today laugh at DOS and the problems it caused Windows on i386 machines. Many would point to it as a quick and dirty solution. But those who do fail to understand that DOS (a CPM clone) was a correct an proper solution to a 8086 with 640K RAM, and that they quickly started working on a replacement for more powerful processors.
Some correct and proper solutions from Microsoft off the top of my head (though a few may be tainted by overhype and feature creep): all early MS compilers, OS/2 (originally a MS project), NT, COM, integrated browser, and much of
p.s. I am not a Microsoft fan, being a loyal NIX fanboy and FOSS advocate, but credit has to be given where it is due.
Never Compromise Quality. It's not worth it in the long run.
If management and marketing expect you to shit code out your ass on demand, then make them give you some toilet paper in the form of a signed document saying you will not be held responsible for any stench resulting from the project.
And continue to follow the process! If you can't get your code through a review, make someone in charge sign a waiver and keep several copies of it on file.
Also write up some release notes listing all known and potential bugs, and make everyone you can find sign it.
And while you're covering your ass, get your resume in order and keep sending it out to companies with a clue. Eventually the tech sector will turn around and you can bail ship.
Then stick with 1.3 for the present. Point is, FreeBSD has more available then just 1.1.
compilers, editors, libraries, those make up the OS, not just the kernel.
So you're saying then that Visual C++ and Word (or Visual Basic and Notepad) are part of an operating system? Huh?
The typical user has no idea what an operating system is, but RMS ought to know better.
Those two people out there still using Tokenring will just have to stick with Linux then...
I'm always wondering why doesn't people use Java for such large developments
You sound just like my CEO. He knows nothing about the technical requirements of my project, but he saw a show on the Discovery Channel about Java so now we have to use Java.
Why is linux getting all that good press is the real puzzlement.
It's all about history and architecture.
History One) Bill Jolitz got lazy. He stopped applying patches and the 386BSD project was stagnating. NetBSD and FreeBSD forked off in impatience.
History Two) At just the time that BSD was removing encumbered AT&T code to create the world's first Free Software operating system, USL came along and bit the hand that fed it. Ouch! People didn't know how the trial was going to end up, so they avoided BSD. The trial was eventually won.
The end result of history was that BSD ended up being about two years behind Linux.
Architecture) Linux is not a single project. Consequently you need teams to do the integration. These teams are the distributions. Most distributions are commercial. Commercial entities advertise. The architecture of Linux leads directly to the need for advertisement. And since advertising creates advertising, IBM is heavily promoting Linux solely because people have heard of Linux.
There is no compelling need to commercialize the free BSD projects. The base operating systems are already integrated.
The end result of history and architecture is that Linux gets a lot of good press. So much so that "Linux" is becoming a meaningless synonym for "UNIX". You hear stuff like "Xfce is an alternate Linux desktop" when in fact Xfce runs on any POSIX/X11 system. Ditto for any other non-Linux-centric project. Even Apache is hailed by the press as Linux software, even though Apache is primarily developed under FreeBSD. Take a look at linuxtoday.com. 90% of the stories have little or nothing to do with the Linux kernel or surrounding operating system.
that is desktop leads to server, because it provides a good visibility in everybody's mind.
Unfortunately, you are correct. Geeks, hackers, and nerds know better. Engineers and developers know better. But these aren't the people in charge. Too many CEOs/CIOs think that if WindowsXP is good enough for their home email, then it must be good enough to run all of their mission critical enterprise servers. At my company we were even told by the CEO to use WindowsXP on our new hard realtime embedded medical diagnostics system.
There is a native Java 1.4 (and 1.2 and 1.3) for FreeBSD. There just isn't a native prebuilt binary, simply because Sun is being weird. But the source is all there and it works great.
Originally, perhaps, but with today's focus on the economy, government can no longer credibly threaten to neuter industry.
I wasn't talking about industry, I was talking about corporations. There is a difference, a huge difference.
I am so pro-business that I make Steve Forbes look like a liberal. But I do not believe in corporations. They are artificial entities created by government. There is no practical difference between the chartered corporations of yore (East India Company) and the public corporations of today (Microsoft, SCO, Redhat). Corporations have a government grant of immunity that absolves them from all responsibilities. A corporation can literally get away with criminal negligance without the owners of said corporation ever being held accountable.
Corporations have plenty of inherent power. They can fire or hire employees; this gives them power to help or destroy families.
This is not limited to corporations. Nothing prevents your small mom-n-pop donut shop from firing an employee. I've known people who have been fired from universities and farmer's cooperatives.
Companies have tons of power and inherent power, and they do abuse it.
I didn't say "companies" I said "corporations". Corporations can engage in behavior that would put a private owner of a business in jail. Consider the Exxon Valdez. One boat pilot got fired and the stock dropped a bit. Big fat hairy deal. Now suppose that the Exxon Valdez was owned by a private unincorporated business. The owners of the business would have been individually sued, and some might have gone to jail.
I have sued and won a judgement against a small one-man corporation. But I was never able to collect, because the corporation didn't have any money, and the judgement wasn't against the sole shareholder. So I got another judgement against the sole shareholder, and he filed bankruptcy with his corporation being the sole creditor. Corporations were designed to shield the business owners from their responsibilities.
The problem with corporations has nothing to do with a concentration of wealth, but everything to do with a government grant of immunity.
On the other hand, an attempt by some entity (either commercial or governmental) to arbitrarily limit the access that certain people have to the 'net would be illegal.
Boss: You can't use our computers and our network to surf porn on our time.
Employee: I'm suing you all the way to the Hague you fascist bastard, I've got rights!
In the early days of the US, the right to free speech was also considered a strange thing.
The right to free speech doesn't cost anyone anything.
But let's look at this from the property angle. All rights are property rights when you consider ownership of the self as a form of property. Speech is a property of the self, and thus free speech is a right. But the internet is a different sort of beast. You have the right to use your own computer since it is your property. You have the right to use a network if you own the network. You also have the right to use a network if you engage in a property transaction (paying a fee to the provider). If the ISP doesn't let you surf, then the ISP has broken a contract, which is a violation of your property rights. The the government steps in and tells you that you can't surf certain sites, or tells the provider that they must give the government information about you, then the government is violating property rights.
Saying that you have the right to the internet is like saying you have the right to a chicken in your pot. If it's your chicken and your pot, you certainly have the right to put the chicken in the pot. But you do not have the right to compel someone else to provide you with a chicken and a pot. What right do you have to a particular ISP's services? The answer is "none". If you want it you need to engage in a property transaction with the ISP, so that you obtain that right through a contract.
A corporation has no power but that which a government has given it.
This is not the fault of corporations, but of governments, which have decided to offer up portions of their power to the highest bidder. One way they have done this is to charter corporations. This allows the ownership of companies to be diluted to the point of meaninglessness, so that the owners' accountability for their companies' actions are zero.
p.s. This is not a US problem, but a world problem. The two richest women in the world are European heads of state with nationalized petroleum corporations.
You have the right to put up a website. But you don't have the right to coerce someone else to host it for you or provide you with bandwidth.
A right is a power, not a thing. My right of free speech means I have both the power to speak and the power to prevent people from restricting my speech. Oftentimes that power takes the form of legal action, but at its heart it is still a physical power: if you attempt to clamp your hand over my mouth I will bite down really hard.
What good is the right to free speech if nobody is allowed to listen to you?
You're talking about two different rights. One is the power to speak and the other the power to listen. Both need to be protected. But you seem to imply a third right, namely the power to coerce people into listening.
I have the right of free speech, you have the right to listen to my free speech. But I do not have the right to compel you to listen. That's tyranny.
The "internet" should not be a right. It would imply the power to coerce others into giving you hardware and connectivity. It's another application of the "tax one group to payoff another" philosophy.
Stallman had been working to achieve this from the 80's and now his project wasn't getting any kind of credit even though it had been a main player in making this possible.
"Back in 1984 I started the Free Automobile project. We built a chassis, several axles, steering wheels, etc. We had built everything except the engine. Well actually, we didn't build everything, some other people built some crucial parts, but that's beside the point. We made all of our parts available under the GNU Parts License, which said no one could demand attribution, and then set up an automobile parts store where you could get all of the parts you needed for an automobile for free.
"Then this guy from Finland comes along with an engine, gets a bunch of parts from our online store, and creates the world's second complete Free Automobile system. But he calls it "Automobix" and not "GNU/Automobix". That's just not right. The autoparts store should be the one to name the automobile! Just because these new automobiles had features we had never even thought of, like file systems, boot loaders and init processes, the so called "Automobix" systems are still GNU Automobiles, and I demand that people call them that."
But then again, they've chosen their licenses so that they allow this, and it's entirely okay if Apple takes everything and never gives anything back.
The GPL expects most people to be thieves, and thus the FSF is constantly sending nastygrams to people telling them to behave or they'll sic Eben on them. But the BSD license expects that most people are honest, and gets back tons of stuff without even asking.
It disturbs me too. I like writing applications because applications are interesting. They have algorithms, interesting data structures, architectures that inspire thought, etc.
There's only so many opportunities to earn a living writing kernels, browsers and interpreters. Everyone else who's in software will be writing perl scripts for websites. Sigh.
Yeah, it really is a weird license. Almost like the Apple BSD advocates had a head on collision with the Apple legal department.
First, Apple has given back to every Open Source project it's borrowed from. The two main examples are FreeBSD and KDE. Why aren't they giving back Aqua? Because they didn't borrow Aqua from the community!
Second, according to the Tim philosophy of Open Source, Apple is the equivalent of Compaq. It's taking commodity software and "improving" it with proprietary additions. This works great (it worked great for Compaq), but eventually the paradigm shift will occur, and people are going to say "why am I paying proprietary prices for what should be commodity goods?"
Yup, Bill Gates started Microsoft on a Monday. On Tuesday he was running an illegal, predatory monopoly. On wednesday he sold his first copy of BASIC. After than he was an unstoppable juggernaught.
Microsoft stock hasn't been skyrocketing in quite a while. Investors are getting antsy. Either Bill pays out a dividend or the investors take their money out and put under their mattresses where it will yield a higher rate of return. Bill Gates is doing this because he is greedy. He doesn't want the investors to bail on him. It's the purest sort of self-interest, known as survival.
The weird and aberrant stock market of the late '90s and early 'naughts is over. People have come to their senses and realized that if you want money in your 401K and IRA twenty or thirty years down the road when you retire, then you invest in solid stable and boring companies that pay solid stable and boring dividends.
Yeah, you're also paying more for the packaging tiny amounts of ink inside electronic reservoirs than you are for large amounts of champaigne in plain glass magnums.
We are investigating email clients to deploy as our "standard" at the college where I work. I'm trying to find out who is using Mozilla for their email.
Do you know why IExploder and Outlurk have %95+ market share? It's not because Microsoft is a monopoly, or because they are better products, or because Bill Gates is a member of the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderbergers. It's because of the herd instinct. People want to use the same software that other people in their group use. Corporations use IE/Ol because other corporations do. Geeks use Linux because other geeks do. There are rare exceptions, but by and large human beings rival cattle in their ability to be molded by the opinion of their peers.
I get the impression from your question that you're seeking to follow the herd. If you were one of the rare exceptions then you wouldn't care what other companies are using, and just deploy Mozilla. But since you're asking, it seems to me that either you or someone above you needs the assurance that using Mozilla in an organization isn't new, innovative or radical.
You're not asking about problems others have uncovered while deploying Mozilla in an organization. That's not your concern at all. Instead you merely want to know who is using it. If you want to be a individual unswayed by the unthinking opinion of your peers, then just go deploy Mozilla. But if you just want to make sure your head isn't sticking above the level of the herd too far, then stick with the Microsoft products that all the other organizations are using.