As a developer, I would like to see a really good set of libraries and IDE become the defacto standard on Linux. I think that the VisualAge product line is one of the best prospects to become do for GNULinux what MS Visual Studio on the Windows environment did.
How much effort is IBM putting towards improving the VisualAge support for Linux? I think that if there was a strong push to get VisualAge for C/C++ and foundation libraries out to developers, there would be a chance to improve corporate/government willingness to move desktops and internal developed applications to GNULinux.
I think the server market is going well, but the workstation market needs help like this.
It's easy to write songs, you just sit down and write them.
What I don't really understand is that the other large corps have all made a move to make Linux a part of their business plan, and M$ keeps going the other way.
I know that M$ has a different product than Oracle, but the second largest software corp. was one of the first big players to port to Linux. The others from Apple, SGI and Compaq didn't take this stance.
I don't get why M$ is doing this... Their usual method is the embrace->control policy. If you asked me 5 years ago what I thought about how M$ was going to deal with GNULinux now, I would have said they would have ported their apps, packaged up their own distro, and tried to rub RedHat and the others off the face of the earth.
How hard would it be to port Office to X-windows, but only to M$ commercial version of X-windows, and then sell that? Most of M$ workstation customers think the GUI is the OS, and couldn't care less about the kernel.
I think that Bill will wize up though. Nobody at M$ thought the internet was going to be a big deal 8 years ago, and ol' Bill managed to turn M$ on it's pivot and take the whole corp. in that direction when he saw it coming. This is no different than how M$ started in the first place, ol' Bill believed that everyone would want a computer in the days when the big corps totally didn't think that was ever going to happen.
I think that in the next couple of months there will be a 180 spin at M$, and they are going to 'Go with the Geeks'. Seeing what the geeks were doing, and knowing the rest of the population will eventually catch up, is what put M$ where it is today. Either they will remember this, or they will miss the boat on this trend.
It's easy to write songs, you just sit down and write them?
Living in SK myself, I think that the people here are used to this idea.
The population is sparse, and the services that are delivered to rural areas would be unaffordable to those communities if the cost wasn't shared by the urban areas. SaskTel is a crown corporation, and along with the other crown utilities (SaskPower, SaskEnergy), has had a mandate to deliver service to all communities whether it is profitable or not. This wouldn't happen if they were private companies, and probably will diminish since the deregulation of utitilies has happened (we now get hassled by AT&T and Sprint for long distance service too). In the '80's and early '90s, SaskTel converted the entire phone system to underground, SaskEnergy pipelined natural gas to everyone, and in alot of these cases, like my parents farm, they ran 5 miles of underground cable to service 1 customer, and there was no charge to them for upgrading the service from overhead lines. Part of the reason that this is acceptable here, is that something like 6 billion a year is generated from agriculture in this province, which is most of the gross product. The urban people generally know that their income is probably either directly or closely derived from agriculture. The other thing is that people here are very socialist by nature.
Politically, there are only 2 larger cities of a population of about 180,000, and the rest of the million people that live here, are in the smaller communities anyway, so selling this idea isn't all that hard.
It's easy to write songs, you just sit down and write them?
If you rent a car, and sign an agreement that says you will obey traffic laws with it, they have every right to do this. The agreement would have to include the clause that they will monitor you, and add an additional charge to your rental contract if you disobey traffic laws, but it is THEIR CAR. If you don't like it, don't rent it. Renting someone elses property, does not give you ownership.
It's easy to write songs, you just sit down and write them?
ya'know,
Regardless of the moral stance you may take on the whole RIAA copyright infringement circus, there is a bit of irony here.
The business side of the the recording arts, has made it's fortune from technology, with unrelentless greed. The multi-billion dollar industry exists only because someone invented everything from the motion picture through the eight track to the digital media.
The recording arts business embraced every chunk of technology to come along, and has sucked it for all it's worth.
Overwhelming greed pushed the industry into releasing material in digital form, not a huge desire to increase the quality of the product they sell.
Now it has backfired. There probably hasn't been a CD produced that is any good, that hasn't been converted to an MP3 and spread out on the net. The same will happen for movie DVD's.
I personally think this is wrong, but that is irrellevant, it will happen.
The irony is that the golden goose that made the business side of the recording arts what it is (technology) is what is going to sink it. They never will be able to encode digital format in a way that some geek can't crack, an still have something that will play in a cheap player. They won't quit releasing digital media, because it is way cheaper to produce than the analogue version (lp, cassette, vhs), and they won't be able to stop pirates.
If bands wanna make money, get a tour bus and hit the road. Put your albums out for free on the net, they are going to get there anyway. I guess actors can do the same with live performances. The business side is a huge leach that it was created by technology, and is now taking it's lumps from it.
It's easy to write songs, you just sit down and write them?
There is no short supply of electricity, natural gas, coal, hydroelectricity, wind powered generators, crude oil or gasoline in the middle of Canada.
This kinda skews my perspective I guess. I worked a consulting stint at the provincial gas company, and they are hunting for customers. The same goes with the electric utility, they have way more supply and infrastructure than they know what to do with.
Kinda makes me wonder why we don't have more IT companies pulling up stakes in California, and headin' north.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers? Make doooooobieees?
In today's cheap iron world, I don't think narrow margins in performance matter that much.
Everything is about reliability. I would rather have an OS that works is up >99% of the time, and shell out a few more bucks for hardware, than an OS that runs itself into a blue screen like a freakin' rocket.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers? Make doooooobieees?
I can't get there either, but I would take a shot in the dark and say it means smp multithreading, where you would spin off multiple threads and they execute parallel instead of timeshare/serial.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers? Make doooooobieees?
Where do they do their scouting for researchers?
on
Space Blimps
·
· Score: 1
Blow-up doll factories?
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers? Make doooooobieees?
IMHO nobody is going to make it selling generic packaged software for free OS's.
I can see a business model based around free software and high-priced consistency like Arsdigita being a somewhat feasible business model, but generic products like office suites or firewall tools in a shrink wrap aren't going to get any market share on open platforms, because there are free alternatives.
The other problem is the mentality of people running GNULinux or *BSD just doesn't lend them to pay for stuff.
To contradict myself, I think that something like Oracle 8i is doing well on Linux, even if it is only being used for development or interim production while waiting for a Solaris or AIX box, I believe it will replace NT as the OS of choice to run Oracle on Intel. But that is the exception... and the reason for that is that anyone setting up an Oracle installation is a little passed the 'if-i-can't-click-it-it's-too-complicated-and-make s-me-look-stupid' market that makes up the 95% of computer users that M$ caters to.
I can't see the gaming market for the GNULinux desktop ever making anyone rich. Same goes for the office suites. Console gaming is console gaming, the market is totally different than desktop platform gaming. It really doesn't matter to the 12 year old kid what OS runs on his console, and he doesn't wanna be able to create Word documents on it.
Anyway... I think that as a Software Dude, that wants to make a living working on GNULinux or *BSD, the only companies that are going to survive are one's that:
have a good chunk of open-source code that is better than other products out there
have a high enough profile to use the existing installations of their open-source software as marketting
have enough cash flow to completely write off the people that will just download their software that they paid employees to write, and never give them a cent
generate that cash flow through customization and consulting
hire smart enough people and train them on the product so that they get the consulting work implementing their product, because regardless of the price they charge the customer gets their money's worth
have clients that believe enough in open-source that will be willing to pay a consultant to customize an application and release those changes as open-source
Which is prettymuch what Arsdigita does. I wish the company I work for did the same. We already give out all source to our clients with every project, the trick is convincing the brass that giving it out to the general population would increase our sales enough to compensate for the people that would just take it and use it.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers? Make doooooobieees?
I work at a GIS shop that mostly builds extensions for AutoCad Map. When I first started with VLisp, it was ugly. After developing a few larger applications using VLisp and ActiveX (this has to be one of the weirdest combinations of technology in production), I am hooked. Lisp is totally relevant after 50 years, and the ActiveX extensions to AutoCad work really well with vlax (visual lisp ActiveX extensions). I've spent lots of time in C/C++, Java, PL/SQL, JavaScript, etc. and I guess I have lost my language bigotry, because I think that Lisp still stands up with any of the newer languages. Which leads me to believe that Philip Greenspun was right when he said that all the good ideas in CS came outta the 50's, and all the smart people now are in medicine.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers? Make doooooobieees?
What I tend to see from recent CS grads that I have worked with, is not a lack of technical training or ability to remember syntax, but a lack of basic engineering skills.
The junior people usually have more education than myself, but they don't know how to build something.
I think that the first thing that schools should do is a class in suspension bridge building. Make the potential CS student design and build a bridge across something with about a mile drop, and when they are done, make them walk across it.
This would ensure that the kids that get a chance to sit down and start hacking have some concept of the process of design->implementation before they start cranking out crap code.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers? Make doooooobieees?
What I've noticed in my little world, being employed at a Canadian GIS consulting company that mostly works for urban municipalities and government, is that middle managers choose Microsoft because it is safe.
A report like this, whether it actually reflects a true market or not will be used by the millions of middle managers to back up their decision to choose Microsoft.
I worked on a web application project for a provincial crown corporation, and the entire web infrastructure was built on MS products (NT,IIS,MTS,SQL Server), even though the legacy system was built around Sybase 11.3 on AIX, and there was a ton of Unix experience around the building, they went with M$ products.
Turned out that MTS couldn't do a transaction against Sybase, IIS didn't scale at all, etc. etc. That is not the point though. No one was going to make the decision to use something like GnuLinux/Apache/PostgreSQL in any Canadian government organization, because the middle managers aren't technical enough to take the chance.
The factor in this case is IBM. The only way GnuLinux is going to get into these organizations is if IBM, HP, or Sun puts it there.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers? Make doooooobieees?
I would imagine the Canadian Official who wrote this will probably take paid stress leave over the summer. This is the new fad sweeping the Canadian government and prettymuch all unionized Canadian employees.
Apparently, if your job stresses you out, you deserve a couple of months off to alleviate the problem.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers? Make doooooobieees?
I did this app for a client. I think that the interface for a raster (no java, plugin or activeX) based page is pretty good.
The client is the local yellow pages provider and provincial gov. phone company. It was a little tough to implement with Mapguide LiteView, because there was no functionality to draw the feature for the business. What I ended up doing is a custom servlet that gets the map from liteview, with a LL->UTM conversion (the features are stored in LL, but liteview needs a bounding box in the projection it is drawing in).
The idea of the map is just to locate businesses, without the user downloading any sort of thick client, so the full MapGuide plugin/ActiveX was not usefull. They don't have all of the businesses located yet, but if you search for 'pizza' in the business category then click on any address, you should get a map.
I tried to keep the UI as clean as possible.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers? Make doooooobieees?
Mapserver included on the cd is a great open-source raster delivery mapserver. It does have it's limits, mainly that it is CGI based, so database connections and memory caching are limited by the design, but if you want to put up a web page for a small to medium volume site, it is fairly easy to set up, and will work with any webserver. I have an app I built for a client about 3 years ago with it, and it has worked out well.
I implement Autodesk Mapguide for a living, and Mapserver is very close in features and performs comparably to Mapguide with the LiteView extension.
I looked at the GRASS package for a bit, and it is very complicated, even for someone who does GIS professionally. If you want to do basic GIS manipulation, get a copy of ArcView, MapInfo or Autocad Map.
FME from Safe Software is a fantastic converter for most data formats, and has an 15 day trial. It rocks.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers? Make doooooobieees?
I posted this on the O'Reilly site. What do you guys think about this point?
Mr. Mundie,
If you released the source code to Office, you would probably get at least the basic functionality ported to other OS's... for free. You would also get a huge amount of free QA. I would like to have Office available for Linux, and would be willing to work on porting it on my own time, and I would imagine I am not the only person that feels that way.
IMO there are no great innovations in Office that aren't available in other suites, so I don't think there is really all that much to lose on Microsoft's part. Office for Mac cannot possibly change the total sales of Microsoft OS's very much. Office for Linux wouldn't have a very significant impact either, unless it turns out that Linux as a desktop OS matures to be a better OS than MS Windows, and the market makes a choice to use it.
If Open Source is such a detriment to innovation, there is no way Linux could ever become the desktop OS of choice over MS Windows, so all you would be doing is expanding your Office user base, with no expense.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers? Make doooooobieees?
So this should lead to the best of both worlds by giving you all the functionality you have come to expect from the Java platform with the added benefit of using languages other than Java (C++, C#, VB, Javascript, VBScript, Perl and a few others) and transparently interact with objects written in these languages.
The only real value of Java is the cross-platform ability. If.NET is a Microsoft only technology, it doesn't really mean anything, I might as well continue to use VB/VC++. I also don't see any real improvement in Win2000, (or XP for that matter) above NT4.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers? Make doooooobieees?
Slashdot Mirror
How much effort is IBM putting towards improving the VisualAge support for Linux? I think that if there was a strong push to get VisualAge for C/C++ and foundation libraries out to developers, there would be a chance to improve corporate/government willingness to move desktops and internal developed applications to GNULinux.
I think the server market is going well, but the workstation market needs help like this.
It's easy to write songs, you just sit down and write them.
I know that M$ has a different product than Oracle, but the second largest software corp. was one of the first big players to port to Linux. The others from Apple, SGI and Compaq didn't take this stance.
I don't get why M$ is doing this...
Their usual method is the embrace->control policy. If you asked me 5 years ago what I thought about how M$ was going to deal with GNULinux now, I would have said they would have ported their apps, packaged up their own distro, and tried to rub RedHat and the others off the face of the earth.
How hard would it be to port Office to X-windows, but only to M$ commercial version of X-windows, and then sell that? Most of M$ workstation customers think the GUI is the OS, and couldn't care less about the kernel.
I think that Bill will wize up though. Nobody at M$ thought the internet was going to be a big deal 8 years ago, and ol' Bill managed to turn M$ on it's pivot and take the whole corp. in that direction when he saw it coming. This is no different than how M$ started in the first place, ol' Bill believed that everyone would want a computer in the days when the big corps totally didn't think that was ever going to happen.
I think that in the next couple of months there will be a 180 spin at M$, and they are going to 'Go with the Geeks'. Seeing what the geeks were doing, and knowing the rest of the population will eventually catch up, is what put M$ where it is today. Either they will remember this, or they will miss the boat on this trend.
It's easy to write songs, you just sit down and write them?
Maybe Sun will start posting how to port your AIX app to GNULinux, and IBM will post a 'Guide to Migrating your Tru64 app to GNULinux', etc.
It's easy to write songs, you just sit down and write them?
Living in SK myself, I think that the people here are used to this idea.
The population is sparse, and the services that are delivered to rural areas would be unaffordable to those communities if the cost wasn't shared by the urban areas. SaskTel is a crown corporation, and along with the other crown utilities (SaskPower, SaskEnergy), has had a mandate to deliver service to all communities whether it is profitable or not.
This wouldn't happen if they were private companies, and probably will diminish since the deregulation of utitilies has happened (we now get hassled by AT&T and Sprint for long distance service too).
In the '80's and early '90s, SaskTel converted the entire phone system to underground, SaskEnergy pipelined natural gas to everyone, and in alot of these cases, like my parents farm, they ran 5 miles of underground cable to service 1 customer, and there was no charge to them for upgrading the service from overhead lines.
Part of the reason that this is acceptable here, is that something like 6 billion a year is generated from agriculture in this province, which is most of the gross product. The urban people generally know that their income is probably either directly or closely derived from agriculture. The other thing is that people here are very socialist by nature.
Politically, there are only 2 larger cities of a population of about 180,000, and the rest of the million people that live here, are in the smaller communities anyway, so selling this idea isn't all that hard.
It's easy to write songs, you just sit down and write them?
If you rent a car, and sign an agreement that says you will obey traffic laws with it, they have every right to do this. The agreement would have to include the clause that they will monitor you, and add an additional charge to your rental contract if you disobey traffic laws, but it is THEIR CAR. If you don't like it, don't rent it. Renting someone elses property, does not give you ownership.
It's easy to write songs, you just sit down and write them?
Regardless of the moral stance you may take on the whole RIAA copyright infringement circus, there is a bit of irony here.
The business side of the the recording arts, has made it's fortune from technology, with unrelentless greed. The multi-billion dollar industry exists only because someone invented everything from the motion picture through the eight track to the digital media.
The recording arts business embraced every chunk of technology to come along, and has sucked it for all it's worth.
Overwhelming greed pushed the industry into releasing material in digital form, not a huge desire to increase the quality of the product they sell.
Now it has backfired. There probably hasn't been a CD produced that is any good, that hasn't been converted to an MP3 and spread out on the net. The same will happen for movie DVD's.
I personally think this is wrong, but that is irrellevant, it will happen.
The irony is that the golden goose that made the business side of the recording arts what it is (technology) is what is going to sink it. They never will be able to encode digital format in a way that some geek can't crack, an still have something that will play in a cheap player. They won't quit releasing digital media, because it is way cheaper to produce than the analogue version (lp, cassette, vhs), and they won't be able to stop pirates.
If bands wanna make money, get a tour bus and hit the road. Put your albums out for free on the net, they are going to get there anyway. I guess actors can do the same with live performances. The business side is a huge leach that it was created by technology, and is now taking it's lumps from it.
It's easy to write songs, you just sit down and write them?
yeah well...
pr0n and better beer kinda sunk the 'come up with a better idea and code it' plan
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
There is no short supply of electricity, natural gas, coal, hydroelectricity, wind powered generators, crude oil or gasoline in the middle of Canada.
This kinda skews my perspective I guess. I worked a consulting stint at the provincial gas company, and they are hunting for customers. The same goes with the electric utility, they have way more supply and infrastructure than they know what to do with.
Kinda makes me wonder why we don't have more IT companies pulling up stakes in California, and headin' north.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
In today's cheap iron world, I don't think narrow margins in performance matter that much.
Everything is about reliability. I would rather have an OS that works is up >99% of the time, and shell out a few more bucks for hardware, than an OS that runs itself into a blue screen like a freakin' rocket.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
I can't get there either, but I would take a shot in the dark and say it means smp multithreading, where you would spin off multiple threads and they execute parallel instead of timeshare/serial.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
Blow-up doll factories?
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
I can see a business model based around free software and high-priced consistency like Arsdigita being a somewhat feasible business model, but generic products like office suites or firewall tools in a shrink wrap aren't going to get any market share on open platforms, because there are free alternatives.
The other problem is the mentality of people running GNULinux or *BSD just doesn't lend them to pay for stuff.
To contradict myself, I think that something like Oracle 8i is doing well on Linux, even if it is only being used for development or interim production while waiting for a Solaris or AIX box, I believe it will replace NT as the OS of choice to run Oracle on Intel. But that is the exception... and the reason for that is that anyone setting up an Oracle installation is a little passed the 'if-i-can't-click-it-it's-too-complicated-and-makI can't see the gaming market for the GNULinux desktop ever making anyone rich. Same goes for the office suites. Console gaming is console gaming, the market is totally different than desktop platform gaming. It really doesn't matter to the 12 year old kid what OS runs on his console, and he doesn't wanna be able to create Word documents on it.
Anyway... I think that as a Software Dude, that wants to make a living working on GNULinux or *BSD, the only companies that are going to survive are one's that:
- have a good chunk of open-source code that is better than other products out there
- have a high enough profile to use the existing installations of their open-source software as marketting
- have enough cash flow to completely write off the people that will just download their software that they paid employees to write, and never give them a cent
- generate that cash flow through customization and consulting
- hire smart enough people and train them on the product so that they get the consulting work implementing their product, because regardless of the price they charge the customer gets their money's worth
- have clients that believe enough in open-source that will be willing to pay a consultant to customize an application and release those changes as open-source
Which is prettymuch what Arsdigita does. I wish the company I work for did the same. We already give out all source to our clients with every project, the trick is convincing the brass that giving it out to the general population would increase our sales enough to compensate for the people that would just take it and use it.Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
Great to see that we are right on the bleeding edge today.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
Pee Wee's Great Adventure or any of the other brilliant programs
huh?
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
After developing a few larger applications using VLisp and ActiveX (this has to be one of the weirdest combinations of technology in production), I am hooked. Lisp is totally relevant after 50 years, and the ActiveX extensions to AutoCad work really well with vlax (visual lisp ActiveX extensions).
I've spent lots of time in C/C++, Java, PL/SQL, JavaScript, etc. and I guess I have lost my language bigotry, because I think that Lisp still stands up with any of the newer languages.
Which leads me to believe that Philip Greenspun was right when he said that all the good ideas in CS came outta the 50's, and all the smart people now are in medicine.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
The junior people usually have more education than myself, but they don't know how to build something.
I think that the first thing that schools should do is a class in suspension bridge building. Make the potential CS student design and build a bridge across something with about a mile drop, and when they are done, make them walk across it.
This would ensure that the kids that get a chance to sit down and start hacking have some concept of the process of design->implementation before they start cranking out crap code.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
A report like this, whether it actually reflects a true market or not will be used by the millions of middle managers to back up their decision to choose Microsoft.
I worked on a web application project for a provincial crown corporation, and the entire web infrastructure was built on MS products (NT,IIS,MTS,SQL Server), even though the legacy system was built around Sybase 11.3 on AIX, and there was a ton of Unix experience around the building, they went with M$ products.
Turned out that MTS couldn't do a transaction against Sybase, IIS didn't scale at all, etc. etc.
That is not the point though. No one was going to make the decision to use something like GnuLinux/Apache/PostgreSQL in any Canadian government organization, because the middle managers aren't technical enough to take the chance.
The factor in this case is IBM. The only way GnuLinux is going to get into these organizations is if IBM, HP, or Sun puts it there.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
This is the new fad sweeping the Canadian government and prettymuch all unionized Canadian employees.
Apparently, if your job stresses you out, you deserve a couple of months off to alleviate the problem.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
(my brain is actually off on sunday)
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
If it doesn't make my 100 watt tube head go to 11, what good is it?
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
The client is the local yellow pages provider and provincial gov. phone company.
It was a little tough to implement with Mapguide LiteView, because there was no functionality to draw the feature for the business. What I ended up doing is a custom servlet that gets the map from liteview, with a LL->UTM conversion (the features are stored in LL, but liteview needs a bounding box in the projection it is drawing in).
The idea of the map is just to locate businesses, without the user downloading any sort of thick client, so the full MapGuide plugin/ActiveX was not usefull. They don't have all of the businesses located yet, but if you search for 'pizza' in the business category then click on any address, you should get a map.
I tried to keep the UI as clean as possible.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
I implement Autodesk Mapguide for a living, and Mapserver is very close in features and performs comparably to Mapguide with the LiteView extension.
I looked at the GRASS package for a bit, and it is very complicated, even for someone who does GIS professionally.
If you want to do basic GIS manipulation, get a copy of ArcView, MapInfo or Autocad Map.
FME from Safe Software is a fantastic converter for most data formats, and has an 15 day trial.
It rocks.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
Philip Greenspun is cool. Norm Abrams rocks the world of open-source furniture.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
Mr. Mundie, If you released the source code to Office, you would probably get at least the basic functionality ported to other OS's... for free. You would also get a huge amount of free QA. I would like to have Office available for Linux, and would be willing to work on porting it on my own time, and I would imagine I am not the only person that feels that way.
IMO there are no great innovations in Office that aren't available in other suites, so I don't think there is really all that much to lose on Microsoft's part. Office for Mac cannot possibly change the total sales of Microsoft OS's very much. Office for Linux wouldn't have a very significant impact either, unless it turns out that Linux as a desktop OS matures to be a better OS than MS Windows, and the market makes a choice to use it.
If Open Source is such a detriment to innovation, there is no way Linux could ever become the desktop OS of choice over MS Windows, so all you would be doing is expanding your Office user base, with no expense.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?
The only real value of Java is the cross-platform ability. If .NET is a Microsoft only technology, it doesn't really mean anything, I might as well continue to use VB/VC++. I also don't see any real improvement in Win2000, (or XP for that matter) above NT4.
Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?