"There are none so blind as those who are blinded by irrational zealotry."
If I had to choose between zealots who insist all code should be GPLed and zealots who insist the GPL doesn't have a place in this world, I'd choose the GPL.
"How do the open source programmers feed their families ?"
If you discount the college students who program in their spare time or as a class project. The hobby programers who do it just because they like it.
You are left with tech people who have unrelated jobs, but contribute becuase they use the software and want to make it better. People who work for hardare companies that have a vested interest in making sure the software gets better. People who do contract programming that involves the projects they contribute to. Writing books, doing seminars, teaching etc. Gettng a job at a company that uses the software and is willing to pay to further it's development. Get a job at a linux company that may or may not be making money, but at least pays it programmers.
"but unless we had a unified (no competing projects like KDE and Gnome) set of projects, goals for those projects, and clear and definable end-user documentation and online help, we would not get to the level microsoft has made thier software to be."
It may be good to have some unity and clearly defined goals within a project, but it is also good to have outside contributors doing the unexpected. Alot of good stuff is unplanned.
I believe having multiple projects that compete is good because:
Competition pushes each project to do better. The different projects experiment with ideas that appeal to different users. Analisys of what is wrong or right with one project can clarify the direction of another.
In the end it is not a unified vision that is important, it is standards.
Having multiple implementations of something can point out where:
A standard is flawed. A standard needs to be more clearly defined. A standard needs to be extended. A new standard needs to be created.
"And I expect they'll use their usual underhanded marketing trick of making up a model number that sounds like it ought to be Mhz to try to fool potential buyers"
So you would rather buy from a company that designs a less efficiant chip so they can pump up the Mhz to try and fool potential buyers?
As long as the numbers are based on real world performance most people will not care. It's when you have a situation like you did with Cyrix where they claimed numbers that just didn't make sense that it becomes underhanded.
We've been using Abit kt7a and Kr7a. We are now getting Gigabyte Ga-7vrxp boards for the new systems.
For people looking for a more integrated design. I have been testing an MSI K7n420 for the last few days and it seems to be pretty good. It has onboard sound, nic, and video (Nforce chipset). It also has an AGP slot so you can upgrade the video later on (there is also a version without onboard video).
" I can't think of a good reason to justify a upgrade to 64bit"
If you consider that Speed = IPC * MHZ and that even without a 64 bit OS and software you will still get a significant boost in IPC on Hammer based systems that will give power users looking for every edge (along with the other reasons mentioned elsewhere)enough reason to want to upgrade.
The nice thing about what AMD has done is the chips can work themselves into the normal comsumer channel and all the consumer has to know is they are getting a faster machine.
In the early going power users will upgrade because they want the advantages. Later the avereage consumer will upgrade just because they need a more powerful machine.
I have used the browser at http://www.chameleonbrowser.com/ in the past.
I never really saw the point in running these so called browsers, that depend on IE to provide most of their functionality. Whatever little quirks there are in the underling code won't be able to be fixed by them.
Contrast that with browsers that use the Gecko engine. The code is available to them and they can fix it or work with the Mozilla team to get a fix out. Same with xpcom the quirks of the parent won't necessarily remain in the children.
I'd rather own a product that does a few things well than one that does a lot of things in mediocrity. That's why I use a Mac in the first place.
Since Linux is just a kernel and it does a few things well I'd say that fits the bill. One of the things it does well is provide the flexibility to be easily adapted (relatively speaking) to new devices. This way you can have Linux on a pda, a watch, a net appliance, MP3 player etc.. because they all have a different range of software (often overlapping) running on top to provide the value for the customer of each product.
" Sun is trying to put Solaris features into linux. This strikes me as a very bad move. Why would you improve "competing" products. Now addmitedly it will help them sell more solaris machines but given the open source nature of linux wouldnt this mean the improvements could be relatively ported to intel...effectively shooting themselves in the foot."
In a world where linux is becoming accepted as 'the common unix' why would a company whos primary profit comes from hardware view linux as competition.
I already have a DVD drive in my computer so why buy a seperate player to hook to the TV. I run VLC on windows using a Matrox G450 with the DVD max option selected. The connector for the second monitor is hooked to the TV and the stereo gets hooked to the headphone jack on the speakers when I am watching a DVD.
"I have encountered it within a few Win98'ers, but I've only experienced it myself within WinME. Near the very end of the scandisk section, after having gone over most of the disk, ScanDisk will inform you of an "error" in the "bootsector" which it believes to be improperly formatted or inaccurate data. If you repair this error, ScanDisk either removes any boot information (resulting in a halting LiLo screen or a blank screen, but never a "No Operating System Found" message) or replaces it with a basic NT bootloader. When replaced with a basic NT bootloader, your system will only be able to boot into Windows."
What you described here has nothing to do with the MBR. It is a problem with the partition windows is booting from. In some cases the repairs that windows makes will cuase problems with lilo this is one reason why you always keep a boot floppy around.
I have had my system dual boot linux with Win95b, 98, 98SE, ME, NT4, 2k, and now with XP. The only time any version of Windows cared what was in the MBR was during the install/reinstall.
" How about this: Some company decides that Black & Decker makes a nice set of tools, and millions of people buy them, but this company wants to sell modfied verions of Black & Decker tools. Maybe they want to put the on/off switch right where the plug goes into the wall socket. Or make the drill bits rotate the opposite way. However, they still want to call it a Black & Decker tool, since that's the brand name people are looking for. "
A closer analogy would be to imagine Black and Decker having %95 drill sales to the home consumer. But you can only buy the drill as part of a kit with 25 bits, 3 wire wheels, 5 sanding wheels, and 3 grinding wheels. Now imagine that Black and Decker is found to be a monopoly and you have people coming out of the woodwork saying we want to be able to sell this drill all by itself or package it with these other drill bits and these other attachments. Now imagine if on top of all of this Black and Decker had the odacity to say, If distributors are allowed to package the drill with any attachment they want we might have to pull the drill off the market. The attachments are an intregal part of the design if we have to support 25,000 combinations of packages that use our drill, well, I just don't see how that can be done.
i just bought a fresh nvida card because they have (yes i know it's closed sorce) very good linux drivers, the are fast and i can play quake 3 in 1280x1024 or use tvout to watch dvd's on my tv.
" Sorry, but selling GPL'd software is pointless. One guy will buy it for whatever it costs and then post it up on some website or on Kazaa and it'll spread if enough people want it. There's not a damned thing the distributors can do. So, why would someone then go buy the $5000 copy of the GPL'd software for instance when you can go to Joe's House of GPL software and download it for free? "
Was That sarcasm?
1 of the reasons for having GPLed software is to keep companies from selling software at outrageous prices and not providing any service.If a company builds their reputation and provides service with their software that makes it worth $5000 they will make their money in spite of the fact that many people will download the copy that is posted on the net.
Someone mentioned Redhat going after Cheepbytes for selling 3$ Redhat CDs as proof that the issue is a big deal. To me all that really proves is that Redhat doesn't want a bunch of people who bought $3 CDs from Cheepbytes contacting them expecting to get support at no extra charge.
I agree with error27 that (free software) was added by the editor and it subtly changes the way you read the answer. To me if you leave it out things are a little clearer
"How militant are you about which licences people use for their software, and how they use them? People who are not following the licence are pirates, it's as simple as that. It's no different if you take GPL (GNU Public Licence) code and don't give people the source code, or if you make copies of movies and sell them to people, it's the same thing. In terms of other software, it really depends on the people who write it. I don't think you have a right to dictate how somebody controls their own work, apart from the very, very basic standard you'd expect."
" I can't imagine that the RIAA would ever let someone make a hardware MP3 player that's reprogrammable. They were upset enough that you could download the MP3s back off the RIO device, even when it wasn't supported by RIO. Imagine what those Free Software wackos will do if they can reprogram the whole unit. It'd be anarchy."
If people are free to do what they want with the music, bands that become popular without signing their life away to some record company might become the rule instead of the execption.What's a rich leech, uh, poor record exec to do.
Later, Seeker
Re:He SHOULD care about the competition...
on
Torvalds Tells All
·
· Score: 1
"continue to be a player"? Right... Every business/organization should think that way. Screw Bill Gates and Microsoft. Who needs 90%+ market share, billions of dollars and incomparable influence when you can "continue to be a player"?
Caring about Microsoft alomost wiped out Corel. Now, with a new leader at the helm, they have decided to be a player and concentrate on their target market and things have improved.
"I sometimes wonder if it wasn't Microsoft's goal to confuse their competition so that they didn't know how to respond. It seems to be working, everybody is focusing on Passport and Hailstorm which were clearly not the signifigant pieces."
Don't underestimate the importance of Hailstorm and Passport. You have passport being positioned as a general solution to provide users with a single point of authentication across a broad range of services. Now when your selling people on Hailstorm you can sell them on the idea that they can tie in to the Passport service and if a user has a passport id then a significant amount of information necessarry to sign up for the service will be provided automatically. Now if you have a development environment that makes it relatively simple to develop software that ties into Hailstorm and Passport you have an inward spiral that leads back to Microsoft.
"What he was talking about in the way of clustering was the sudden fascination with beowulf type clusters. These things are being marketed as high availability when clearly they are not."
This may be true I have not really noticed. Beowulf was created with supercomputing in mind not high availablitiy, and this is where I have noticed it being used in the news stories that have talked about it.
When I read the comment about not using clustering to mask the fact that systems are crashing my first thought was of Microsoft.
"If you take anything away from this article, this is quote is it. It is so important for the Linux community to understand if they are going to have a chance of breaking Microsoft's strong hold of Jo Six-packs computer."
quoting the article
"Both Linux and FreeBSD are in the same boat there... the only way to drive desktop acceptance is to ship machines pre-installed with the OS (whatever OS) and preconfigured with a desktop so when you turn the thing on, you are ready to rock. The only way to do that is for the PC vendors to pre-install Linux (or FreeBSD, or whatever)."
This is a valid and important point. But I feel it is more important to create cross platform applications. If you get other programs to to follow Abiword, The Gimp, Open Office and Mozilla onto the Mac OS and Windows, and get people to use them, then the phrase "Where do you want to go today" will have some meaning.
If the "this" you refer to in the subject is the content of your message then the answer is yes.
"I mean, sure ogg vorbis is not encumbered by patents, and that is surely a good thing. But the whole purpose of MP3, Ogg Vorbis, ATRAC and all these other digital music compression algorithms is to make it easier/more cost effective for people to steal the music they want, rather than pay for it."
The point is to reduce the cost of use. A radio station does not have to pay usage fees to the people that created the cd audio format, why should internet radio have to for their audio format.
"I am fed up to the back teeth of these criminal scum who ruthlessly and without any conscience whatsoever steal music and then brag about it on IRC."
We have reached a point where a band can produce a cd and sell it on the internet at a much more convenient price then the record labels are doing. Which begs the question: Who is stealing the music?
"Last week some guy was saying how he had about 40 Gigabytes of 'ripped' MP3s on his machine. By my calculations (assume a CD cost $14) that means he has stolen the equivalent of about $30000."
You may be happy to fork over your hard earned cash paying for something you already paid for, but most of us are not. Copyright was not intended to give perfect control to the copyright holder. Any solution to the issue of stealing needs to be handled in a way that does not infringe on my right to copy stuff I paid for onto my computer then copy that copy to any other computer/device/file format that I choose to use in the future.
Later, Seeker
"I'll take the organized patterns of chaos over the chaotic organizations of man, any day."
(Iommi/Tankian/Marlette)
"Nobody ever, ever, ever wanted a sidebar in their browser. Nobody. Ever."
I was never that fond of the sidebar in IE, but now that I've been using Mozilla for a while I miss it when my bookmarks are not immedaitely accessible for selecting/editing in my sidebar.
If the Mono project is successfull at creating a common language runtime with support for multiple languages and support for multiple platforms it will have done it's job and it will be a good thing.
If you look at these points made by the author of the article:
" There are two elements of Microsoft.NET crucial to Ximian and Mono's success:.NET, the e-commerce development environment; and.NET, the infrastructure to manage Internet e-commerce security. At issue is the latter portion of.NET, which is part of Microsoft HailStorm. HailStorm includes an e-commerce authentication service called Passport."
These things are outside the scope of the Mono project. There is a seperate project that seeks to create an alternative to passport, and there are companies building e-commerce solutions on unix and unix like systems.
None of these things are dependent on each other for their success, but they could potentially help each other out.
Later, Seeker
I'll take the organized patterns of chaos over the chaotic organizations of man, any day.
Iommi/Tankian/Marlette
Slashdot Mirror
" Heh. The parts they lifted from CMU (i.e., Mach) and *BSD are open source. The bulk of the codebase (i.e., NeXTSTEP) is closed"
http://www.gnustep.org/ provides an open system that is getting far enough along to provide a base for portable applications.
Later, Seeker
"There are none so blind as those who are blinded
by irrational zealotry."
If I had to choose between zealots who insist all code should be GPLed and zealots who insist the GPL doesn't have a place in this world, I'd choose the GPL.
Later, Seeker
"How do the open source programmers feed their families ?"
If you discount the college students who program in their spare time or as a class project.
The hobby programers who do it just because they like it.
You are left with tech people who have unrelated jobs, but contribute becuase they use the software and want to make it better.
People who work for hardare companies that have a vested interest in making sure the software gets better.
People who do contract programming that involves the projects they contribute to.
Writing books, doing seminars, teaching etc.
Gettng a job at a company that uses the software and is willing to pay to further it's development.
Get a job at a linux company that may or may not be making money, but at least pays it programmers.
Later, Seeker
"but unless we had a unified (no competing projects like KDE and Gnome) set of projects, goals for those projects, and clear and definable end-user documentation and online help, we would not get to the level microsoft has made thier software to be."
It may be good to have some unity and clearly defined goals within a project, but it is also good to have outside contributors doing the unexpected. Alot of good stuff is unplanned.
I believe having multiple projects that compete is good because:
Competition pushes each project to do better.
The different projects experiment with ideas that appeal to different users.
Analisys of what is wrong or right with one project can clarify the direction of another.
In the end it is not a unified vision that is important, it is standards.
Having multiple implementations of something can point out where:
A standard is flawed.
A standard needs to be more clearly defined.
A standard needs to be extended.
A new standard needs to be created.
Later, Seeker
As it's capabilities grow open source is gaining more traction in enterpris markets.
It would seem to me that for an enterprise level company some of the following would certainly be true.
They have:
Evaluated the project and decided it meets their needs.
Decided their developers can work with the project maintainers.
Decided there is a cost savings that offset the deployment issues they will have to face.
Have custom code that is easy to port.
Savings offset the cost of porting.
Have a service contract with IBM, HP, Redhat or some other company whos job it is to address the issues they face.
Later, Seeker
"And I expect they'll use their usual underhanded marketing trick of making up a model number that sounds like it ought to be Mhz to try to fool potential buyers"
So you would rather buy from a company that designs a less efficiant chip so they can pump up the Mhz to try and fool potential buyers?
As long as the numbers are based on real world performance most people will not care. It's when you have a situation like you did with Cyrix where they claimed numbers that just didn't make sense that it becomes underhanded.
Later, Seeker
We've been using Abit kt7a and Kr7a. We are now getting Gigabyte Ga-7vrxp boards for the new systems.
For people looking for a more integrated design. I have been testing an MSI K7n420 for the last few days and it seems to be pretty good. It has onboard sound, nic, and video (Nforce chipset). It also has an AGP slot so you can upgrade the video later on (there is also a version without onboard video).
Later, Seeker
" I can't think of a good reason to justify a upgrade to 64bit"
If you consider that Speed = IPC * MHZ and that even without a 64 bit OS and software you will still get a significant boost in IPC on Hammer based systems that will give power users looking for every edge (along with the other reasons mentioned elsewhere)enough reason to want to upgrade.
The nice thing about what AMD has done is the chips can work themselves into the normal comsumer channel and all the consumer has to know is they are getting a faster machine.
In the early going power users will upgrade because they want the advantages. Later the avereage consumer will upgrade just because they need a more powerful machine.
Later, Seeker
I have used the browser at http://www.chameleonbrowser.com/ in the past.
I never really saw the point in running these so called browsers, that depend on IE to provide most of their functionality. Whatever little quirks there are in the underling code won't be able to be fixed by them.
Contrast that with browsers that use the Gecko engine. The code is available to them and they can fix it or work with the Mozilla team to get a fix out. Same with xpcom the quirks of the parent won't necessarily remain in the children.
Later, Seeker
Later, Seeker
" Sun is trying to put Solaris features into linux.
This strikes me as a very bad move. Why would you improve "competing" products. Now addmitedly it will help them sell more solaris machines but given the open source nature of linux wouldnt this mean the improvements could be relatively ported to intel...effectively shooting themselves in the foot."
In a world where linux is becoming accepted as 'the common unix' why would a company whos primary profit comes from hardware view linux as competition.
Later, Seeker
I already have a DVD drive in my computer so why buy a seperate player to hook to the TV. I run VLC on windows using a Matrox G450 with the DVD max option selected. The connector for the second monitor is hooked to the TV and the stereo gets hooked to the headphone jack on the speakers when I am watching a DVD.
Later, Seeker
"I have encountered it within a few Win98'ers, but I've only experienced it myself within WinME. Near the very end of the scandisk section, after having gone over most of the disk, ScanDisk will inform you of an "error" in the "bootsector" which it believes to be improperly formatted or inaccurate data. If you repair this error, ScanDisk either removes any boot information (resulting in a halting LiLo screen or a blank screen, but never a "No Operating System Found" message) or replaces it with a basic NT bootloader. When replaced with a basic NT bootloader, your system will only be able to boot into Windows."
What you described here has nothing to do with the MBR. It is a problem with the partition windows is booting from. In some cases the repairs that windows makes will cuase problems with lilo this is one reason why you always keep a boot floppy around.
I have had my system dual boot linux with Win95b, 98, 98SE, ME, NT4, 2k, and now with XP. The only time any version of Windows cared what was in the MBR was during the install/reinstall.
Later, Seeker
" How about this: Some company decides that Black & Decker makes a nice set of tools, and millions of people buy them, but this company wants to sell modfied verions of Black & Decker tools. Maybe they want to put the on/off switch right where the plug goes into the wall socket. Or make the drill bits rotate the opposite way. However, they still want to call it a Black & Decker tool, since that's the brand name people are looking for. "
A closer analogy would be to imagine Black and Decker having %95 drill sales to the home consumer. But you can only buy the drill as part of a kit with 25 bits, 3 wire wheels, 5 sanding wheels, and 3 grinding wheels. Now imagine that Black and Decker is found to be a monopoly and you have people coming out of the woodwork saying we want to be able to sell this drill all by itself or package it with these other drill bits and these other attachments. Now imagine if on top of all of this Black and Decker had the odacity to say, If distributors are allowed to package the drill with any attachment they want we might have to pull the drill off the market. The attachments are an intregal part of the design if we have to support 25,000 combinations of packages that use our drill, well, I just don't see how that can be done.
Later, Seeker
i just bought a fresh nvida card because they have (yes i know it's closed sorce) very
good linux drivers, the are fast and i can play quake 3 in 1280x1024 or use
tvout to watch dvd's on my tv.
Do they support the device filesystem yet?
Later Seeker
" Sorry, but selling GPL'd software is pointless. One guy will buy it for whatever it costs and then post it up on some website or on Kazaa and it'll spread if enough people want it. There's not a damned thing the distributors can do. So, why would someone then go buy the $5000 copy of the GPL'd software for instance when you can go to Joe's House of GPL software and download it for free? "
Was That sarcasm?
1 of the reasons for having GPLed software is to keep companies from selling software at outrageous prices and not providing any service.If a company builds their reputation and provides service with their software that makes it worth $5000 they will make their money in spite of the fact that many people will download the copy that is posted on the net.
Someone mentioned Redhat going after Cheepbytes for selling 3$ Redhat CDs as proof that the issue is a big deal. To me all that really proves is that Redhat doesn't want a bunch of people who bought $3 CDs from Cheepbytes contacting them expecting to get support at no extra charge.
Later Seeker
I agree with error27 that (free software) was added by the editor and it subtly changes the way you read the answer. To me if you leave it out things are a little clearer
"How militant are you about which licences people use for their software, and how they use them?
People who are not following the licence are pirates, it's as simple as that. It's no different if you take GPL (GNU Public Licence) code and don't give people the source code, or if you make copies of movies and sell them to people, it's the same thing. In terms of other software, it really depends on the people who write it. I don't think you have a right to dictate how somebody controls their own work, apart from the very, very basic standard you'd expect."
Later, Seeker
" I can't imagine that the RIAA would ever let someone make a hardware MP3 player that's reprogrammable. They were upset enough that you could download the MP3s back off the RIO device, even when it wasn't supported by RIO. Imagine what those Free Software wackos will do if they can reprogram the whole unit. It'd be anarchy."
If people are free to do what they want with the music, bands that become popular without signing their life away to some record company might become the rule instead of the execption.What's a rich leech, uh, poor record exec to do.
Later, Seeker
"continue to be a player"? Right... Every business/organization should think that way. Screw Bill Gates and Microsoft. Who needs 90%+ market share, billions of dollars and incomparable influence when you can "continue to be a player"?
Caring about Microsoft alomost wiped out Corel. Now, with a new leader at the helm, they have decided to be a player and concentrate on their target market and things have improved.
Later, Seeker
"I sometimes wonder if it wasn't Microsoft's goal to confuse their competition so that they didn't know how to respond. It seems to be working, everybody is focusing on Passport and Hailstorm which were clearly not the signifigant pieces."
Don't underestimate the importance of Hailstorm and Passport. You have passport being positioned as a general solution to provide users with a single point of authentication across a broad range of services. Now when your selling people on Hailstorm you can sell them on the idea that they can tie in to the Passport service and if a user has a passport id then a significant amount of information necessarry to sign up for the service will be provided automatically. Now if you have a development environment that makes it relatively simple to develop software that ties into Hailstorm and Passport you have an inward spiral that leads back to Microsoft.
Later, Seeker
"What he was talking about in the way of clustering was the sudden fascination with beowulf type clusters. These things are being marketed as high availability when clearly they are not."
This may be true I have not really noticed. Beowulf was created with supercomputing in mind not high availablitiy, and this is where I have noticed it being used in the news stories that have talked about it.
When I read the comment about not using clustering to mask the fact that systems are crashing my first thought was of Microsoft.
Later, Seeker
DavidJA said
"If you take anything away from this article, this is quote is it. It is so important for the Linux community to understand if they are going to have a chance of breaking Microsoft's strong hold of Jo Six-packs computer."
quoting the article
"Both Linux and FreeBSD are in the same boat there... the only way to drive desktop acceptance is to ship machines pre-installed with the OS (whatever OS) and preconfigured with a desktop so when you turn the thing on, you are ready to rock. The only way to do that is for the PC vendors to pre-install Linux (or FreeBSD, or whatever)."
This is a valid and important point. But I feel it is more important to create cross platform applications. If you get other programs to to follow Abiword, The Gimp, Open Office and Mozilla onto the Mac OS and Windows, and get people to use them, then the phrase "Where do you want to go today" will have some meaning.
Later, Seeker
If the "this" you refer to in the subject is the content of your message then the answer is yes.
"I mean, sure ogg vorbis is not encumbered by patents, and that is surely a good thing. But the whole purpose of MP3, Ogg Vorbis, ATRAC and all these other digital music compression algorithms is to make it easier/more cost effective for people to steal the music they want, rather than pay for it."
The point is to reduce the cost of use. A radio station does not have to pay usage fees to the people that created the cd audio format, why should internet radio have to for their audio format.
"I am fed up to the back teeth of these criminal scum who ruthlessly and without any conscience whatsoever steal music and then brag about it on IRC."
We have reached a point where a band can produce a cd and sell it on the internet at a much more convenient price then the record labels are doing. Which begs the question: Who is stealing the music?
"Last week some guy was saying how he had about 40 Gigabytes of 'ripped' MP3s on his machine. By my calculations (assume a CD cost $14) that means he has stolen the equivalent of about $30000."
You may be happy to fork over your hard earned cash paying for something you already paid for, but most of us are not. Copyright was not intended to give perfect control to the copyright holder. Any solution to the issue of stealing needs to be handled in a way that does not infringe on my right to copy stuff I paid for onto my computer then copy that copy to any other computer/device/file format that I choose to use in the future.
Later, Seeker
"I'll take the organized patterns of chaos over the chaotic organizations of man, any day."
(Iommi/Tankian/Marlette)
"Nobody ever, ever, ever wanted a sidebar in their browser. Nobody. Ever."
I was never that fond of the sidebar in IE, but now that I've been using Mozilla for a while I miss it when my bookmarks are not immedaitely accessible for selecting/editing in my sidebar.
Later, Seeker
If the Mono project is successfull at creating a common language runtime with support for multiple languages and support for multiple platforms it will have done it's job and it will be a good thing.
.NET crucial to Ximian and Mono's success: .NET, the e-commerce development environment; and .NET, the infrastructure to manage Internet e-commerce security. At issue is the latter portion of .NET, which is part of Microsoft HailStorm. HailStorm includes an e-commerce authentication service called Passport."
If you look at these points made by the author of the article:
" There are two elements of Microsoft
These things are outside the scope of the Mono project. There is a seperate project that seeks to create an alternative to passport, and there are companies building e-commerce solutions on unix and unix like systems.
None of these things are dependent on each other for their success, but they could potentially help each other out.
Later, Seeker
I'll take the organized patterns of chaos over the chaotic organizations of man, any day.
Iommi/Tankian/Marlette