All this new configurability and extensibility in Evo 2.0 is great, but what I'd really like to see is some better documentation for the "Evolution Data Server" (basically the Camel and Wombat API's). Ximian/Novell are hoping that the community will be excited about writing "snap-ins" to extend Evo's functionality, but what about those of us who would like to, for example, connect it to other back-end data stores? There's a "connector" for Groupwise and a "connector" for Exchange... what if I want to write a "connector" for some other groupware server? (I'm asking this question because I do want to do exactly that.) These API's are barely documented. You have to reverse-engineer the existing connector code to get anything done with it. I'd like to see some real docs.
Upon further consideration, I've come to the conclusion that if an asteroid that big did collide with the Earth... the complete destruction of all life on the planet would be a small price to pay for finally getting rid of Microsoft.
No problem. Let MS and Sun go right on believing that Linux == Red Hat. Let them even try to kill Red Hat if they can. We'll just keep doing what we've always done: building better software in and for the open source community. To use "their" terminology -- our Value Proposition continues to improve, year after year, relentlessly marching on, happily coexisting with (but not depending on) the corporations who operate within our space.
Seriously, if MS and Sun think they can beat Linux by beating Red Hat, let them believe that. It'll keep them off our backs while we build the next generation of superior software.
Remember the 1970's (and earlier)? People were into all sorts of geek DIY activities. Building your own electronic devices, photography with home darkrooms, mechanical stuff, theater/stage tech... there were a lot of hobbies that are now a shadow of their former selves because the advent of personal computing sucked up all the mindshare.
That trend almost reversed itself in the 1990's, when computers became boring. A vast wasteland of Intel and Microsoft. Nothing fun there. But then Linux and Open Source came along and re-kindled geeks' love for computing again. There's undeniable geek fun in the DIY aspect of open source hacking. (And it's great that we also have non-DIY products available now for the non-geeks.)
My prediction (which I hope never comes true) is that if Microsoft's DRM dystopia becomes reality and we can't do open source anymore, geeks will scramble away from computing in large numbers, and we'll see a resurgence of interest in DIY hobbies.
Software is an overhead for IBM. It's a distraction from hardware and services. Open Source allows IBM to sell hardware and services without having to pay to develop the software to run on it and/or implement on behalf of customers. That's the reason, and the only reason, IBM is into Linux.
In other words, IBM's business model is exactly the way open source advocates want the entire industry to be. And that's a good thing. Hardware and services are things with tangible value. Software is just a bunch of bits (which is why the "software as a product" crowd, especially MS, love to call it "intellectual property" in an attempt to create the illusion that once created, software still has value).
IBM is doing the right thing. They're looking to make money on things with real value, and the software isn't a real product -- it's just kinda there. That's the way it ought to be everywhere. That's the open source vision of the future. I sincerely hope we get there.
I want to see MS gone. I don't expect it to happen, but I still would be happy to see it. I'd like to see their entire top level of management executed by a firing squad. They are horrible, horrible people who simply don't deserve to live. They don't deserve to be treated like human beings because they have a blatant disregard for the well-being of the rest of the world. Beyond contempt. They are sub-human and do not deserve to live.
When unchecked greed outweighs basic human decency by such a wide margin, you know you're looking at people who are dangerous when they hold that much wealth and power.
Interstingly enough is that it is 'higher than rewards in most high-profile criminal and terrorism cases.'
What did you expect? Violent crime usually only affects people in ghettos and inner cities. Spam affects everyone -- including a bunch of fat old white men who control the wealth and power in this country. Therefore it's a more important crime to impose stiff penalties for.
Don't blame me, I voted Libertarian. You want more of this type of crap, go ahead and re-select Bushoco this year.
Funny how these "open source is less secure" people always seem to conveniently forget Apache, which runs the majority of the world's web servers and is open source. Despite its installed base, which is overwhelmingly greater than Microsoft's, it is the Microsoft web servers which frequently suffer from all the worms and viruses.
All these self-proclaimed experts make uneducated conjectures about worms and viruses targeting Windows because that's where the largest installed base of desktops is, but they conveniently ignore Apache. Until someone can come up with an objective explanation for that, any conjecture about open source being less secure will be summarily dismissed.
Intel has been caught off guard. They definitely have a lot of products in the R&D pipeline, but they spent so many years focusing on the Itanium future that they're really starting to hurt from the fact that nobody wants Itaniums.
Fortunately, even Intel's second-string is big and fast enough to keep pace with the rest of the industry, but things like this show that they really are having to make a huge effort to do so. I'm sure the dual-core demo was genuine, but as with so many demos of this type, it must have been very carefully scripted to avoid an embarassing crash.
How much more is Gates going to be remembered as the great success story who gave his money for the good of others? Any blemishes on his character will be easily waved away as jealous competitors, not anyone with a serious grief.
I think I speak for quite a few people when I say that I really don't care, as long as the computers a generation from now aren't locked into end-to-end Microsoft products. Business historians remember Carnegie and Rockefeller as robber barons; they'll remember Gates as a robber baron too, and that's good enough for me. While it's a bit sad that Microsoft made the bulk of the money from the PC revolution while doing almost none of the innovation, as a computer enthusiast I just want their crappy software to be gone (or at least non-monopoly) by the time my kids are in college.
The real reason for this: Windows Longhorn is going to require an obscene amount of memory, so Microsoft's new bought-and-paid-for friends in the DOJ are making sure RAM chips are inexpensive.
Mr. Citizen would probably be more likely to spend the extra money on a bigger TV - than cleaner electricity.
Which simply makes ordinary laws of economics go into effect: when the price of electricity from conventional sources rises above the price of electricity from renewable sources, the power companies will start making the switch. It's an interesting spectator sport, but it's not really something consumers need to be bothered with.
I'd imagine the same holds true for recycling of waste products, to a lesser extent.
This will certainly help with Jabber's market share and installed base.
What I'd like to see, though, is a Google branded instant messenger service -- based on Jabber. This would really kick IM up to the next level, and maybe even pressure the other big three to make their systems interoperable, like Internet technologies are supposed to be.
Let me repeat the operative words here: commercial software, binary only, Intel.
Get off your high horse already. There are plenty of good reasons to support the idea of a "one binary runs on any distribution" architecture. There are a lot of potential users out there who would be more willing to give Linux a try if they could do Next-Next-Next-Finish installs. Yes, LSB makes life easier for commercial software, but it makes life easier for everyone else too.
You won't win any converts to the open source philosophy by deliberately keeping the software more difficult to install. That former Windows user who started Linux life with binary LSB packages might eventually grow into a contributing community member, but if you never give him the opportunity to start with something easy, he might never get there. And if he doesn't -- so what? You can't expect everyone to be a super-elite power user.
Actually, the Sendmail program itself makes Sendmail look bad. Something as crufty as Sendmail shouldn't exist in 2004. It's no surprise that even seasoned unixheads are switching to Postfix.
This isn't a troll, or at least it isn't meant to be read as one. My point is that Sendmail is a perfect example of exactly what's wrong with unix. Nobody wants to be editing cryptic configuration files to accomplish simple things. Remember the mantra: simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible.
Domination of the net by Intel and its cronies, of course. We all know that the real reason the current Internet succeeded was because it was built on open standards. But the very openness that we love is what makes companies like Intel (and Microsoft, Dell, and Halliburton [aka the US government]) hate it, because they can't lock it down.
Rest assured their "new" Internet will be full of DRM and other horrors. One might even require a crypto certificate signed by an oligopoly-approved CA in order to connect at all.
Of course, if this thing is built on top of the existing Internet, it isn't any more useful than that "private email club" which was posted here yesterday. It's easy to simply ignore the rest of the world at your router or firewall. It's somewhat harder to actually fix real problems.
It would't be free (gratis) but it would be free (libre) if implemented in an open and unencumbered fashion. As for decentralized, there would have to be a decent size list of well-known certificate authorities -- probably the same authorities currently trusted by browsers for SSL-encrypted web sites. That way you get a choice of certificate authorities, and no one CA can monopolize the market.
Wow, so much hostility here. I'd be surprised if Mr. Glaser didn't simply decline the interview entirely at this point. This is an opportunity to get some real answers out of someone who's in a position to answer them, and all I'm seeing here is a bunch of stark raving lunatics. Here at Slashdot it's cool to hate Real and therefore you're all acting like a bunch of children.
The whole lot of you really need to grow up. It's exactly this kind of behavior that leads folks like Mr. Glaser to avoid taking you seriously.
Blu-Ray Disc (BD) already supported MPEG-2 and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, and now just added Microsoft VC-9. So what?
It's important because if you want to build an HD-DVD (and now Blu-Ray DVD) player, you have to support all the codecs specified by the format. You only have a choice when you're a content producer deciding which codec to use. You can't just build a player and decide "Well, I like MPEG but I don't like Microsoft, so I'll omit the VC-9 codec." If you do that, your player won't get certified. And of course, users will complain when their VC-9 encoded discs won't play on your player.
So now what do you do if you're building, say, a Linux player? Now you have to acquire IP rights from not only the MPEG people, but also from Microsoft. Think that'll be easy?
Yes, this will be reverse-engineered in some part of the world which is not dominated by the Corporate/Government oligarchy that exists in the US. In fact, the xine/mplayer stuff can probably handle it today. But you can be sure that both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will carry a brand new scrambling system as well. Perhaps DVD Jon will crack it, but don't count on it happening quickly.
All these different projects trying to come up with an end-to-end solution, and none of them really getting anywhere. We need a standard.
A few months ago, the folks at the Citadel project took notice of the specs for the Kolab project, and began promoting its storage and network formats as a proposed standard for open source groupware. It was a nice, simple, elegant design, using vCard and vCalendar formats. Others shared the same view: for example, the Aethera people joined in, and made their client Kolab-compatible. We at the Citadel project made our server Kolab-compatible. This was shaping up to be something good.
So what did the Kolab people do? They designed "Kolab 2" which uses data formats that are neither forward nor backward compatible with Kolab 1. They completely disregarded not only their installed base, but other projects that were working towards compatibility. The new format is proprietary (documented and unencumbered, but proprietary) and gratuitously abuses XML instead of following the industry-standard vCard and vCalendar formats.
The Aethera and Citadel projects are currently in discussions to work together to create a true. open, standards-compliant, cross-platform, end-to-end groupware solution. We invite others to participate as well -- we won't ignore you the way the Kolab people have.
As for OpenXchange? As others have suggested, this is really just a couple of bells and whistles glued onto someone else's IMAP server. It's not really a true solution.
This is just another PNAC conspiracy. Every time Bush and/or Ashcroft scares people into thinking terrorists are about to wreak havoc, the good little sheeple promptly bend over and accept new legislation that further erodes civil liberties. Bill Gates being the "generous" GOP donor that he is, has now joined in. If they scare enough people into thinking that cyberterrorism is about to destroy the Internet, the good little sheeple will promptly bend over and accept Microsoft(tm) Patented(tm) DRM(tm) across everything.
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All this new configurability and extensibility in Evo 2.0 is great, but what I'd really like to see is some better documentation for the "Evolution Data Server" (basically the Camel and Wombat API's). Ximian/Novell are hoping that the community will be excited about writing "snap-ins" to extend Evo's functionality, but what about those of us who would like to, for example, connect it to other back-end data stores? There's a "connector" for Groupwise and a "connector" for Exchange ... what if I want to write a "connector" for some other groupware server? (I'm asking this question because I do want to do exactly that.) These API's are barely documented. You have to reverse-engineer the existing connector code to get anything done with it. I'd like to see some real docs.
Now I'll have to buy the White album again.
Upon further consideration, I've come to the conclusion that if an asteroid that big did collide with the Earth ... the complete destruction of all life on the planet would be a small price to pay for finally getting rid of Microsoft.
(It's funny. Laugh.)
No problem. Let MS and Sun go right on believing that Linux == Red Hat. Let them even try to kill Red Hat if they can. We'll just keep doing what we've always done: building better software in and for the open source community. To use "their" terminology -- our Value Proposition continues to improve, year after year, relentlessly marching on, happily coexisting with (but not depending on) the corporations who operate within our space.
Seriously, if MS and Sun think they can beat Linux by beating Red Hat, let them believe that. It'll keep them off our backs while we build the next generation of superior software.
Remember the 1970's (and earlier)? People were into all sorts of geek DIY activities. Building your own electronic devices, photography with home darkrooms, mechanical stuff, theater/stage tech ... there were a lot of hobbies that are now a shadow of their former selves because the advent of personal computing sucked up all the mindshare.
That trend almost reversed itself in the 1990's, when computers became boring. A vast wasteland of Intel and Microsoft. Nothing fun there. But then Linux and Open Source came along and re-kindled geeks' love for computing again. There's undeniable geek fun in the DIY aspect of open source hacking. (And it's great that we also have non-DIY products available now for the non-geeks.)
My prediction (which I hope never comes true) is that if Microsoft's DRM dystopia becomes reality and we can't do open source anymore, geeks will scramble away from computing in large numbers, and we'll see a resurgence of interest in DIY hobbies.
Software is an overhead for IBM. It's a distraction from hardware and services. Open Source allows IBM to sell hardware and services without having to pay to develop the software to run on it and/or implement on behalf of customers. That's the reason, and the only reason, IBM is into Linux.
In other words, IBM's business model is exactly the way open source advocates want the entire industry to be. And that's a good thing. Hardware and services are things with tangible value. Software is just a bunch of bits (which is why the "software as a product" crowd, especially MS, love to call it "intellectual property" in an attempt to create the illusion that once created, software still has value).
IBM is doing the right thing. They're looking to make money on things with real value, and the software isn't a real product -- it's just kinda there. That's the way it ought to be everywhere. That's the open source vision of the future. I sincerely hope we get there.
Not that I want to see MS gone
I want to see MS gone. I don't expect it to happen, but I still would be happy to see it. I'd like to see their entire top level of management executed by a firing squad. They are horrible, horrible people who simply don't deserve to live. They don't deserve to be treated like human beings because they have a blatant disregard for the well-being of the rest of the world. Beyond contempt. They are sub-human and do not deserve to live.
When unchecked greed outweighs basic human decency by such a wide margin, you know you're looking at people who are dangerous when they hold that much wealth and power.
Interstingly enough is that it is 'higher than rewards in most high-profile criminal and terrorism cases.'
What did you expect? Violent crime usually only affects people in ghettos and inner cities. Spam affects everyone -- including a bunch of fat old white men who control the wealth and power in this country. Therefore it's a more important crime to impose stiff penalties for.
Don't blame me, I voted Libertarian. You want more of this type of crap, go ahead and re-select Bushoco this year.
Funny how these "open source is less secure" people always seem to conveniently forget Apache, which runs the majority of the world's web servers and is open source. Despite its installed base, which is overwhelmingly greater than Microsoft's, it is the Microsoft web servers which frequently suffer from all the worms and viruses.
All these self-proclaimed experts make uneducated conjectures about worms and viruses targeting Windows because that's where the largest installed base of desktops is, but they conveniently ignore Apache. Until someone can come up with an objective explanation for that, any conjecture about open source being less secure will be summarily dismissed.
Intel has been caught off guard. They definitely have a lot of products in the R&D pipeline, but they spent so many years focusing on the Itanium future that they're really starting to hurt from the fact that nobody wants Itaniums.
Fortunately, even Intel's second-string is big and fast enough to keep pace with the rest of the industry, but things like this show that they really are having to make a huge effort to do so. I'm sure the dual-core demo was genuine, but as with so many demos of this type, it must have been very carefully scripted to avoid an embarassing crash.
How much more is Gates going to be remembered as the great success story who gave his money for the good of others? Any blemishes on his character will be easily waved away as jealous competitors, not anyone with a serious grief.
I think I speak for quite a few people when I say that I really don't care, as long as the computers a generation from now aren't locked into end-to-end Microsoft products. Business historians remember Carnegie and Rockefeller as robber barons; they'll remember Gates as a robber baron too, and that's good enough for me. While it's a bit sad that Microsoft made the bulk of the money from the PC revolution while doing almost none of the innovation, as a computer enthusiast I just want their crappy software to be gone (or at least non-monopoly) by the time my kids are in college.
The real reason for this: Windows Longhorn is going to require an obscene amount of memory, so Microsoft's new bought-and-paid-for friends in the DOJ are making sure RAM chips are inexpensive.
Mr. Citizen would probably be more likely to spend the extra money on a bigger TV - than cleaner electricity.
Which simply makes ordinary laws of economics go into effect: when the price of electricity from conventional sources rises above the price of electricity from renewable sources, the power companies will start making the switch. It's an interesting spectator sport, but it's not really something consumers need to be bothered with.
I'd imagine the same holds true for recycling of waste products, to a lesser extent.
This will certainly help with Jabber's market share and installed base.
What I'd like to see, though, is a Google branded instant messenger service -- based on Jabber. This would really kick IM up to the next level, and maybe even pressure the other big three to make their systems interoperable, like Internet technologies are supposed to be.
Let me repeat the operative words here: commercial software, binary only, Intel.
Get off your high horse already. There are plenty of good reasons to support the idea of a "one binary runs on any distribution" architecture. There are a lot of potential users out there who would be more willing to give Linux a try if they could do Next-Next-Next-Finish installs. Yes, LSB makes life easier for commercial software, but it makes life easier for everyone else too.
You won't win any converts to the open source philosophy by deliberately keeping the software more difficult to install. That former Windows user who started Linux life with binary LSB packages might eventually grow into a contributing community member, but if you never give him the opportunity to start with something easy, he might never get there. And if he doesn't -- so what? You can't expect everyone to be a super-elite power user.
Actually, the Sendmail program itself makes Sendmail look bad. Something as crufty as Sendmail shouldn't exist in 2004. It's no surprise that even seasoned unixheads are switching to Postfix.
This isn't a troll, or at least it isn't meant to be read as one. My point is that Sendmail is a perfect example of exactly what's wrong with unix. Nobody wants to be editing cryptic configuration files to accomplish simple things. Remember the mantra: simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible.
Domination of the net by Intel and its cronies, of course. We all know that the real reason the current Internet succeeded was because it was built on open standards. But the very openness that we love is what makes companies like Intel (and Microsoft, Dell, and Halliburton [aka the US government]) hate it, because they can't lock it down.
Rest assured their "new" Internet will be full of DRM and other horrors. One might even require a crypto certificate signed by an oligopoly-approved CA in order to connect at all.
Of course, if this thing is built on top of the existing Internet, it isn't any more useful than that "private email club" which was posted here yesterday. It's easy to simply ignore the rest of the world at your router or firewall. It's somewhat harder to actually fix real problems.
that wouldn't be free & decentralised anymore.
It would't be free (gratis) but it would be free (libre) if implemented in an open and unencumbered fashion. As for decentralized, there would have to be a decent size list of well-known certificate authorities -- probably the same authorities currently trusted by browsers for SSL-encrypted web sites. That way you get a choice of certificate authorities, and no one CA can monopolize the market.
Wow, so much hostility here. I'd be surprised if Mr. Glaser didn't simply decline the interview entirely at this point. This is an opportunity to get some real answers out of someone who's in a position to answer them, and all I'm seeing here is a bunch of stark raving lunatics. Here at Slashdot it's cool to hate Real and therefore you're all acting like a bunch of children.
The whole lot of you really need to grow up. It's exactly this kind of behavior that leads folks like Mr. Glaser to avoid taking you seriously.
Until right now, I didn't know anything about Mister Sinus. Now I do. Perhaps that was the intention all along. Hey, it worked for Lindows...
Blu-Ray Disc (BD) already supported MPEG-2 and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, and now just added Microsoft VC-9. So what?
It's important because if you want to build an HD-DVD (and now Blu-Ray DVD) player, you have to support all the codecs specified by the format. You only have a choice when you're a content producer deciding which codec to use. You can't just build a player and decide "Well, I like MPEG but I don't like Microsoft, so I'll omit the VC-9 codec." If you do that, your player won't get certified. And of course, users will complain when their VC-9 encoded discs won't play on your player.
So now what do you do if you're building, say, a Linux player? Now you have to acquire IP rights from not only the MPEG people, but also from Microsoft. Think that'll be easy?
Yes, this will be reverse-engineered in some part of the world which is not dominated by the Corporate/Government oligarchy that exists in the US. In fact, the xine/mplayer stuff can probably handle it today. But you can be sure that both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will carry a brand new scrambling system as well. Perhaps DVD Jon will crack it, but don't count on it happening quickly.
All these different projects trying to come up with an end-to-end solution, and none of them really getting anywhere. We need a standard.
A few months ago, the folks at the Citadel project took notice of the specs for the Kolab project, and began promoting its storage and network formats as a proposed standard for open source groupware. It was a nice, simple, elegant design, using vCard and vCalendar formats. Others shared the same view: for example, the Aethera people joined in, and made their client Kolab-compatible. We at the Citadel project made our server Kolab-compatible. This was shaping up to be something good.
So what did the Kolab people do? They designed "Kolab 2" which uses data formats that are neither forward nor backward compatible with Kolab 1. They completely disregarded not only their installed base, but other projects that were working towards compatibility. The new format is proprietary (documented and unencumbered, but proprietary) and gratuitously abuses XML instead of following the industry-standard vCard and vCalendar formats.
The Aethera and Citadel projects are currently in discussions to work together to create a true. open, standards-compliant, cross-platform, end-to-end groupware solution. We invite others to participate as well -- we won't ignore you the way the Kolab people have.
As for OpenXchange? As others have suggested, this is really just a couple of bells and whistles glued onto someone else's IMAP server. It's not really a true solution.
This is just another PNAC conspiracy. Every time Bush and/or Ashcroft scares people into thinking terrorists are about to wreak havoc, the good little sheeple promptly bend over and accept new legislation that further erodes civil liberties. Bill Gates being the "generous" GOP donor that he is, has now joined in. If they scare enough people into thinking that cyberterrorism is about to destroy the Internet, the good little sheeple will promptly bend over and accept Microsoft(tm) Patented(tm) DRM(tm) across everything.
Ok, so Microsoft seems to be trying to assert patent rights on Sender ID, in a fashion that makes open source difficult to implement.
Can anyone tell us what is stopping the Free world from simply reverting back to plain old SPF and ignoring Microsoft's extensions?
So ... SCO is toast, either way, and the outcome of this case is going to set a precedent about the validity of the GPL.
I think perhaps Mr. Gates may have to resume Microsoft's funding of SCO, regardless of whether outside observers have already made the connection.