You think open source is communist? MS new "AOL-ized" approach is geared towards providing services for the desktop user. Additionally.NET will make it possible to integrate MS-affialited "software services" into one's own software, and most MS software itself will be accompanied by a time-limited licensing agreement. If they truely lead the software inustry into this new paradigm, what will open source's answer likely be? I say, open services. Consider things like SETI@home and the Gnutella network. There is no reason, especially if Mono and.GNU are a success, that the opne source community can not only provide a free (as in both "beer", and "speech") counterpart to MS software, just as they are now. The two things keeping desktop users away from Linux (an other OSS platforms) are technical barriers to entry (learning curve) and lack of killer apps (or at least the ones present on Windows). OSS is perfectly capable of providing services. Imagine if everyone was able to run their favorite open source apps, but was able to run them remotely on some other computer on the internet, for free, and automatically (the entire internet a cluster, anyone). This amounts to the same low cost solution in the emerging service inustry that user today enjoy in software by using open source.
Despite the fact that this is a troll, the comment bearing both "college student" and "software architect" begs my gripe... I am a Computer Engineering major at the University of Maryland, and I am keenly interested in software engineering from the architectural standpoint, and yet there isn't even an ABET-accredited software engineering major offered to undergrads. Computer science is not in the engineering school, as is true of some other Universities. I want to be taking object-oriented design and analysis, or "aplied programming" (STL), rather than an algorithms class. I also work for the Department of Defense in a software engineering role, so I have an idea about what I need to know for real work, and I'm not getting it, and neither are 95% of undergrads in CS or CE around the nation. Why is academia intent on not producing "applied programmers" rather than engineers?
I was interested to hear the war on Microsoft called a "moral obligation". I don't believe the fight is far from that. Historically, a user's (especially those who aren't technically savvy enough to pursue more difficult to use alternatives) operating environment are wholly determined by the applications available under that environment. MS Office, Photoshop are obvious examples of applications that dictate use of 'non-linux' OSes. MS, between.Net and XP is in a position to entirely determine the landscape of the internet, obviously the most critical of all "applications" in use today. Tim O'Reilly says that HTML is open-source's greatest success. Why then are we accepting an effective propriatery control on our greatest success? I would love to have a secure and universally accessable and portable personal information database record, and I would love to be able to develop applications that integrate web services as easily as I would make use of local resources. I just hate the idea that I have virtually no input as to what those services do, i have no choice as to use them or not, and I certainly cannot organize a modification of those services. We must be wary of giving up on "applications" development for the Desktop or any other medium, for "applications" are WHY we use computers in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
You think open source is communist? MS new "AOL-ized" approach is geared towards providing services for the desktop user. Additionally .NET will make it possible to integrate MS-affialited "software services" into one's own software, and most MS software itself will be accompanied by a time-limited licensing agreement. If they truely lead the software inustry into this new paradigm, what will open source's answer likely be? I say, open services. Consider things like SETI@home and the Gnutella network. There is no reason, especially if Mono and .GNU are a success, that the opne source community can not only provide a free (as in both "beer", and "speech") counterpart to MS software, just as they are now. The two things keeping desktop users away from Linux (an other OSS platforms) are technical barriers to entry (learning curve) and lack of killer apps (or at least the ones present on Windows). OSS is perfectly capable of providing services. Imagine if everyone was able to run their favorite open source apps, but was able to run them remotely on some other computer on the internet, for free, and automatically (the entire internet a cluster, anyone). This amounts to the same low cost solution in the emerging service inustry that user today enjoy in software by using open source.
take that MS,
menander
Despite the fact that this is a troll, the comment bearing both "college student" and "software architect" begs my gripe... I am a Computer Engineering major at the University of Maryland, and I am keenly interested in software engineering from the architectural standpoint, and yet there isn't even an ABET-accredited software engineering major offered to undergrads. Computer science is not in the engineering school, as is true of some other Universities. I want to be taking object-oriented design and analysis, or "aplied programming" (STL), rather than an algorithms class. I also work for the Department of Defense in a software engineering role, so I have an idea about what I need to know for real work, and I'm not getting it, and neither are 95% of undergrads in CS or CE around the nation. Why is academia intent on not producing "applied programmers" rather than engineers?
I was interested to hear the war on Microsoft called a "moral obligation". I don't believe the fight is far from that. Historically, a user's (especially those who aren't technically savvy enough to pursue more difficult to use alternatives) operating environment are wholly determined by the applications available under that environment. MS Office, Photoshop are obvious examples of applications that dictate use of 'non-linux' OSes. MS, between .Net and XP is in a position to entirely determine the landscape of the internet, obviously the most critical of all "applications" in use today. Tim O'Reilly says that HTML is open-source's greatest success. Why then are we accepting an effective propriatery control on our greatest success? I would love to have a secure and universally accessable and portable personal information database record, and I would love to be able to develop applications that integrate web services as easily as I would make use of local resources. I just hate the idea that I have virtually no input as to what those services do, i have no choice as to use them or not, and I certainly cannot organize a modification of those services. We must be wary of giving up on "applications" development for the Desktop or any other medium, for "applications" are WHY we use computers in the first place.