I think click-n-run is a good idea actually, the ease of apt with a simple GUI for non-geeks.
And don't worry, I'm not expecting MS to stand still. Don't worry about the database thing, if MS manage to do it (and I'm sure they will eventually), then we can too - check out the plans for ReiserFS.
To be honest, I think you're right. It is too early yet for mass adoption of Linux, there are still a few too many rough edges. KDE and GNOME are making great progress, but the quality of those suites is variable, and again - rough edges.
Ditto with software installation. It's too hard. No, your average user will not build software from the source. These things are being dealt with, but they're not fully dealt with yet. I'd give Linux a few more years to mature before pushing it hard into the desktop marketplace.
There's also the problem that there aren't any truly professional (imho) end user distributions that don't attempt to clone Windows, and if there's one thing I think will fail, it's attempting to out Windows Windows. It's not going to happen, wine or no wine. Mandrake comes the closet, but it's busy fighting financial battles, and it's still less than perfect: their urpmi tool doesn't always work. I had a friend give up on Linux in frustration after he couldn't do something as upgrade Mozilla with it.
But... it is coming. A few years from now, Linux will be ready to compete on its own terms, rather than just by cloning Windows, and MS are going to be even further up the creek than they already are. That is when I'd start to seriously start pushing Linux on the desktop. Not before.
we're talking about one of the most successful companies of all time. had they waited until their products were very reliable (something *not* demanded by the marketplace at the time) instead of building the empire, they wouldn't have $40b in the bank and $1b/mo in profits.
Well yeah, sort of. The market didn't really realise that computers could be reliable though. You know, I've met people who think that when a computer crashes it's their own fault! I was thinking about this the other day after reading that article about software reliability, and I think basically the poor quality of todays software in terms of crashiness etc is largely Microsofts doing (i said largely, not completely).
So the IBM PC is released, and along comes Windows. Windows crashes 3 times a day, but they have a monopoly, it's all people ever know. How should they know that computers aren't inherantly unreliable? Nobody tells them that, apart from the occasional lone geek. Instead, people just roll their eyes and say "Computers! What can you do?".
It wasn't like that in the 70s. If your mainframe app crashed, the owner would be on the phone giving you hell. These days, people just accept it as normal, and so developers don't bother with long testing cycles, cos they know that their customers expect unreliability.
Take Apache and KDE. Apache was left to accumulate bugfixes for months, even years after v2 was virtually finished. I know it was running apache.org for a long time before it went gold. Dirk Mueller would have been crucified if he'd said "well we've got kde 3 here, but I want to leave it for a year to accumulate bug fixes so it doesn't crash".
Rhythmbox, which "takes its inspiration from Apple's iTunes application" [rhythmbox.org], is a direct rip-off of iTunes. It's also what I point at each and every time someone mentions open-source innovation.
Mac OS X, "which takes its inspiration from UNIX and NeXT", is a direct rip-off of BSD unix and NeXTStep. It's also what I point at each and every time somebody mentions Apple's "innovations".
Please, get off your horse. Apple didn't just copy an UI or two when they built OS X, they copied verbatim most of BSD Unix. And now, they're at it again, the next version of Sherlock will be using, of all things, the KDE JavaScript engine.
Come on guys, we need to start thinking about a real way forward. All this trash I'm seeing about "use another network", it's just hiding from the real issue.
So you don't like the RIAA? Then try thinking about an alternative. There are a lot of smart people here, we can make a new system that works better than the old one. It's surely worth a try!
Actually I was surprised to find out that this value referred to the cost of Code Red. I'd have thought the instability of the Windows 9x line has cost business far far more than any virus. And this time, you can't really say "well that's okay because they got a lot of benefit from Windows", because people have been making stable operating systems for years.
In theory, companies could have switched anytime to another product, in which case the "Value = Benefit - Cost" equation applies, but due to the market lockdowns MS has in place, it was realistically a case of use Windows or you can't use computers, which will make you uncompetitive.
I'm no lawyer, but I'd have thought that companies would have been quite within their rights to claim that Microsofts monopoly has indirectly cost them billions through lost time while Windows reboots, loses work and so on.
In all seriousness, what you save in open source software you usually lose in support costs.
This might be true -now-, if you deploy say a Linux desktop with no "get used to your new system" training, or you screw it up or whatevr, but basically the whole "OSS software support costs more than MS support" is just a short term argument. Right now MS is dominant, so MCSEs are 10 a penny (and lets face it, 12 year olds can get that qualification - experience virtually doesn't factor into it).
Now imagine that 60% of desktops run Linux, and Linux runs 80% of business machines. Now which is cheaper - MS support personnell or UNIX support? Linux of course, because it's wider spread and has higher number of people who are experienced with it. This isn't a general argument against open source.
Yeah, but you're forgetting about the disadvantages of NeXT style.app files (well, actually directories). It's basically just like the old DOS days, when apps were entirely self contained. Some quick problems with this system:
Very little code sharing. The reason we're having this discussion is because in general Linux apps share a lot of code, and because Linux is developing very rapidly right now you often need different versions of it. How do I say, "this program requires KDE3, and won't work with 2" when I have a completely self contained program?
No install time scripting/configuration. Yes, I know there are some people who think this is evil, but often for more complex apps it is necessary.
The OS is not notified when new software is present. There are all sorts of uses for this feature, such as dynamic menu creation etc
Basically, the OSX/NeXT.app method wins hands down for simplicity, but it has significant architectural flaws. I'd rather we resolved the packaging system problems.
KDE uses a series of.INI style text files for configuration - it's hardly the Windows registry.
Re:standardized locations, etc.
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 2
I was reading the FHS yesterday, and am still confused about one thing. It says that/usr/local and/opt are both for use by user-installed software. So where should my packages go?
Oh, and by the way, I think SuSE is basically the only fully LSB/FHS compliant distro out there, correct me if I'm wrong.
Netscape didn't lose because Microsoft had a 'monoloplistic share of the market.' It lost because IE was:
1) A better browser than Netscape
2) Free as in beer
Last time I checked, you needed to have a monopolistic share of the market to fund catching up with a competitor, then outrunning them, while at the same time as giving away that product for free.
I mean, wake up! Do you seriously think that IE has ever recouped it's cost? No, of course not. It's made a huge loss. Why can MS do this? Why, because they have a monopoly.
This sounds very much like RealNames. However, that wouldn't really help in situations where you just misspell a name. The fundamental problem is that of the "name" itself - what is a name? Yahoo is just a noise people make when they're happy: why should a corporation be able to own that? And more to the point, if they can own that, who says they can?
I think we need to scrap DNS and start over from scratch. Hand out names as needed for technological reasons, and set up a directory for users to provide an organizational name and get back links to that organization's web site(s).
Funny. I could have sworn I use one of those every day.
XRender is a redesign of the X rendering pipeline to bring it in line with the features we expect today. As part of that, hardware accelerated alpha-blends are implemented, in that you can give X 2 pixmaps and they'll be quickly blended together. The thing that's missing is the ability to easily get hold of a pixmap containing the stuff underneath your window - and keep it up to date. That's what the transparency server will do. Then, and only then, will we have "true" transparency, where you can move a window underneath a semi-transparent menu and see the window change underneath.
Basically I think it's pretty obvious now that Mozilla market share is going to increase alongside Linux market share. Why should anyone on Windows switch? Yes, it has nice features, but trying to convince my brother to use Mozilla over the past few months has been fruitless. He finally uses MozMail because of viruses, but he insists on IE for browsing. His attitude is (fairly enough) "put something with an address bar in front of me, and I'll be happy".
He couldn't care less about extra security, tabs and whatnot. Really, convincing people to switch browsers will be pretty hard now, IE is too entrenched. However, Linux is a different story - people are unhappy with Windows, users and retailers, and I think this recent WalMart deal with Lindows (which btw doesn't seem to be as bad a distro as some claim) shows this. And what is the premier browser on Linux? That'd be Mozilla.
- lUser cannot figure out how to cut and paste from the Mozilla web browser to Abiword (a harsh welcome to Xwindows indeed).
The clipboard issues have been fully resolved with KDE3, and that was the only thing that caused problems in the first place. All the major apps are now compliant with the standards, the only clipboard problems are with old installations. Linux is developing fast, can we please drop the now-dead clipboard thing?
While I realize this release wasnt supposed to 'look' much different, they still could have taken advantage of new eyecandy availible to x and gtk2. Even kde supports tranparent menus. Besides anti-aliased fonts and alpha blending in widgets, nothing else looks much different.
Well like you said, this release is about under the hood changes, much like the difference between Windows 95 and 98 - a lot of good changes, but not really in the visuals department.
2.) cool little features like drop shadows on the menus and windows, alpha blending and animations on mouse over widgets or icons, faded menus, transparency, etc....
Drop shadows on menus will have to wait for real transparency, which doesn't rely on taking a screen grab of the underside (which is how current X transparency is implemented, it means once blended it'll get out of date). This doesn't exist in X yet, but will once Keith Packard has finished his transparency server. I wish I knew when this would be.
Animations on mouse over widgets and icons is implemented in KDE3, so I dunno why GNOME doesn't have it either - guess it's just priorities. For faded menus, I guess you mean transparent menus, see above. In fact, that list basically comes down to "transparency". It's coming. Hold tight.
I think they need to boost their bandwidth on that site somewhat..
Re:Can it compete with KDE?
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Gnome 2.0 RC1
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Asking.... will KDE vanquish GNOME, or "which will win the desktop environment wars" is the wrong question. It's like asking "Which will win, Ford or Vauxhall?". I wouldn't be surprised if a decade from now, KDE and GNOME are still around, still with plenty of happy users. I think KDE will be loved more by those who came from Windows and are most happy with a Windows style desktop environment (which is in fact quite a good design, MS bashing aside).
I think GNOME should start to differentiate itself in some way, and I expect we'll start seeing them diverge somewhat as GNOME realise they can't out-KDE KDE, and instead try and do their own thing.
In theory, it looks like a great idea... I've loved the "urpmi" function in Mandrake, but this is even better. Indeed, Mandrake will have to raise their own level to meet Lindows's challenge of their spot as the top desktop Linux... Competition is good.
Well I only ever played with urmpi for a few mins, and all I found was that it had an ugly (imho) GTK interface and wouldn't let me upgrade Mozilla (it wouldn't let me override dependancy failures).
One thing that as I browse this catalog I'm getting a bit concerned about is.... there's too much software on Click-and-Run. Like Pingus for instance. Now Pingus is a mighty fine Lemmings clone, but it's no longer supported, and last time I tried to play it, I got a background that said 404 Texture not found - basically it's not finished. A lot of stuff in this database is like that - us geeks aren't troubled by this, and I'm often willing to use software that seems to be in a never ending beta test if it gets what I want done. To a standard Windows user though, seeing 20 programs that all do the same thing poorly won't impress them: Lindows would be better to select the best of breed as it were, rather than try to impress with sheer weight of software.
Last time I looked into Lindows, I wasn't that impressed. Though I didn't actually try it, I read up about it and flicked through the screenshots.
My, how things changed. They've given their website a total facelift, which now looks MUCH more professional. Stuff like this:
Clicking the "Install LindowsOS" button will automatically copy over your Outlook® email so that it can be read by the Mail program in LindowsOS. It will also copy over your bookmark files so they can still find your favorite web sites with the Browser included with LindowsOS. (Your Outlook mail and bookmarks will remain in their current location as well. Only a copy is moved to LindowsOS.) If you have a lot of mail or bookmarks, this may take a few seconds. Then you'll get a screen informing you that you need to restart your computer.
.. impresses the hell out of me. It's a nice touch, and solves a problem many windows users will find as they transition. Also, their Click-And-Run program (cheesy name, good idea) is another nice touch: one of the best things about Linux is the huge amount of free software to get you started, minimizing transition costs. But how to get to it? Click'n'run is apt for non-geeks. It even sends you an email once it's done giving you some tips for your new program.
Sometimes I think they've taken the Windows clone approach too far. It can (apparently) run IE/Notes and Word, which is impressive, but there will be things, especially games, that it'll barf on. Also the fact that it runs as root all the time is just a cop-out, they could have used something like kdesu to make that unnecessary. Ah well.... a good attempt though, I'm glad somebodies doing it.
Microsoft has totally opened up the specs to.NET. Okay, some things like 'Windows Forms' are a bit proprietary, but there's still tons of documentation for it. The Ximian guys are even going to be spinning their own compatible version.
Two things:
Firstly, Microsoft has submitted a few of the.NET specs to ECMA. However, ECMA is a standards organistion that, unlike say the IETF or W3C, allows patented "standards". This means that Microsoft can, and almost certainly do, have patents on key parts of the.NET infrastructure. And that means that they can stop anybody they like from building a.NET implementation, if they so wish.
Secondly, I'd say Windows Forms is one of THE most important parts of the whole framework. Why did Java fail on the client side? Well, the general lameness of the MS virtual machine didn't help, but largely it was because the AWT sucked hard, and Swing was just as bad, except slower. The Java GUIs were always bad, basically. Also, if you look at the Windows Forms disassembled code, you'll see that really it's just a big wrapper around GDI+ - do you honestly think that MS will say "Whoa, we'd better not add feature X to WinForms because Linux/Mac doesn't support it". I mean really, is that likely?
But it doesn't matter if the users aren't running Microsoft's VM. Unlike in the old days, Microsoft is not going to get rich by selling its platform anymore. It's going to stay rich by providing the best.NET solution.
Providing the best.NET solution is easy when you own.NET
Let's jump ahead 3 years. Let's say that Linux and MacOS X have a perfect compatible.NET framework on them. This means people can go out and buy Microsoft Office 2005, and it'll run on their PC, Mac, or Linux box. What has Microsoft lost here? Nothing really, infact, they're likely to gain market share.
3 years? That's optimistic. Wine has been in development for 10 years or more, and they still haven't got a complete implementation of the windows APIs! I think it's pretty likely that Microsoft, with it's huge teams of developers, can outpace any Linux development team at.NET compatability. Maybe there will be.NET for the Mac, in fact I expect there will be, but that'd be bad news for the Mac in the long term too..... I know one thing though, MS hates Linux, never forget that. I seriously doubt they'd want to see a fully working.NET on Linux.
Oh, one last thing. Microsoft seems to have an institutional hatred of rewriting stuff. They did it for Windows, because Windows 9x was such a piece of trash, and now they say they're doing it for IIS, because IIS is getting its ass kicked by Apache. They once tried to rewrite Word though, the project was called Pyramid iirc, but it got cancelled early on, and written off as a huge mistake.
If one day a.NET version of Office does appear, what will it be? A port? A transition to Managed C++? Office bear in mind is surprisingly insular, and uses a lot of its own code which is already present in Windows. A proper, fully paid up.NET version would be a huge undertaking. Then they'd have to do IE, and then they'd hit problems with VM performance and so on. I think hoping that Microsoft, after all these years, will suddenly become "enlightened" and give away a large amount of its intellectual property and try and make money selling the best products is, well, massively over-optimistic.
I've said it time and time again that that this is not a trivial issue at all. To YOU it is obvious because of your clear bias against MS. Personally, myself (and many others) do not believe that what was done with IE was anti-competitive in any way
I'd be interested to know how giving away a product that costs money to make for free, deliberately, in order to "cut off their air supply" (I think that was the phrase MS execs used, right?) is not anti-competitive. Please enlighten me.
Moz does use XUL for scrollbars within the app. If you're thinking of HTML form controls, then the XBL form controls effort is replacing them with proper, fully paid up XUL constructs. After that, only a few more things need to be eliminated (like the you-need-a-plugin dialog) and then it can switch to pure Xlib. GTK was just slowing things down anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
And don't worry, I'm not expecting MS to stand still. Don't worry about the database thing, if MS manage to do it (and I'm sure they will eventually), then we can too - check out the plans for ReiserFS.
Ditto with software installation. It's too hard. No, your average user will not build software from the source. These things are being dealt with, but they're not fully dealt with yet. I'd give Linux a few more years to mature before pushing it hard into the desktop marketplace.
There's also the problem that there aren't any truly professional (imho) end user distributions that don't attempt to clone Windows, and if there's one thing I think will fail, it's attempting to out Windows Windows. It's not going to happen, wine or no wine. Mandrake comes the closet, but it's busy fighting financial battles, and it's still less than perfect: their urpmi tool doesn't always work. I had a friend give up on Linux in frustration after he couldn't do something as upgrade Mozilla with it.
But ... it is coming. A few years from now, Linux will be ready to compete on its own terms, rather than just by cloning Windows, and MS are going to be even further up the creek than they already are. That is when I'd start to seriously start pushing Linux on the desktop. Not before.
Well yeah, sort of. The market didn't really realise that computers could be reliable though. You know, I've met people who think that when a computer crashes it's their own fault! I was thinking about this the other day after reading that article about software reliability, and I think basically the poor quality of todays software in terms of crashiness etc is largely Microsofts doing (i said largely, not completely).
So the IBM PC is released, and along comes Windows. Windows crashes 3 times a day, but they have a monopoly, it's all people ever know. How should they know that computers aren't inherantly unreliable? Nobody tells them that, apart from the occasional lone geek. Instead, people just roll their eyes and say "Computers! What can you do?".
It wasn't like that in the 70s. If your mainframe app crashed, the owner would be on the phone giving you hell. These days, people just accept it as normal, and so developers don't bother with long testing cycles, cos they know that their customers expect unreliability.
Take Apache and KDE. Apache was left to accumulate bugfixes for months, even years after v2 was virtually finished. I know it was running apache.org for a long time before it went gold. Dirk Mueller would have been crucified if he'd said "well we've got kde 3 here, but I want to leave it for a year to accumulate bug fixes so it doesn't crash".
Mac OS X, "which takes its inspiration from UNIX and NeXT", is a direct rip-off of BSD unix and NeXTStep. It's also what I point at each and every time somebody mentions Apple's "innovations".
Please, get off your horse. Apple didn't just copy an UI or two when they built OS X, they copied verbatim most of BSD Unix. And now, they're at it again, the next version of Sherlock will be using, of all things, the KDE JavaScript engine.
So you don't like the RIAA? Then try thinking about an alternative. There are a lot of smart people here, we can make a new system that works better than the old one. It's surely worth a try!
In theory, companies could have switched anytime to another product, in which case the "Value = Benefit - Cost" equation applies, but due to the market lockdowns MS has in place, it was realistically a case of use Windows or you can't use computers, which will make you uncompetitive.
I'm no lawyer, but I'd have thought that companies would have been quite within their rights to claim that Microsofts monopoly has indirectly cost them billions through lost time while Windows reboots, loses work and so on.
Try looking at the source for KSnapshot in kde cvs
This might be true -now-, if you deploy say a Linux desktop with no "get used to your new system" training, or you screw it up or whatevr, but basically the whole "OSS software support costs more than MS support" is just a short term argument. Right now MS is dominant, so MCSEs are 10 a penny (and lets face it, 12 year olds can get that qualification - experience virtually doesn't factor into it).
Now imagine that 60% of desktops run Linux, and Linux runs 80% of business machines. Now which is cheaper - MS support personnell or UNIX support? Linux of course, because it's wider spread and has higher number of people who are experienced with it. This isn't a general argument against open source.
Basically, the OSX/NeXT .app method wins hands down for simplicity, but it has significant architectural flaws. I'd rather we resolved the packaging system problems.
KDE uses a series of .INI style text files for configuration - it's hardly the Windows registry.
Oh, and by the way, I think SuSE is basically the only fully LSB/FHS compliant distro out there, correct me if I'm wrong.
thanks -mike
1) A better browser than Netscape
2) Free as in beer
Last time I checked, you needed to have a monopolistic share of the market to fund catching up with a competitor, then outrunning them, while at the same time as giving away that product for free.
I mean, wake up! Do you seriously think that IE has ever recouped it's cost? No, of course not. It's made a huge loss. Why can MS do this? Why, because they have a monopoly.
Funny. I could have sworn I use one of those every day.
XRender is a redesign of the X rendering pipeline to bring it in line with the features we expect today. As part of that, hardware accelerated alpha-blends are implemented, in that you can give X 2 pixmaps and they'll be quickly blended together. The thing that's missing is the ability to easily get hold of a pixmap containing the stuff underneath your window - and keep it up to date. That's what the transparency server will do. Then, and only then, will we have "true" transparency, where you can move a window underneath a semi-transparent menu and see the window change underneath.
He couldn't care less about extra security, tabs and whatnot. Really, convincing people to switch browsers will be pretty hard now, IE is too entrenched. However, Linux is a different story - people are unhappy with Windows, users and retailers, and I think this recent WalMart deal with Lindows (which btw doesn't seem to be as bad a distro as some claim) shows this. And what is the premier browser on Linux? That'd be Mozilla.
The clipboard issues have been fully resolved with KDE3, and that was the only thing that caused problems in the first place. All the major apps are now compliant with the standards, the only clipboard problems are with old installations. Linux is developing fast, can we please drop the now-dead clipboard thing?
Well like you said, this release is about under the hood changes, much like the difference between Windows 95 and 98 - a lot of good changes, but not really in the visuals department.
2.) cool little features like drop shadows on the menus and windows, alpha blending and animations on mouse over widgets or icons, faded menus, transparency, etc....
Drop shadows on menus will have to wait for real transparency, which doesn't rely on taking a screen grab of the underside (which is how current X transparency is implemented, it means once blended it'll get out of date). This doesn't exist in X yet, but will once Keith Packard has finished his transparency server. I wish I knew when this would be.
Animations on mouse over widgets and icons is implemented in KDE3, so I dunno why GNOME doesn't have it either - guess it's just priorities. For faded menus, I guess you mean transparent menus, see above. In fact, that list basically comes down to "transparency". It's coming. Hold tight.
Meanwhile, here is a shot of GNOME that actually looks good. And look - the terminal is transparent. Happy now?
I think they need to boost their bandwidth on that site somewhat..
I think GNOME should start to differentiate itself in some way, and I expect we'll start seeing them diverge somewhat as GNOME realise they can't out-KDE KDE, and instead try and do their own thing.
Well I only ever played with urmpi for a few mins, and all I found was that it had an ugly (imho) GTK interface and wouldn't let me upgrade Mozilla (it wouldn't let me override dependancy failures).
One thing that as I browse this catalog I'm getting a bit concerned about is.... there's too much software on Click-and-Run. Like Pingus for instance. Now Pingus is a mighty fine Lemmings clone, but it's no longer supported, and last time I tried to play it, I got a background that said 404 Texture not found - basically it's not finished. A lot of stuff in this database is like that - us geeks aren't troubled by this, and I'm often willing to use software that seems to be in a never ending beta test if it gets what I want done. To a standard Windows user though, seeing 20 programs that all do the same thing poorly won't impress them: Lindows would be better to select the best of breed as it were, rather than try to impress with sheer weight of software.
My, how things changed. They've given their website a total facelift, which now looks MUCH more professional. Stuff like this:
Clicking the "Install LindowsOS" button will automatically copy over your Outlook® email so that it can be read by the Mail program in LindowsOS. It will also copy over your bookmark files so they can still find your favorite web sites with the Browser included with LindowsOS. (Your Outlook mail and bookmarks will remain in their current location as well. Only a copy is moved to LindowsOS.) If you have a lot of mail or bookmarks, this may take a few seconds. Then you'll get a screen informing you that you need to restart your computer.
Sometimes I think they've taken the Windows clone approach too far. It can (apparently) run IE/Notes and Word, which is impressive, but there will be things, especially games, that it'll barf on. Also the fact that it runs as root all the time is just a cop-out, they could have used something like kdesu to make that unnecessary. Ah well.... a good attempt though, I'm glad somebodies doing it.
Two things:
Firstly, Microsoft has submitted a few of the .NET specs to ECMA. However, ECMA is a standards organistion that, unlike say the IETF or W3C, allows patented "standards". This means that Microsoft can, and almost certainly do, have patents on key parts of the .NET infrastructure. And that means that they can stop anybody they like from building a .NET implementation, if they so wish.
Secondly, I'd say Windows Forms is one of THE most important parts of the whole framework. Why did Java fail on the client side? Well, the general lameness of the MS virtual machine didn't help, but largely it was because the AWT sucked hard, and Swing was just as bad, except slower. The Java GUIs were always bad, basically. Also, if you look at the Windows Forms disassembled code, you'll see that really it's just a big wrapper around GDI+ - do you honestly think that MS will say "Whoa, we'd better not add feature X to WinForms because Linux/Mac doesn't support it". I mean really, is that likely?
But it doesn't matter if the users aren't running Microsoft's VM. Unlike in the old days, Microsoft is not going to get rich by selling its platform anymore. It's going to stay rich by providing the best .NET solution.
Providing the best .NET solution is easy when you own .NET
Let's jump ahead 3 years. Let's say that Linux and MacOS X have a perfect compatible .NET framework on them. This means people can go out and buy Microsoft Office 2005, and it'll run on their PC, Mac, or Linux box. What has Microsoft lost here? Nothing really, infact, they're likely to gain market share.
3 years? That's optimistic. Wine has been in development for 10 years or more, and they still haven't got a complete implementation of the windows APIs! I think it's pretty likely that Microsoft, with it's huge teams of developers, can outpace any Linux development team at .NET compatability. Maybe there will be .NET for the Mac, in fact I expect there will be, but that'd be bad news for the Mac in the long term too..... I know one thing though, MS hates Linux, never forget that. I seriously doubt they'd want to see a fully working .NET on Linux.
Oh, one last thing. Microsoft seems to have an institutional hatred of rewriting stuff. They did it for Windows, because Windows 9x was such a piece of trash, and now they say they're doing it for IIS, because IIS is getting its ass kicked by Apache. They once tried to rewrite Word though, the project was called Pyramid iirc, but it got cancelled early on, and written off as a huge mistake.
If one day a .NET version of Office does appear, what will it be? A port? A transition to Managed C++? Office bear in mind is surprisingly insular, and uses a lot of its own code which is already present in Windows. A proper, fully paid up .NET version would be a huge undertaking. Then they'd have to do IE, and then they'd hit problems with VM performance and so on. I think hoping that Microsoft, after all these years, will suddenly become "enlightened" and give away a large amount of its intellectual property and try and make money selling the best products is, well, massively over-optimistic.
I'd be interested to know how giving away a product that costs money to make for free, deliberately, in order to "cut off their air supply" (I think that was the phrase MS execs used, right?) is not anti-competitive. Please enlighten me.
Moz does use XUL for scrollbars within the app. If you're thinking of HTML form controls, then the XBL form controls effort is replacing them with proper, fully paid up XUL constructs. After that, only a few more things need to be eliminated (like the you-need-a-plugin dialog) and then it can switch to pure Xlib. GTK was just slowing things down anyway.