1) What has communism got to do with this whole debate? absolutely *NOTHING*
2) Need one drag out the issue of the French next generation space engine which chosen over the English model even though the French version was less fuel efficient.
It doesn't matter if there is competition involved, the net result will always be, political interference will take place against the better judgement of engineers and scientists.
3) Interesting that you talk about competition, yet, you *COMPLETELY* forget about the senate querying the amount NASA recieves and the percieved benefits to the public.
Had the space agencies around the world combined, the cost of getting things done would be alot cheaper, meaning, less wastage and more can be done on the shoe string budget they receive.
however, when are they going to fix the problems with long term space flight? we can have the greatest space ship ever designed, however, unless the issues faced, aka, bone density deterioration due to weightless environment and the ability to haul a large amount of supply of food etc.
Ulimately if there is ever to be a future in space travel and space "exploration", the dogma between the European Space Agency, Russian Space Agency and NASA have to be put to one side, pull all the collective resources together and focus on a common goal.
With out a common goal and unified direction all there will be as a result is 3 organisations duplicating each others R&D, whichm IMHO is not a very efficient way of spending tax payers money.
FreeBSD Frozen: Does that mean it is finally dead;-)
Oh well, looking forward to the 5.2 release, however, it is good to see that 4.x series are continuing to be developed as the temptation by some uname groups to focus more on the sexy/cool version rather than the boring maintainance work that is required.
However, I would be interested to see where they're going head in the next couple of years. For me, I would love to see Corel have a come back, however, they need to do the following:
1) Listen to customers. There is a reason why people don't use Corel Graphics Suite for in their production environment, find out the problems and fix them. Talk to people, find out the issues. Indesign 2 is making BIG inroads into Quarks territory because they neglected the Mac market. Corel is in a strong position by the fact that they produce a Mac and Windows version of Graphics Suite 11.
2) Wordperfect Suite is still plagued by bugs. Again, talk to CIO's and IS staff, find out the issues they have with it and fix them. Simply screaming that Microsoft is the devil and they use voodoo magic to stop users from using different software is rubbish.
3) Start concerntrating on getting their Mac software in line with their competition. They've done a good job with Painter 8, however, they need to build on their success and not simply sit back and rest of their lorals.
4) Team up with Codeweavers to that existing customers can run Wordperfect Suite on Codeweavers Crossover Office. Label it as an "unsupported feature", however, it will win cudos from the Linux community with out the need to invest thousands in having a seperate product line.
I was talking to a mate at SUN, and put it this way, IBM has more lawyers than programmers or consultants. IBM make Microsofts legal team look like a chariety case.
If anything is going to happen, IBM is going to crush SCO with their (IBM's) wallet and legal power. SCO will wish that they had NEVER thought of the idea,
It is unfortunate that SCO has gone down this path. IMHO, atleast the previous CEO (before Ranson Love) was a good old fashioned, home grown Microsoft basher. All there is now is a sycophants willing to bend over and take it from MS.
As for the license deal, is this the future of SCO, keep their two products alive and live off the royalties from licensing intellectual property? if they had an active, high-tech R&D programme in place, it would be a different situation, however, they have done very little to increase the value of the current intellectual property war chess.
It seems strange that GNOME, according to their roadmap, are willing to simply ignore gtk 2.4. Wouldn't it be best for GNOME to hold back, wait till GTK 2.4 is released, set aside one month for testing GTK 2.4 against GNOME 2.4 and then release it?
However, I do have a couple of questions which is kinda off-topic-ish:
1) Is there a "roadmap" setout in regards to GTK 2.4/2.6 etc terms of functionality one should expect in up coming releases.
2) I've heard rumbles that gtk2 is still being ported to Quartz, could someone confirm it. I know there is an X11 version, however, it would be nice to have one that does require it, not because of anything political, I just don't want to download that massive 40+ MB XFree86 package from Apple;-)
3) Is there going to be a move by GNOME to support MAS as a replacement for esound? having used MAS and seen it action, it would be a really great addition if it was made available.
4) When running GNOME on FreeBSD I notice that when I select text in a terminal window there is a stall and the whole computer freezes then suddenly comes alright. I haven't experience that with KDE.
Having run GNOME 2.2 on Linux quite nicely it clearly isn't an issue with GNOME but with the FreeBSD port. Could someone confirm that this is being addressed?
I guess you fail to remember the anti-GPL tirade he went on when they released OpenLinux 3 which had a per-seat licensing policy.
Over the next couple of weeks he promoted the BSD license over GPL and claimed that the GPL was bad for business.
The question I want to know is why SCO/Caldera just simply use the BSD license. Had they simply started to use another license the whole issue would have been a footnote to a footnote.
Ultimately SCO/Caldera failed because they failed to utilise the investments they made into their own product and what made it worse they didn't make the issue any easier by simply isolating themselves from the opensource community by failing to contribute and enhace the opensource software they used in their one products.
Compare what SCO/Caldera did to KDE vs the effort and time Redhat, SuSE and Mandrake put into their distribution both from a visual (GUI) point of view and support (both software support and third party package availability).
SCO/Caldera dug their own hole and now they are looking for a scape goat for their bad management practices. IBM being the biggest cash cow and Linux proponent was/is the perfect target.
Having followed this issue, it seems rather funny that that this whole rampage against the GPL and other opensource licenses was first started by Ransom Love.
When McBride came onto the scene he started to talking about IP issues. I have no issues with a company setting out to see their IP is being used and whether the parties that are using it have paid the appropriate licenses for it.
Lets fast forward a little. SCO suddenly kills off their Linux business and throws all their programmers to SuSE so basically SCO simply becomes a reseller. Considering that they have made no profits so far from Linux and have almost a 0% marketshare, maybe their last resort is hair spliting.
Over the next several months the accusations have moved from being IP vioations to contractural issues.
Lets give a brief rewind, the last version of SCO Linux to be released before Ransom Love left was Caldera OpenLinux 3.1.1 and it was loaded with 2.4.13. Having the RCU code in the Linux kernel since the VERY early test releases, and it has taken almost 21 releases, around 2 years for SCO to come out of the wood works and complain.
Here is my take, when Ransom Love was in "their" they most likely looked at the possibility of litigation, however, due to a gray area in the IBM contract Love most likely decided not to persue a dead end law suite.
Fast forward to today and we have a new management trying their luck in a vein hope of sucking money out of IBM to prop up their failing business.
Sorry, UnixWare and OpenServer failed because they "suck". Sorry, I can't come up with a better adjective for their current line up. Poor scalability, waaaaaay over priced, heck, it makes Microsoft look charietable with their license pricing and they have next to no ISV and IHV support. No wonder SCO is dying.
Reminds of the Redhat 9.0 debate...
on
Flavor vs. Flavour
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
which I started in the Redhat mailing list back when someone had a query over why Redhat defaulted to A4 over US Letter, then it spawned into:
A4 vs. US Letter A-looo-me-num vs. Ala-min-e-um 240v vs. 110v -our vs -or Driving on the right vs. Driving on the left New Zealand Accent vs. Australian Accent
The default GNOME Window Manager is Metacity, however, the ability is there, if the user wishes, to swap it for another one as so long as it is "GNOME compliant".
Regarding KDE, KDE has kwin, and IIRC, you can not replace it with a window manager of your choice, hence, when one compiles KDE from scratch, the window manager is embedded right into the desktop code.
Whether that is good or bad, I'll let the zealots from both sides of the spectrum take up that argument.
Whilst we have Bill Gates scream "secure computing", Palladium and other buzz word compliant clap trap as if it was some sort of magic silver bullet, the real issue has nothing to do with security of the software but the people who have access to it.
Read ANY security analysis and they will always tell you that the weakest link in the security chain is always the human operator.
This weaknes is either via two things, social engineering by an outside cracker or privilages being abused by an inside employee either for themselves (as this case) or for a third party, as the case 2 years ago in New Zealand when 3 public servants were found selling social welfare records to debt collecting agencies.
Unforunately in this day in age there is a sizable portion of people who have absolutely no integrity and as a result give the whole business a bad name.
Although this sort of thing DID happen years ago, it didn't happen on the large scale it does now because there was always a paper trail to follow vs the virtual electronic one which can be easily manipulated by those with the knowledge and desire to do so.
What has happened today/whenever was not only a lack of integrity by one person but a lack of safe guards in place from day one to ensure that this sort of this can't be repeated.
For example, the credit card number should not be available to anyone. The only things that should be allowed to happen is for it to be replaced or deleted. Since everything is done electronically, there is no need for anyone to see those numbers.
Another safe guard would be to install monitoring software onto all computers to track the interaction of the employee and the data and cameras (of decent visual quality) to monitor not only the user on the computer but their body behaviour so that if any tell-tale signs of dishonesty are detected such as taking notes and trying to secretly "hide" a document in their pocket then the employee should be questioned then and there.
Yes, this does sound like big brother, however, ultimately, until the minority realise that there behaviour is completely and utterly unacceptable, this sort of thing will repeat itself.
Well Novell certainly benefits from the investments of SuSE, Red Hat and others by using Linux.
See this is what makes the GPL cool, it keeps the software free and lets everyone cooperate on making the best OS without the fear that anyone can just snag the source and release a closed OS.
What you want back is the fragmentation of the old unix world.
Thankfully most of us and even old unix companies don't want that.
Unix didn't fragment because people extended upon the specification, Unix fragmented because none of the Unix vendors could agree on a CORE set of specifications. It wasn't until Unix95 specification became a reality when interoperability was made more of a reality.
The fact remains, there is nothing with extending a protocol as so long as:
1) Supports the openstandard fully and thus allowing FULL operation with out the extension enabled.
2) The extension if full documented so that third parties can write the appropriate software required for interoperability.
As for the issue about compatibility, you can still have innovation WHILST maintaining compatibility with FreeBSD. If for example Novell created a way to speed up VM operations and the changes are completely transparent to the software, how could that cause incomatibility? How is this negative to the *BSD community? Why should Novell have to open up modules that have been added onto the core kernel to speed up user based application such as a http.ko?
At the end of the day, ultimately, a business is there to make money. The business makes money by offering something that is demanded and differentiates themselves from the competition.
What the GPL and Linux do is it enforces a state of perfect competition, which is unsustainable as businesses realise that any R&D they invest into, in the hope of pushing themselves ahead of the competition is instantly disolved as soon as they have to release the ehancement due to the nature of the GPL.
funny to see the number of RIAA whiners and whingers who complain about falling sales.
Here is a hint sunshine, GET SOME PEOPLE WITH TALENT THAT CAN SING AND DANCE!
You know, when you actually send someone out into the "field" and actually FIND talent rather than create it based on a bunch of demographic BS collected through some third rate "research" company.
For me, I bearly own a record newer than the 1990s because that is when things REALLY started to go down hill. Five boy bands with less talent than me playing a guitar and so-called "music" which would make the hair stand up on the back of anyones neck.
Instead of blaming everyone for their tale of wowes, how about the RIAA members look at the problem, warts and all instead of taking the easy way out and blaming Joe Bloggs who wants to hear the latest song from What-she-ma-call it "Unplugged".
1) Scott McNealy a while back spent a good 5minutes of an interview praising Steve Jobs and Apple. Also, in the same interview he "shocked" the audience that he too has an Apple Mac at home.
2) A merger between Apple and SUN wouldn't be too far off. A great server, awsome desktop and sell the lot in a bundle including a support contract. It would enable them to get into the desktop market alot quicker.
However, it maybe all very fine and dandy to embrace the Linux kernel BUT does Novell have a long term plan for Linux besides embracing it to be the flavour of the month?
I've seen these types of things before, companies mearly jumping on a bandwagon because it happened to pass their house.
Where is Novell heading in the next 5-7years? what are going to be their target market? Where will their network opereating system fit into? high end? small business? anti-Microsoft-and-linux crowd?
If it were ME I would embrace FreeBSD 5.2 (once released) and base an operating system off that, incorporate all the products that are currently available as seperate titles, bundle and sell it with a subscription support contract.
The benefit of FreeBSD is that is allows one to retain control over their investment so that if they, for example, spend $100million making a feature which quaduples the speed of the server, why then should they simply hand it over? if they invested that money into Linux they may as well, under that senario, grab $100million, throw some petrol over it and throw a lighter to it.
Why should Redhat or SuSE benefit of the investment of Novell?
I want to see Novell, Linux, *BSD and MacOS X to not only survive but become a real pain in the ass for Microsoft. Just when they think they have beaten one player, another jumps up and improves on Microsofts offerings.
So basically we are going to see the pile of crap just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger? No clear direction set by Microsoft? no long term road map for their product?
If it were ME, I would be VERY concerned when a company hasn't even set down where.NET is going to head towards.
All we have seen so far from the likes of you is speculative talk based on a wish and a hope that Microsofts gets the "message" and does something.
I want to hear what place the.NET framework will play in the operating system 4-5 years from now. Will it be the sucessor to win32/win16? where will it sit in regards to Microsofts "connected home" future? where will it sit in the webservices?
These are questions I want answered, not by speculation but Microsoft's management.
Around the time of Longhorn's release, maybe? That's still 2 years off.
No, I mean now. We have a server called Windows 2003 and not one component in it is written in.NET. Why not re-write IIS in.NET and thus reduce the chances of vulnerabilities? their application server, why is it that almost every application server on the market is written the language which it promotes, yet, Microsoft mearly religates C# to "scripting"?
Wouldn't making an application server based on pure C# and.NET be the *BEST* proof of concept? to me, when you see Windows 2003 and what roll C# plays, you can't help but feel like asking why they created another language when all it is being used for is scripting.
Not to produce flame bait, but when, may I ask, will we actually *SEE* some.NET based applications?
For almost 2 years we have seen Microsoft hype.NET to the sky and beyond, yet, we don't even see *ONE* pure.NET application as "proof of concept". Atleast with Java, for instance you can point to the numerous number of IDE's written in Java or the hand full of PURE Java application servers that exist.
KDE does have a clean API without any of the draw backs which the Win32 has. Applications have been written from the ground up for KDE and hence, no "migration to a better solution" is required.
How long will it take for software to move over the.NET? 2years? 3years? never? will it mearly be a really bad repeat of the win16 to win32, and Microsoft not making the hard decision to cut the air supply off to win16 and DOS developers?
When it comes to the crunch time, Microsoft NEVER makes the tough decisions unless in involves money. They have never once made a tough decision regarding their operating system, if they did, we wouldn't have win16 and DOS compatibility hanging around in Windows XP!
I think the one thing the article overlooked was the API set of which KDE is based on.
KDE is a clean, multi-platform API built from the ground up, not only for ease of use but easy development of applications to run on top of it as well as easy to maintain. Microsoft should learn something from that.
Regarding the ease of use, ultimately, it will depend on the end users background. If a person has never touched a computer, will KDE be easier? if a person has used a Windows PC all their lives, would they find KDE easier?
What ever the situation, the one thing that can be assured is the fact that the KDE community won't settle for second or third place, they are aiming to be the best.
This type of "technical" motivation is going to benefit the end user in the long run.
That Ximian may give more to Novell that what Novell can give to Ximian.
Think about it. Novell Netware 6.5 has a *really* crap management console, why not purchase the necesssary skills to improve it?
Now, lets add on top of that the fact that Novell doesn't want to be left out. They have Java, why not add a dot-net compliant framework to the mix so that no matter what the outcome of the framework wars is, Novell will be sitting back with a smile on their face knowing that what ever the outcome, they're covered either way.
Then lets add ontop of that! there are now *MORE* businesses moving to centralised processing, why not make Novell an viable alternative to Windows? get OpenOffice.org, Ximian GNOME, Evolution etc and you will have a really good combo for the end user.
Add even *MORE* ontop by the fact they Novell will earn some brownie points in the developer circles by embracing openstandards and as a net result, Novell has *NOTHING* to lose and everything to gain from this.
Slashdot Mirror
1) What has communism got to do with this whole debate? absolutely *NOTHING*
2) Need one drag out the issue of the French next generation space engine which chosen over the English model even though the French version was less fuel efficient.
It doesn't matter if there is competition involved, the net result will always be, political interference will take place against the better judgement of engineers and scientists.
3) Interesting that you talk about competition, yet, you *COMPLETELY* forget about the senate querying the amount NASA recieves and the percieved benefits to the public.
Had the space agencies around the world combined, the cost of getting things done would be alot cheaper, meaning, less wastage and more can be done on the shoe string budget they receive.
however, when are they going to fix the problems with long term space flight? we can have the greatest space ship ever designed, however, unless the issues faced, aka, bone density deterioration due to weightless environment and the ability to haul a large amount of supply of food etc.
Ulimately if there is ever to be a future in space travel and space "exploration", the dogma between the European Space Agency, Russian Space Agency and NASA have to be put to one side, pull all the collective resources together and focus on a common goal.
With out a common goal and unified direction all there will be as a result is 3 organisations duplicating each others R&D, whichm IMHO is not a very efficient way of spending tax payers money.
FreeBSD Frozen: Does that mean it is finally dead ;-)
Oh well, looking forward to the 5.2 release, however, it is good to see that 4.x series are continuing to be developed as the temptation by some uname groups to focus more on the sexy/cool version rather than the boring maintainance work that is required.
However, I would be interested to see where they're going head in the next couple of years. For me, I would love to see Corel have a come back, however, they need to do the following:
1) Listen to customers. There is a reason why people don't use Corel Graphics Suite for in their production environment, find out the problems and fix them. Talk to people, find out the issues. Indesign 2 is making BIG inroads into Quarks territory because they neglected the Mac market. Corel is in a strong position by the fact that they produce a Mac and Windows version of Graphics Suite 11.
2) Wordperfect Suite is still plagued by bugs. Again, talk to CIO's and IS staff, find out the issues they have with it and fix them. Simply screaming that Microsoft is the devil and they use voodoo magic to stop users from using different software is rubbish.
3) Start concerntrating on getting their Mac software in line with their competition. They've done a good job with Painter 8, however, they need to build on their success and not simply sit back and rest of their lorals.
4) Team up with Codeweavers to that existing customers can run Wordperfect Suite on Codeweavers Crossover Office. Label it as an "unsupported feature", however, it will win cudos from the Linux community with out the need to invest thousands in having a seperate product line.
HP-UX is based on SysVr4 and is Unix 95 compliant, AIX is based on pretty much like IRIX, SYSV with BSD 4.3 extensions. Tru64 based on Mach 3.2 IIRC.
I was talking to a mate at SUN, and put it this way, IBM has more lawyers than programmers or consultants. IBM make Microsofts legal team look like a chariety case.
If anything is going to happen, IBM is going to crush SCO with their (IBM's) wallet and legal power. SCO will wish that they had NEVER thought of the idea,
It is unfortunate that SCO has gone down this path. IMHO, atleast the previous CEO (before Ranson Love) was a good old fashioned, home grown Microsoft basher. All there is now is a sycophants willing to bend over and take it from MS.
As for the license deal, is this the future of SCO, keep their two products alive and live off the royalties from licensing intellectual property? if they had an active, high-tech R&D programme in place, it would be a different situation, however, they have done very little to increase the value of the current intellectual property war chess.
It seems strange that GNOME, according to their roadmap, are willing to simply ignore gtk 2.4. Wouldn't it be best for GNOME to hold back, wait till GTK 2.4 is released, set aside one month for testing GTK 2.4 against GNOME 2.4 and then release it?
However, I do have a couple of questions which is kinda off-topic-ish:
;-)
1) Is there a "roadmap" setout in regards to GTK 2.4/2.6 etc terms of functionality one should expect in up coming releases.
2) I've heard rumbles that gtk2 is still being ported to Quartz, could someone confirm it. I know there is an X11 version, however, it would be nice to have one that does require it, not because of anything political, I just don't want to download that massive 40+ MB XFree86 package from Apple
3) Is there going to be a move by GNOME to support MAS as a replacement for esound? having used MAS and seen it action, it would be a really great addition if it was made available.
4) When running GNOME on FreeBSD I notice that when I select text in a terminal window there is a stall and the whole computer freezes then suddenly comes alright. I haven't experience that with KDE.
Having run GNOME 2.2 on Linux quite nicely it clearly isn't an issue with GNOME but with the FreeBSD port. Could someone confirm that this is being addressed?
I guess you fail to remember the anti-GPL tirade he went on when they released OpenLinux 3 which had a per-seat licensing policy.
Over the next couple of weeks he promoted the BSD license over GPL and claimed that the GPL was bad for business.
The question I want to know is why SCO/Caldera just simply use the BSD license. Had they simply started to use another license the whole issue would have been a footnote to a footnote.
Ultimately SCO/Caldera failed because they failed to utilise the investments they made into their own product and what made it worse they didn't make the issue any easier by simply isolating themselves from the opensource community by failing to contribute and enhace the opensource software they used in their one products.
Compare what SCO/Caldera did to KDE vs the effort and time Redhat, SuSE and Mandrake put into their distribution both from a visual (GUI) point of view and support (both software support and third party package availability).
SCO/Caldera dug their own hole and now they are looking for a scape goat for their bad management practices. IBM being the biggest cash cow and Linux proponent was/is the perfect target.
Having followed this issue, it seems rather funny that that this whole rampage against the GPL and other opensource licenses was first started by Ransom Love.
When McBride came onto the scene he started to talking about IP issues. I have no issues with a company setting out to see their IP is being used and whether the parties that are using it have paid the appropriate licenses for it.
Lets fast forward a little. SCO suddenly kills off their Linux business and throws all their programmers to SuSE so basically SCO simply becomes a reseller. Considering that they have made no profits so far from Linux and have almost a 0% marketshare, maybe their last resort is hair spliting.
Over the next several months the accusations have moved from being IP vioations to contractural issues.
Lets give a brief rewind, the last version of SCO Linux to be released before Ransom Love left was Caldera OpenLinux 3.1.1 and it was loaded with 2.4.13. Having the RCU code in the Linux kernel since the VERY early test releases, and it has taken almost 21 releases, around 2 years for SCO to come out of the wood works and complain.
Here is my take, when Ransom Love was in "their" they most likely looked at the possibility of litigation, however, due to a gray area in the IBM contract Love most likely decided not to persue a dead end law suite.
Fast forward to today and we have a new management trying their luck in a vein hope of sucking money out of IBM to prop up their failing business.
Sorry, UnixWare and OpenServer failed because they "suck". Sorry, I can't come up with a better adjective for their current line up. Poor scalability, waaaaaay over priced, heck, it makes Microsoft look charietable with their license pricing and they have next to no ISV and IHV support. No wonder SCO is dying.
which I started in the Redhat mailing list back when someone had a query over why Redhat defaulted to A4 over US Letter, then it spawned into:
A4 vs. US Letter
A-looo-me-num vs. Ala-min-e-um
240v vs. 110v
-our vs -or
Driving on the right vs. Driving on the left
New Zealand Accent vs. Australian Accent
Can't you Americans just say it, TOILET! THUNDERBOX! SHIT-HOUSE! THE THRONE! JOHN! BOGG!
No one says bathroom. Bathroom would be implying that you are going to have a bath or shower.
Touch ./path
make install
for some reason, every package in gnome complains that index.sgml doesn't exist.
The default GNOME Window Manager is Metacity, however, the ability is there, if the user wishes, to swap it for another one as so long as it is "GNOME compliant".
Regarding KDE, KDE has kwin, and IIRC, you can not replace it with a window manager of your choice, hence, when one compiles KDE from scratch, the window manager is embedded right into the desktop code.
Whether that is good or bad, I'll let the zealots from both sides of the spectrum take up that argument.
Whilst we have Bill Gates scream "secure computing", Palladium and other buzz word compliant clap trap as if it was some sort of magic silver bullet, the real issue has nothing to do with security of the software but the people who have access to it.
Read ANY security analysis and they will always tell you that the weakest link in the security chain is always the human operator.
This weaknes is either via two things, social engineering by an outside cracker or privilages being abused by an inside employee either for themselves (as this case) or for a third party, as the case 2 years ago in New Zealand when 3 public servants were found selling social welfare records to debt collecting agencies.
Unforunately in this day in age there is a sizable portion of people who have absolutely no integrity and as a result give the whole business a bad name.
Although this sort of thing DID happen years ago, it didn't happen on the large scale it does now because there was always a paper trail to follow vs the virtual electronic one which can be easily manipulated by those with the knowledge and desire to do so.
What has happened today/whenever was not only a lack of integrity by one person but a lack of safe guards in place from day one to ensure that this sort of this can't be repeated.
For example, the credit card number should not be available to anyone. The only things that should be allowed to happen is for it to be replaced or deleted. Since everything is done electronically, there is no need for anyone to see those numbers.
Another safe guard would be to install monitoring software onto all computers to track the interaction of the employee and the data and cameras (of decent visual quality) to monitor not only the user on the computer but their body behaviour so that if any tell-tale signs of dishonesty are detected such as taking notes and trying to secretly "hide" a document in their pocket then the employee should be questioned then and there.
Yes, this does sound like big brother, however, ultimately, until the minority realise that there behaviour is completely and utterly unacceptable, this sort of thing will repeat itself.
Unix didn't fragment because people extended upon the specification, Unix fragmented because none of the Unix vendors could agree on a CORE set of specifications. It wasn't until Unix95 specification became a reality when interoperability was made more of a reality.
The fact remains, there is nothing with extending a protocol as so long as:
1) Supports the openstandard fully and thus allowing FULL operation with out the extension enabled.
2) The extension if full documented so that third parties can write the appropriate software required for interoperability.
As for the issue about compatibility, you can still have innovation WHILST maintaining compatibility with FreeBSD. If for example Novell created a way to speed up VM operations and the changes are completely transparent to the software, how could that cause incomatibility? How is this negative to the *BSD community? Why should Novell have to open up modules that have been added onto the core kernel to speed up user based application such as a http.ko?
At the end of the day, ultimately, a business is there to make money. The business makes money by offering something that is demanded and differentiates themselves from the competition.
What the GPL and Linux do is it enforces a state of perfect competition, which is unsustainable as businesses realise that any R&D they invest into, in the hope of pushing themselves ahead of the competition is instantly disolved as soon as they have to release the ehancement due to the nature of the GPL.
funny to see the number of RIAA whiners and whingers who complain about falling sales.
Here is a hint sunshine, GET SOME PEOPLE WITH TALENT THAT CAN SING AND DANCE!
You know, when you actually send someone out into the "field" and actually FIND talent rather than create it based on a bunch of demographic BS collected through some third rate "research" company.
For me, I bearly own a record newer than the 1990s because that is when things REALLY started to go down hill. Five boy bands with less talent than me playing a guitar and so-called "music" which would make the hair stand up on the back of anyones neck.
Instead of blaming everyone for their tale of wowes, how about the RIAA members look at the problem, warts and all instead of taking the easy way out and blaming Joe Bloggs who wants to hear the latest song from What-she-ma-call it "Unplugged".
"I can't be bothered buying the product, I'll just keep eating the free samples"
1) Scott McNealy a while back spent a good 5minutes of an interview praising Steve Jobs and Apple. Also, in the same interview he "shocked" the audience that he too has an Apple Mac at home.
2) A merger between Apple and SUN wouldn't be too far off. A great server, awsome desktop and sell the lot in a bundle including a support contract. It would enable them to get into the desktop market alot quicker.
However, it maybe all very fine and dandy to embrace the Linux kernel BUT does Novell have a long term plan for Linux besides embracing it to be the flavour of the month?
I've seen these types of things before, companies mearly jumping on a bandwagon because it happened to pass their house.
Where is Novell heading in the next 5-7years? what are going to be their target market? Where will their network opereating system fit into? high end? small business? anti-Microsoft-and-linux crowd?
If it were ME I would embrace FreeBSD 5.2 (once released) and base an operating system off that, incorporate all the products that are currently available as seperate titles, bundle and sell it with a subscription support contract.
The benefit of FreeBSD is that is allows one to retain control over their investment so that if they, for example, spend $100million making a feature which quaduples the speed of the server, why then should they simply hand it over? if they invested that money into Linux they may as well, under that senario, grab $100million, throw some petrol over it and throw a lighter to it.
Why should Redhat or SuSE benefit of the investment of Novell?
I want to see Novell, Linux, *BSD and MacOS X to not only survive but become a real pain in the ass for Microsoft. Just when they think they have beaten one player, another jumps up and improves on Microsofts offerings.
So basically we are going to see the pile of crap just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger? No clear direction set by Microsoft? no long term road map for their product?
.NET is going to head towards.
.NET framework will play in the operating system 4-5 years from now. Will it be the sucessor to win32/win16? where will it sit in regards to Microsofts "connected home" future? where will it sit in the webservices?
If it were ME, I would be VERY concerned when a company hasn't even set down where
All we have seen so far from the likes of you is speculative talk based on a wish and a hope that Microsofts gets the "message" and does something.
I want to hear what place the
These are questions I want answered, not by speculation but Microsoft's management.
No, I mean now. We have a server called Windows 2003 and not one component in it is written in .NET. Why not re-write IIS in .NET and thus reduce the chances of vulnerabilities? their application server, why is it that almost every application server on the market is written the language which it promotes, yet, Microsoft mearly religates C# to "scripting"?
.NET be the *BEST* proof of concept? to me, when you see Windows 2003 and what roll C# plays, you can't help but feel like asking why they created another language when all it is being used for is scripting.
Wouldn't making an application server based on pure C# and
Not to produce flame bait, but when, may I ask, will we actually *SEE* some .NET based applications?
.NET to the sky and beyond, yet, we don't even see *ONE* pure .NET application as "proof of concept". Atleast with Java, for instance you can point to the numerous number of IDE's written in Java or the hand full of PURE Java application servers that exist.
.NET? 2years? 3years? never? will it mearly be a really bad repeat of the win16 to win32, and Microsoft not making the hard decision to cut the air supply off to win16 and DOS developers?
For almost 2 years we have seen Microsoft hype
KDE does have a clean API without any of the draw backs which the Win32 has. Applications have been written from the ground up for KDE and hence, no "migration to a better solution" is required.
How long will it take for software to move over the
When it comes to the crunch time, Microsoft NEVER makes the tough decisions unless in involves money. They have never once made a tough decision regarding their operating system, if they did, we wouldn't have win16 and DOS compatibility hanging around in Windows XP!
I think the one thing the article overlooked was the API set of which KDE is based on.
KDE is a clean, multi-platform API built from the ground up, not only for ease of use but easy development of applications to run on top of it as well as easy to maintain. Microsoft should learn something from that.
Regarding the ease of use, ultimately, it will depend on the end users background. If a person has never touched a computer, will KDE be easier? if a person has used a Windows PC all their lives, would they find KDE easier?
What ever the situation, the one thing that can be assured is the fact that the KDE community won't settle for second or third place, they are aiming to be the best.
This type of "technical" motivation is going to benefit the end user in the long run.
That Ximian may give more to Novell that what Novell can give to Ximian.
Think about it. Novell Netware 6.5 has a *really* crap management console, why not purchase the necesssary skills to improve it?
Now, lets add on top of that the fact that Novell doesn't want to be left out. They have Java, why not add a dot-net compliant framework to the mix so that no matter what the outcome of the framework wars is, Novell will be sitting back with a smile on their face knowing that what ever the outcome, they're covered either way.
Then lets add ontop of that! there are now *MORE* businesses moving to centralised processing, why not make Novell an viable alternative to Windows? get OpenOffice.org, Ximian GNOME, Evolution etc and you will have a really good combo for the end user.
Add even *MORE* ontop by the fact they Novell will earn some brownie points in the developer circles by embracing openstandards and as a net result, Novell has *NOTHING* to lose and everything to gain from this.