No! The GPL places an independent burden on distributors to independently re-GPL anything they distribute. SCO was certainly aware of what they were distributing. The alternative is that they distributed a mix of other peoples GPL code and their own proprietary code, which is for-profit copyright infringement. Since these acts (occur and continue even now) after they proclaimed linux infringing, they can't plead ignorance anymore.
So they can choose between A) losing because they GPL'd everything in dispute regardless of whether it was proprietary or not before they distributed it, or B) losing because their entire linux business was based on willful, for-profit piracy.
This is just another example of your myopic view of the presentation layer as the entirety of "applications". Slashcode is written in mod_perl as a matter of fact, not in "HTML". It could just as easily have been written in JSP as many, many corporate web pages are. The "J" in JSP stands for java and such an app meets your new criteria to "span a java-based application". That application happens to be on the web server, but you appear not to consider that as part of the world.
Or did you mean you don't regularly go to a web page that spans a Java-based application IN THE BROWSER? If so, you still miss the boat. It's obvious you don't work anywhere which uses an Oracle ERP product or internally developed app. A whole lot of the Fortune 500 companies at one time or another have run some segment of their mission critical systems on Oracle products that launch in a browser JVM. Oracle has started to move away from the browser JVM to the J2EE models, but it will be years before the last browswer JVM app disappears from the corporate landscape.
So even if that is what you actually meant, java is wildly successful.
Sun did this years ago with Java. Why wasn't it successful?
Huh? In what sense is Java not successful? It's only the most popular programming language for enterprise applications in the world right now. Or are you saying their cross-platformness isn't successful, which is also odd since this is precisely why java is the most popular language right now (since when it's combined with good OO it results in highly reusable code).
The only knock on java is that it isn't open source, though between efforts like jikes and gcj and the fact that Sun will eventually be sold for scrap, even this seems bridgeable.
A lot of stuff is created outside the W3C, it all works, if its good we install it.
Some people do, some people don't. Java has clearly not been embraced by the open source community as much as possible because of its licencing. SVG was developed with a lot of overlap with Flash because a lot of people won't use flash. Flash will never be built in to the browser for this reason, while SVG is already at an alpha level for browser support even though it plays catchup.
There is nothing special about W3C other than they happen to be one group that creates **OPEN** standards that aren't dominated by a single company and thus represent a consensus among a lot of groups that together have a lot of credibility. Neither java nor flash can say this and thus neither is completely satisfactory even if many people use it anyway.
Why do you assume that a runtime would be as long to update as a browser? That's really a question of the target developer community. A generic runtime would attract a lot more than just the presentation layer wonks who currently work on browsers.
For example, browsers are lagging way behind in basic XML features that the rest of the world seems to have no problem implementing. The browser is too focused on the presentation specific aspects of life to attract people who are interested in backend technologies. That means when you look at something like an XML spec whose value proposition is to shift hard work from the middle layer to easy work in the client tier, you can't find anybody to implement it.
It's not aimed at replacing XForms, but it is their cop out so they don't have to implement XForms, which would require them to implement several other XMLish specs like XPath, Schema, and XML events which they see as hard. You are right that these have "not been widely implemented by those browsers".
I don't understand how adding an extra spec to learn in addition to XForms can be called a simplification. For whom? Browser implementors and presentation layer programmers. Not for businesses who have to hire people that know both specs and do more total work.
What are you talking about? ACID is non-negotiable. If you have something that doesn't have atomicity it is not viable and you should not call it an RDBMS. Oracle is the fastest RDBMS by a lot for real world problems.
That is a very poor strategy. It is clearly pretty far from game theoretic optimal poker given zero knowledge of opponent tendencies.
Basically, most of the time a good opponent will read your bet as purporting to have a very strong hand and he will fold, giving you his ante. Sometimes he will have a strong hand himself and play it, usually taking all your money.
If you go read a typical howto on playing the starting hands, you'll see that people are going to play at you when they have one of the big hands like QQ. Perhaps you get called about 3% of the time. That doesn't give you anywhere close to the expected win unless your bankroll is tiny relative to the ante, in which case you'll be called a lot more because it won't be true of the other player who will not interpret $200 all-in as very fearsome in a $10 ante game, so you'll get called a lot more in such a case, especially because people will interpret your small bankroll as indicating you are more likely to try to steal a pot on a bluff.
At best the inclusion of wireless in a printer is "differentiation". HP didn't invent wireless networks. The wire or lack thereof is not the main purpose of a printer, so at most, it's a reason to pick one printer over another one that both do the main thing I want (print) well.
Jim Morgan, who used to be the CEO of Applied Materials used to say there are three phases of competition: innovation, differentiation, and commoditization. AMAT wanted to win in the first phase and make do in the second and get out of the game in the third.
A company needs to pick which phase it will focus on in and stick to that. If HP wants to be an innovation company, they need to know when to bail out of a market with no innovation left (like printers).
I'm tired of repeating myself. [[repeating of self omitted]]
As I said before, it's clear that you and I will not agree on whether W3C is leading in the right direction or not. Let's agree to disagree.
I apologize for the mud I slung at you personally. I'm going to unilaterally stop it for the rest of this discussion.
Hopefully, you can realize that your bugzilla comment directed at me by name was a bit of an incitement. You could have easily said "don't advocate here" and left it at that. Instead you acted like I started the advocacy (I didn't). Moreover, you mixed your "don't advocate" message with your own advocacy and followed it with a reminder that you "can decide to restrict abusers' access".
You need to read better. See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=XForms #c26, my second paragraph
In fact I had read that, but your later statement in comment #80 that XForms "is not likely to be built in by default" cause me to believe that you and mozilla had moved away from that position.
I know understand your position and there is no reason to keep rehashing who said what when and what it meant.
I'll repeat for the last time that Mozilla will take an XForms implementation that builds on the existing code. If it's small enough, several drivers@mozilla.org including me have said we'd ship it in the default build.
I have never heard you say this before, which is why I asked about it. I re-read your comments in bugzilla and I see you talking (comments #71, #80) about reasons why it might be undesirable, but none that say what it would take to include it. It appears you've either softened your stance, or I misunderstood it.
Your appeal to the w3c as the sole judge of "standards", and your interpretation of Mozilla's mission statement to mean that Mozilla must implement whatever the w3c recommends, is therefore unreasonable. [quoted out of order]
It's clear that you and I will not agree on the importance of the W3C. I see incredible value in the consensus building process they use and you recoil from treating them as a technical authority. Incidentally, I don't necesarily think the W3C is the "sole judge" of standards. They happen to have a good track record and a process that produces results. If others are offering competing open standards, then pick the one with the most momentum and break ties on technical merit and ease of implementation.
It is a large spec, requiring extra declarations and more indirection, therefore hard for the average web designer to learn and use.
It depends on XPath, XML Schemas, and many other new standards that most browsers don't support and most authors don't know.
It is therefore not well-tested in the market, and it is not being adopted much -- there is no significant demand for it.
No top-four browser apart from Mozilla is likely to implement it.
The plugins that implement it are not selling well enough to grow the XForms market, Oracle and Novell to the contrary notwithstanding. The tide may turn, but there's no sign of it yet.
Server-side translators that turn XForms into DHTML create a substandard experience in all respects, including for XForms authors (no real client-side DOM for the XForms XML, e.g.).
Adobe, Macromedia, and others are doing their own advanced forms standards.
I really don't see why you think the XForms spec is so huge. Comparing it to CSS, SVG, or even HTML doesn't make it look so big (at least to me).
In the first two points you refer to difficulties that "the average web designer" or "most authors" would experience. Perhaps you are overlooking the potential userbase for XForms by thinking in terms of traditional web developers only. The real value I see in XForms is that it can move XML production off the middle tier and towards the client. Also, the traditional GUI developer might use XForms for some tasks. For example, imagine GNOME moving its configuration paradigm to an XML based one with XForms editing. This would make it very easy to navigate to configuration editors (intermix HTML help/howtos) and to allow easy remote administration.
Facts three and five are a measure of the current state of affairs, and aren't surprising given that XForms is so new. Sooner or later some advanced forms standard will get penetration because there is a need. Fact four is an advantage, not a disadvantage: if you believe XForms solves useful problems, then mozilla should lead. Fact six observes there are crummy ways to try XForms. Yep. Fact seven observes some vendors are trying to create standards (so they can dominate them) which indicates a) others think this space is important and b) unless an open standard competes for mindshare apps developers will have to choose between vendor lock-in and going without.
In the mozilla layout newsgroup, I'm exploring what I consider the most important use case for XForms: enterprise systems development. I believe the opportunity is arena to get "mozilla as a platform" going by leveraging XForms. I invite you to particpate in that discussion there.
I give specific reasons for not bowing to arguments from authority. You whine factlessly about my rejection of your favorite authority.
Then change the mozilla mission statement so that it doesn't include "standards compliance" as one of its points. A standard is inhernetly an authority. If you want to reject W3C, then you are appointing yourself as the authority. I prefer the community based approach that has proven it can work by producing successes like HTML and XML. As much as I respect your technical skills, I don't think you can forge standards better than W3C.
Just because the w3c endorses a specification does not mean that spec is a good or necessary standard
W3C has a pretty good track record. HTML, XML, RDF, SVG, XForms are all good specs, with broad support across the industry that standardize things that need to be standardized. I suppose they've probably created a lemon once or twice -- no one is perfect. A bad standard is one that is ignored, so that explains why none come to mind. In most cases having an open standard is an end in itself. Consensus and broad industry acceptance reduces IT costs MORE than absolute technical merit.
The consequent neglect of HTML, DOM level 0, and other under- or un-specified de-facto standards used by billions of web pages, has aided and abetted MS in cementing its monopoly.
Huh? MS had cemented their monopoly long before IE came along. They didn't seem to care much at all about IE breaking the standards you mention. In fact, they kind of like it because it results in IE only websites. If you want to wait to adopt standards until somebody invents a process with no warts that will somehow restrain Microsoft from its bad behavior it won't happen. That is an unreasonable expectation. What standards give you is a way for other groups who want to ignore Microsoft to cooperate and interoperate with you. When you reject the standards process based on technical quibbling like this you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Even if Mozilla supported XForms, web content authors in a few years are much likelier to use XAML than XForms.
Based on the marketing fluff I've read, XAML is more of a direct competitor to XUL and XBL than to XForms. XForms is about binding widgets to an XML data record. But that is beside the point.
The content authors who have been captured by Microsoft aren't going to be using Mozilla no matter what you do. Forget about them and compete for the people who haven't shut you out. The arena where XForms could have tremendous benefit for Mozilla is in enterprise applications. The dominant player in this space is Oracle, not Microsoft. Oracle is developing an XForms plugin for IE, by the way. Care to comment on this?
If your "I want a standards compliant browser" demand means anything here, it can only mean that this is all about *you* and *your wants*.
You act like I'm the only person who wants standards compliance and likes the W3C. The fact that 534 people voted for the XForms bug is dissed out of hand by you. Why even have voting? You obviously don't want to listen to what it tells you about what the Mozilla community wants. If XForms is so crazy, why would Oracle spend the money to make an XForms plugin?
If on your planet, XForms matters, get busy implementing it in Mozilla. We're accepting patches.
Is this a serious offer? Why would I spend the time when it isn't clear that you perceive it to have value or would accept it?
If, as you claim, everybody is going to be using XAML in a few years anyway, why would I want to learn XUL and XBL? Why shouldn't I just switch to IE and use the Oracle plugin? At least Oracle doesn't act like I'm from another "planet" for advocating XForms.
By the way, I took your past suggestion and posted my view of the pro-XForms case on netscape.public.mozilla.layout . I hope that can be a constructive conversation and stay away from flames.
Brendan Eich simply does not "get it" when it comes to standards compliance. His attitude, as displayed above, includes an arrogant disdain for standards. He basically values his own opinion on what's best over that of the community. If the W3C doesn't adopt the way he thinks is best, then to hell with them.
If you want to seem him rant and rave, post something in bugzilla that asks for compliance with a standard simply because it is the standard. I did this in the XForms bug and he went off about "the web world would be a better place if fewer large/second-system-syndrome XML-based de-jure standards were promulgated". He also whined about how my argument was an argument from authority (that authority being the W3C).
Excuse me? I want a standards compliant browser, not some blowhard's opinion on whether he likes the standard or not. Never mind that Mozilla's stated mission is to be a browser "designed for standards-compliance, performance and portability".
Eich is constantly grumbling that "the IE monopoly has frozen progress" in the browser arena. The most valuable feature that IE cannot offer is uncompromising standards compliance, but instead we have to tripe about how big new standards don't help. Lead, follow, or get out of the way, Brendan.
What is new here is that you don't have to know the completely specified sequence number, but only something close enough to fit within a window. This reduces the search space and makes the attack more pragmatic.
My problem with mozilla is not XUL, which I think is great. It's that javascript is the only language with built-in support. Sure you can add others, but unless they are there by default that is too much of an administrational burden and you can't rely on it.
Mozilla needs to do one of two things (or both): a) include a java VM that can run apache BSF b) work with the parrot people and build it into Mozilla
You can rest assured that Microsoft is working on multiple language support through a marriage of IE to.net.
1) Lack of formal support With a company, I have a phone number, a support contract, and a guarantee that someone will work with me to answer my question. With newsgroups and IRC channels, someone might answer my question but only if I'm willing to wait, surf a lot, or put up with a few hundred "what a st00pid newbie you are" responses that invariably get made.
My experience is that for-pay support is substantially WORSE than typical open source support. As an example, I was writing some code that used Batik and encountered a very subtle bug that I was baffled by, so I went to the mailing list. Within 24 hours I had a working patch that fixed the error and I had communicated directly with the developer who wrote it to confirm that it worked. By contrast, at work we have the big dollar support contracts with Microsoft, Oracle, Quest, and others. I have never, ever, ever had 24 hour turnaround on a bug fix that required a code fix with any of those companies. Usually it is flat out impossible to get something escalated to development in less than a day because you have to deal with some nitwit call center idiot who wants to recite the manuals to you.
Moreover, with open source you don't need support -- you have the code. Support is critical when you are at the mercy of a proprietary code vendor and are legally barred from helping yourself. This self-help empowerment is expecially true when your development shop choose open source tools that uses technologies they are familiar with and encourages people to get familiar with the codebases of the tools they use.
I wish more people would get involved with gcj development. It looks very promising, but certain pieces of it (most notably swing support) are very incomplete.
Instead of whining at Sun to open source java, people should help push the already existing open source implementations of java along.
It does require a legal "copy" to be created in memory. However, this is explicitly part of the first sale property right the purchaser receives. See 17 USC 117.
In fact, Johansen was acquitted in Norway and so there is strong evidence to suggest that NO enforceable controct prohibiting reverse engineering was ever formed.
Really I thought this was the reason why DVD CCA gave up -- in order for them to win they would have had to actually trace the misappropriation back to Johansen. But his act was ruled legal (twice), so that is a dead end. Once he placed DeCSS into the public domain, nobody downstream can be any more liable that he was.
Actually, I consider materialized views both an OLTP and a warehouseing feature of Oracle, because you can sometimes completely avoid the need to build a separate warehouse by using materialized views directly in your transaction server. Because of query rewrite, you can retroactively add them and not have to do rewrite all your SQL. The MV just acts like a steroid enhanced index. You can do this while not having to introduce data latency from a scheduled extraction process that supplies the warehouse.
I certainly agree that partitioning is another feature that can be make or break for a high end project.
There are a whole host of other features that Oracle has that nobody else even comes close: function based indexes, index organized tables and advanced queueing, wait based monitoring, very good execution plan selection plus fine grained optimizer hint overrides, etc., etc., etc...
I, on the other hand, am still annoyed that Oracle doesn't allow taking a slice of a result set and still can't do outer/left/right joins in a standard fashion.
What are you talking about?
ANSI standard syntax for such joins was added two versions ago in Oracle. Personally, I hate the ANSI syntax.
What exactly does "taking a slice" of a result set mean? Oracle gives you half a dozen different ways to do this. The standard one is to use native dynamic sql to add arbitrary WHERE clause conditions at runtime. If that isn't enough, Oracle 9i provides a far greater capability: pipelined table functions allow arbitrary programmatic construction of a result set that can be used as a table in a FROM clause.
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No! The GPL places an independent burden on distributors to independently re-GPL anything they distribute. SCO was certainly aware of what they were distributing. The alternative is that they distributed a mix of other peoples GPL code and their own proprietary code, which is for-profit copyright infringement. Since these acts (occur and continue even now) after they proclaimed linux infringing, they can't plead ignorance anymore.
So they can choose between A) losing because they GPL'd everything in dispute regardless of whether it was proprietary or not before they distributed it, or B) losing because their entire linux business was based on willful, for-profit piracy.
Programmers do work that is easily repeatable by others.
You and Ken Brown need to get together and resolve your differences.
Wyvern is a free 2D MMORG coded in java and jython.
This is just another example of your myopic view of the presentation layer as the entirety of "applications". Slashcode is written in mod_perl as a matter of fact, not in "HTML". It could just as easily have been written in JSP as many, many corporate web pages are. The "J" in JSP stands for java and such an app meets your new criteria to "span a java-based application". That application happens to be on the web server, but you appear not to consider that as part of the world.
Or did you mean you don't regularly go to a web page that spans a Java-based application IN THE BROWSER? If so, you still miss the boat. It's obvious you don't work anywhere which uses an Oracle ERP product or internally developed app. A whole lot of the Fortune 500 companies at one time or another have run some segment of their mission critical systems on Oracle products that launch in a browser JVM. Oracle has started to move away from the browser JVM to the J2EE models, but it will be years before the last browswer JVM app disappears from the corporate landscape.
So even if that is what you actually meant, java is wildly successful.
Sun did this years ago with Java. Why wasn't it successful?
Huh? In what sense is Java not successful? It's only the most popular programming language for enterprise applications in the world right now. Or are you saying their cross-platformness isn't successful, which is also odd since this is precisely why java is the most popular language right now (since when it's combined with good OO it results in highly reusable code).
The only knock on java is that it isn't open source, though between efforts like jikes and gcj and the fact that Sun will eventually be sold for scrap, even this seems bridgeable.
A lot of stuff is created outside the W3C, it all works, if its good we install it.
Some people do, some people don't. Java has clearly not been embraced by the open source community as much as possible because of its licencing. SVG was developed with a lot of overlap with Flash because a lot of people won't use flash. Flash will never be built in to the browser for this reason, while SVG is already at an alpha level for browser support even though it plays catchup.
There is nothing special about W3C other than they happen to be one group that creates **OPEN** standards that aren't dominated by a single company and thus represent a consensus among a lot of groups that together have a lot of credibility. Neither java nor flash can say this and thus neither is completely satisfactory even if many people use it anyway.
Why do you assume that a runtime would be as long to update as a browser? That's really a question of the target developer community. A generic runtime would attract a lot more than just the presentation layer wonks who currently work on browsers.
For example, browsers are lagging way behind in basic XML features that the rest of the world seems to have no problem implementing. The browser is too focused on the presentation specific aspects of life to attract people who are interested in backend technologies. That means when you look at something like an XML spec whose value proposition is to shift hard work from the middle layer to easy work in the client tier, you can't find anybody to implement it.
It's not aimed at replacing XForms, but it is their cop out so they don't have to implement XForms, which would require them to implement several other XMLish specs like XPath, Schema, and XML events which they see as hard. You are right that these have "not been widely implemented by those browsers".
I don't understand how adding an extra spec to learn in addition to XForms can be called a simplification. For whom? Browser implementors and presentation layer programmers. Not for businesses who have to hire people that know both specs and do more total work.
What are you talking about? ACID is non-negotiable. If you have something that doesn't have atomicity it is not viable and you should not call it an RDBMS. Oracle is the fastest RDBMS by a lot for real world problems.
That is a very poor strategy. It is clearly pretty far from game theoretic optimal poker given zero knowledge of opponent tendencies.
Basically, most of the time a good opponent will read your bet as purporting to have a very strong hand and he will fold, giving you his ante. Sometimes he will have a strong hand himself and play it, usually taking all your money.
If you go read a typical howto on playing the starting hands, you'll see that people are going to play at you when they have one of the big hands like QQ. Perhaps you get called about 3% of the time. That doesn't give you anywhere close to the expected win unless your bankroll is tiny relative to the ante, in which case you'll be called a lot more because it won't be true of the other player who will not interpret $200 all-in as very fearsome in a $10 ante game, so you'll get called a lot more in such a case, especially because people will interpret your small bankroll as indicating you are more likely to try to steal a pot on a bluff.
At best the inclusion of wireless in a printer is "differentiation". HP didn't invent wireless networks. The wire or lack thereof is not the main purpose of a printer, so at most, it's a reason to pick one printer over another one that both do the main thing I want (print) well.
Jim Morgan, who used to be the CEO of Applied Materials used to say there are three phases of competition: innovation, differentiation, and commoditization. AMAT wanted to win in the first phase and make do in the second and get out of the game in the third.
A company needs to pick which phase it will focus on in and stick to that. If HP wants to be an innovation company, they need to know when to bail out of a market with no innovation left (like printers).
I'm tired of repeating myself. [[repeating of self omitted]]
s #c26, my second paragraph
As I said before, it's clear that you and I will not agree on whether W3C is leading in the right direction or not. Let's agree to disagree.
I apologize for the mud I slung at you personally. I'm going to unilaterally stop it for the rest of this discussion.
Hopefully, you can realize that your bugzilla comment directed at me by name was a bit of an incitement. You could have easily said "don't advocate here" and left it at that. Instead you acted like I started the advocacy (I didn't). Moreover, you mixed your "don't advocate" message with your own advocacy and followed it with a reminder that you "can decide to restrict abusers' access".
You need to read better. See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=XForm
In fact I had read that, but your later statement in comment #80 that XForms "is not likely to be built in by default" cause me to believe that you and mozilla had moved away from that position.
I know understand your position and there is no reason to keep rehashing who said what when and what it meant.
I have never heard you say this before, which is why I asked about it. I re-read your comments in bugzilla and I see you talking (comments #71, #80) about reasons why it might be undesirable, but none that say what it would take to include it. It appears you've either softened your stance, or I misunderstood it.
Your appeal to the w3c as the sole judge of "standards", and your interpretation of Mozilla's mission statement to mean that Mozilla must implement whatever the w3c recommends, is therefore unreasonable. [quoted out of order]
It's clear that you and I will not agree on the importance of the W3C. I see incredible value in the consensus building process they use and you recoil from treating them as a technical authority. Incidentally, I don't necesarily think the W3C is the "sole judge" of standards. They happen to have a good track record and a process that produces results. If others are offering competing open standards, then pick the one with the most momentum and break ties on technical merit and ease of implementation.
I really don't see why you think the XForms spec is so huge. Comparing it to CSS, SVG, or even HTML doesn't make it look so big (at least to me).
In the first two points you refer to difficulties that "the average web designer" or "most authors" would experience. Perhaps you are overlooking the potential userbase for XForms by thinking in terms of traditional web developers only. The real value I see in XForms is that it can move XML production off the middle tier and towards the client. Also, the traditional GUI developer might use XForms for some tasks. For example, imagine GNOME moving its configuration paradigm to an XML based one with XForms editing. This would make it very easy to navigate to configuration editors (intermix HTML help/howtos) and to allow easy remote administration.
Facts three and five are a measure of the current state of affairs, and aren't surprising given that XForms is so new. Sooner or later some advanced forms standard will get penetration because there is a need. Fact four is an advantage, not a disadvantage: if you believe XForms solves useful problems, then mozilla should lead. Fact six observes there are crummy ways to try XForms. Yep. Fact seven observes some vendors are trying to create standards (so they can dominate them) which indicates a) others think this space is important and b) unless an open standard competes for mindshare apps developers will have to choose between vendor lock-in and going without.
In the mozilla layout newsgroup, I'm exploring what I consider the most important use case for XForms: enterprise systems development. I believe the opportunity is arena to get "mozilla as a platform" going by leveraging XForms. I invite you to particpate in that discussion there.
I give specific reasons for not bowing to arguments from authority. You whine factlessly about my rejection of your favorite authority.
Then change the mozilla mission statement so that it doesn't include "standards compliance" as one of its points. A standard is inhernetly an authority. If you want to reject W3C, then you are appointing yourself as the authority. I prefer the community based approach that has proven it can work by producing successes like HTML and XML. As much as I respect your technical skills, I don't think you can forge standards better than W3C.
Just because the w3c endorses a specification does not mean that spec is a good or necessary standard
W3C has a pretty good track record. HTML, XML, RDF, SVG, XForms are all good specs, with broad support across the industry that standardize things that need to be standardized. I suppose they've probably created a lemon once or twice -- no one is perfect. A bad standard is one that is ignored, so that explains why none come to mind. In most cases having an open standard is an end in itself. Consensus and broad industry acceptance reduces IT costs MORE than absolute technical merit.
The consequent neglect of HTML, DOM level 0, and other under- or un-specified de-facto standards used by billions of web pages, has aided and abetted MS in cementing its monopoly.
Huh? MS had cemented their monopoly long before IE came along. They didn't seem to care much at all about IE breaking the standards you mention. In fact, they kind of like it because it results in IE only websites. If you want to wait to adopt standards until somebody invents a process with no warts that will somehow restrain Microsoft from its bad behavior it won't happen. That is an unreasonable expectation. What standards give you is a way for other groups who want to ignore Microsoft to cooperate and interoperate with you. When you reject the standards process based on technical quibbling like this you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Even if Mozilla supported XForms, web content authors in a few years are much likelier to use XAML than XForms.
Based on the marketing fluff I've read, XAML is more of a direct competitor to XUL and XBL than to XForms. XForms is about binding widgets to an XML data record. But that is beside the point.
The content authors who have been captured by Microsoft aren't going to be using Mozilla no matter what you do. Forget about them and compete for the people who haven't shut you out. The arena where XForms could have tremendous benefit for Mozilla is in enterprise applications. The dominant player in this space is Oracle, not Microsoft. Oracle is developing an XForms plugin for IE, by the way. Care to comment on this?
If your "I want a standards compliant browser" demand means anything here, it can only mean that this is all about *you* and *your wants*.
You act like I'm the only person who wants standards compliance and likes the W3C. The fact that 534 people voted for the XForms bug is dissed out of hand by you. Why even have voting? You obviously don't want to listen to what it tells you about what the Mozilla community wants. If XForms is so crazy, why would Oracle spend the money to make an XForms plugin?
If on your planet, XForms matters, get busy implementing it in Mozilla. We're accepting patches.
Is this a serious offer? Why would I spend the time when it isn't clear that you perceive it to have value or would accept it?
If, as you claim, everybody is going to be using XAML in a few years anyway, why would I want to learn XUL and XBL? Why shouldn't I just switch to IE and use the Oracle plugin? At least Oracle doesn't act like I'm from another "planet" for advocating XForms.
By the way, I took your past suggestion and posted my view of the pro-XForms case on netscape.public.mozilla.layout . I hope that can be a constructive conversation and stay away from flames.
Brendan Eich simply does not "get it" when it comes to standards compliance. His attitude, as displayed above, includes an arrogant disdain for standards. He basically values his own opinion on what's best over that of the community. If the W3C doesn't adopt the way he thinks is best, then to hell with them.
If you want to seem him rant and rave, post something in bugzilla that asks for compliance with a standard simply because it is the standard. I did this in the XForms bug and he went off about "the web world would be a better place if fewer large/second-system-syndrome XML-based de-jure standards were promulgated". He also whined about how my argument was an argument from authority (that authority being the W3C).
Excuse me? I want a standards compliant browser, not some blowhard's opinion on whether he likes the standard or not. Never mind that Mozilla's stated mission is to be a browser "designed for standards-compliance, performance and portability".
Eich is constantly grumbling that "the IE monopoly has frozen progress" in the browser arena. The most valuable feature that IE cannot offer is uncompromising standards compliance, but instead we have to tripe about how big new standards don't help. Lead, follow, or get out of the way, Brendan.
What is new here is that you don't have to know the completely specified sequence number, but only something close enough to fit within a window. This reduces the search space and makes the attack more pragmatic.
My problem with mozilla is not XUL, which I think is great. It's that javascript is the only language with built-in support. Sure you can add others, but unless they are there by default that is too much of an administrational burden and you can't rely on it.
Mozilla needs to do one of two things (or both):
a) include a java VM that can run apache BSF
b) work with the parrot people and build it into Mozilla
You can rest assured that Microsoft is working on multiple language support through a marriage of IE to
1) Lack of formal support
With a company, I have a phone number, a support contract, and a guarantee that someone will work with me to answer my question. With newsgroups and IRC channels, someone might answer my question but only if I'm willing to wait, surf a lot, or put up with a few hundred "what a st00pid newbie you are" responses that invariably get made.
My experience is that for-pay support is substantially WORSE than typical open source support. As an example, I was writing some code that used Batik and encountered a very subtle bug that I was baffled by, so I went to the mailing list. Within 24 hours I had a working patch that fixed the error and I had communicated directly with the developer who wrote it to confirm that it worked. By contrast, at work we have the big dollar support contracts with Microsoft, Oracle, Quest, and others. I have never, ever, ever had 24 hour turnaround on a bug fix that required a code fix with any of those companies. Usually it is flat out impossible to get something escalated to development in less than a day because you have to deal with some nitwit call center idiot who wants to recite the manuals to you.
Moreover, with open source you don't need support -- you have the code. Support is critical when you are at the mercy of a proprietary code vendor and are legally barred from helping yourself. This self-help empowerment is expecially true when your development shop choose open source tools that uses technologies they are familiar with and encourages people to get familiar with the codebases of the tools they use.
3) Lack of roadmap
Lack of roadmap, huh. Tell that to mozilla or open office or MySQL or Gnome or perl or
Fedora I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Of course, I prefer a different term than "roadmap" -- vaporware.
I wish more people would get involved with gcj development. It looks very promising, but certain pieces of it (most notably swing support) are very incomplete.
Instead of whining at Sun to open source java, people should help push the already existing open source implementations of java along.
It does require a legal "copy" to be created in memory. However, this is explicitly part of the first sale property right the purchaser receives. See 17 USC 117.
In fact, Johansen was acquitted in Norway and so there is strong evidence to suggest that NO enforceable controct prohibiting reverse engineering was ever formed.
Really I thought this was the reason why DVD CCA gave up -- in order for them to win they would have had to actually trace the misappropriation back to Johansen. But his act was ruled legal (twice), so that is a dead end. Once he placed DeCSS into the public domain, nobody downstream can be any more liable that he was.
Actually, I consider materialized views both an OLTP and a warehouseing feature of Oracle, because you can sometimes completely avoid the need to build a separate warehouse by using materialized views directly in your transaction server. Because of query rewrite, you can retroactively add them and not have to do rewrite all your SQL. The MV just acts like a steroid enhanced index. You can do this while not having to introduce data latency from a scheduled extraction process that supplies the warehouse.
I certainly agree that partitioning is another feature that can be make or break for a high end project.
There are a whole host of other features that Oracle has that nobody else even comes close: function based indexes, index organized tables and advanced queueing, wait based monitoring, very good execution plan selection plus fine grained optimizer hint overrides, etc., etc., etc...
I, on the other hand, am still annoyed that Oracle doesn't allow taking a slice of a result set and still can't do outer/left/right joins in a standard fashion.
What are you talking about?
ANSI standard syntax for such joins was added two versions ago in Oracle. Personally, I hate the ANSI syntax.
What exactly does "taking a slice" of a result set mean? Oracle gives you half a dozen different ways to do this. The standard one is to use native dynamic sql to add arbitrary WHERE clause conditions at runtime. If that isn't enough, Oracle 9i provides a far greater capability: pipelined table functions allow arbitrary programmatic construction of a result set that can be used as a table in a FROM clause.