Very Worried at MS .net

[John Peter Tapsell]

On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, MJ Ray wrote:
> John Peter Tapsell <tapselj0 at cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> 
> > As a hacker, an FS enthusiast, and hard core linux guy, I agree 100%.
> > However, looking at it from a more business side, I have to disagree.
> > 
> > We are years and years behind MS.  It doesn't seem it, and we seem
> > sooo tantatlilisingly close, but MS have the infrastructure we
> > don't.  More then ever we need to go back and fill in that
> > infrastructure (/me is thinking of examples such SMB etc), but doing
> > so would make us appear to stand to still.  It is all political.  It
> > is the politics that will make or break us - not the technical side.
> > (Or is this very statement being disproved by linux - I cannot tell,
> > I have nothing to compare it against in history)
> 
> You are far too pessimistic.  In the important ways, we are still
> years ahead of MS, but in the periphery that makes our public persona
> we do lag behind. 

If only it was so..
Personally i prefer the whole unix model etc...
However, take a look at some of the projects in trying to catch with a lot of
MS's stuff..  do you have any idea have far behind we on the network
neighbourhood file sharing stuff?  One of the main programmers was saying in a
conference that they approximetly 500 man _years_ ahead..  just think about
that.
The trouble that we don't see that, and it is probably totally inconcievable
how that could be, but go to their site (I just /happen/ not to remember it
heh - oh wait samba.org probably ;)
Then corba, etc..
Our gtk widget set is still buggy, and far behind, our X server is starting to
show its age (again, in the infrastructure.  Check X.org )
But then we do have some kick-ass development, some most respected apps, and
developers that love to develop it :)

I don't know if anyone has even attempted to see how far behind/ahead we, if
that is even possible.. anyone?


> What we need to do is to change our image, to make
> Free Software the people's favourite.  Some might say that we don't
> need to win the beauty contest on the publicity front, but if we
> don't, winning the technical beauty contest may turn out to be
> irrelevant, sadly.  Such is the fickle nature of consumerism.

Yeah :(   
I have to agree totally on this.
It is also interesting to take a look at the world, and see how governments are
reacting.  I believe that some are banning MS stuff for internal use, but I
also believe (please correct me if i'm wrong... or add details)  that some
parts are banning OS software.

> A strong part of this must be raising the level of technical
> sophistication amongst our users.  Today I've introduced two users to
> new things: one has just had their first GNU/Linux box installed, set
> up with a mix of free and gratis software so that they can get their
> work done more efficiently that on their previous closed platform.
> It's also more secure, which is important for that member of senior
> management.  The other has just seen machine suspend/resume working as
> it should on a desktop machine for the first time.  Not such a big
> thing, but still impressive to that user, who I think now realises
> that what MS say isn't necessarily the reality.

And this is happening in a lot of places thank god :)
I was just helping samsung move from NT to unix mainframe for one of their
webservers... :)
(Not linux... but this is a windows / non-windows war heh)
 
> > If MS has, and pushes .NET, it _does not matter_ if we ourselves
> > would never use it / dislike it / get round it, if businesses use
> > it.  Imagine if businesses use a passport system for every bit of
> > email, when surfing, when talking to each other.
> 
> I can't see that happening.  Many companies, mine included, will never
> swallow handing over of key control.  We fought UKG over RIP (and
> pretty much lost, ho hum, never mind, we're just off-shoring critical
> things now) and we will fight MS over .NET.

I hope that there are enough people like you out there ;)

> > Now you come along, and they ask you to implement a nice email
> > server.  Fine says you, and whips out your nice sendmail server, and
> > configure it perfectly... ah except it won't authentificate against
> > MS certificates, and make the companies email 'secure'....
> 
> Sendmail?  Exim, maybe.
Nope.  Reverse engineering the key would be illegal (the protocol is already
open tho)  and even if we had our underground traffiking of illegal sendmail's
MS can change the key in no time at all..

> We are a long way from this situation and if it ever happens, then we
> have lost an important battle.  I don't think that implementing .net
> for MS is going to help us win it.
> 
> > Java is dead.  MS killed it, and are being sued for it - but it was worth the
> > suing.  (/me is thinking of MS's java version that was not cross platform)
> 
> Oh, stop it... this is so funny it's almost killing me... have you any
> idea how much Java programmers cost my company to train and then
> retain?  Java is very much in demand and far from dead.  Oddly enough,
> we're not hiring C-hash programmers and haven't even heard of any
> companies that are.

Good to hear it :)
I'll step down from original statement, and try to find some facts to back
either of us up. (heh - although statistics hardly mean anything these days..)

JohnFlux


-- 
Bravely defending the trolls with our swords..... uh  how did that quote go
again....