Where Open Source Meets Big Bucks

Im not an activist against capitialism in no way, making money is an essential part of life i think we all agree on that... but i think open source should retain some of it's own exclusivity... apparently not


All open source starts out uncomercialised and unmainstreamed but how long does this last...?


I used to visit Activestate.com before they sold out to Microsoft everything there now is Visual .Net i can't belive it, i remember when i first downloaded a copy of Activestate's PERL "wow" i was impressed


Now you can't install anything from there that doesn't have Microsoft stamped all over it...


Sorry... you need the latest version of .NET beta 2 version to use this software... aaaah ! ...am i missing something, i thought this was an open source site


It's all about the big bucks, this is just another attempt by Microsoft to muscle in on the Open Source movement, now i read IBM is pumping millions into creating an Open Source movement, why... we already have one !


And if that wasn't enough, ive just noticed an Oracle advertisement on Devsheds homepage... lol


Is nothing sacred in the big buck bonanza of 21'st century


To infinity and beyond...


Mark

Don't know where we're going but I'm not going there with .NET beta 2. Tried installing it on WIN2000 and it froze with 2 minutes to go for 40 minutes. So gave up only to find IIS would no longer work (ASP.NET?), the localhost was no longer local. Added to that when trying to uninstall the bits it had put on the system it took another trip to crash central but didn't uninstall. So I've got half a .NET beta 2 with an inability to repair/remove or write over. Good advert.

.NET seems to have all the holes of previous MS products but without the thread to sew them together?

I personally am glad that IBM stepped up to the plate and is with the open-source side of things. It is nice to see real power-houses stepping up to the task of supporting the open-source community. I really don't care for the oracle thing, ever since I found out they are trying to push a national id system, that was the straw the broke the camels back (for lack of a better expression) and I try to stay away from them.

I don't think IBM is trying to create an open-source movement, just support it.

lol...


Ive no angst against such large company's like IBM or Microsoft they have given so much to world of computing and i am humbled


IBM started it all off remember... when they recruited Bill and his version of QDOS which he brought from an obscure seattle software company back in the eighties and later sold it to IBM for 50.000 dollars


And of course i remember my first IBM AT with 5" floppy... lol
in fact ive still got the floppy somewhere that teaches BASIC...


10 CLS
20 PRINT TIME$;
30 SLEEP 1
40 GOTO 10:


...laughs more



Mark

I would expect that IBM has something up its sleeve but possibly not as sinister as people may think. IBMs super computers run Linux I think, so it's quite probable that this is where their money is aimed at. They rank #1 in the super computer selling table, and are followed by HP and Sunn.

Intel bought HPs alpha chip, so expect the HP super computers to be slowly developed into the Itanium powered super computers using 64bit Windows based supercomputers (possibly), while Sunn Sparcs super computers run non-free UNIX. The obvious thing could be to pump money into Open Source to counter the boost for wintel while also stemming Sunns competition by offerring the same stuff but on a free OS. Saving money for them and their clients.

Oh happy days... ahem.

Of course there could be a sinister side.

Yeah, IBM is now marketing most of their servers and 'heavy metal' computers with linux, which I think is great. You don't see many companies pushing much anything except M$.
And with the release of .NOT, er .NET we have even more craplications to deal with in the future. I believe (and hope) that IBM's intentions are true, but only time will tell.

Marky_Mark:
I know exactly what you are talking about. I played for quite some time on something quite similar, but I had my BASIC learning experience off of a C64.

Well I think that IBM has made some important contributions to the opensource movement, check www.ibm.com/developerworks .
Of course they are working to sell their stuff and to prevent MS from being the absolute monopolist on the IT market .. but they are a business, and have to earn money.
And something similar can be said of SUN, SGI, RedHat ...

It seems there is a major split with software vendors
and PC manufacturers and it's going the way of


IBM
JAVA
LINUX


Microsoft keeping the middle ground, just in case it needs
to change sides, now and then... lol


There's a bit of a conflict here though because Microsoft want's to isolate JAVA because it's staked everything on the success of it's .NET infrastructure and JAVA doesn't really fit in ...how conveinient, but IBM doesn't want to isolate JAVA and IBM and Microsoft have signed deals that keep them tied


Compaq
HP


It's going to be very interesting


Mark

Thing is, IBM laptops and supercomputers that shift with Linux are a packaged item that work. For the average user (most of whom have never heard the term open source) who gets a box from santa, with prepackaged Windows and windows complient peripherals, the likelyhood of going open source is zero. Also for most users Windows does what they want. Most people don't want to get into the guts of the system and edit random files.

I agree binky Linux is not an option for most desktop users but this isn't going to be the case for much longer ...as he delves into his crystal ball


I mean five years from now, i can see Linux as a more user freindly enviroment and more people using Linux not as backend servers but as a real alternative to Windows


Mark

Microsoft is a funny one, very secretive at the moment. The xBox is only three months away in the UK but there's no real publicity. PDA sales are falling apart as Palm falls away while PocketPC PDAs get more expensive. XP, although being sold as the bundled OS, isn't making any great shakes with the advertising being about a continent wide of the mark. I don't know what's happening in the US, if Bill is bellowing from the tops of buildings but with little sounding off over here it speaks volumes that Microsoft seem to be shifting targets.

Where to is the question? Any ideas? I get the feeling that they're going back to the root of their cause. Trying to take on Sunn and UNIX. The impression that .NET seems to make is that it's trying to push out the contenders such as Delphi and Java by incorporating them as language extensions to the .NET framework. Too far? Maybe, but if you can't squeeze out the competition then as Microsoft have always proven, buy it or incorporate it so there's no longer a product for the opposition to sell.

True about Linux, but if I was to take my theory further. It would be that MS are saying "yeah, have Linux on desktops", they've squeezed all they can out of the OS as successive Windows releases have proved. People wont forever buy cosmetic changes. Linux can provide real day to day dynamic change, but the money is now with the big companies and the big machines they need.

Notice that for IBM, SUN, SAP ... the fight is .NET vs. J2EE and nothing else.
That's extremely important for business applications!

The current situation is that the market has suffered it's worst crash since September 1929 and everyone has lost confidence in the software market, the explosion of open source software has not helped because shareholders foresee open source taking huge chunks of their revenue


So people stop buying shares in blue chip companies the panic sets in, message spreads, we get a crash...


So Microsoft has to diversify because it foresee's the damaging effect the open source market will have on it future revenues Linux has already taken revenue from Microsoft and it's gonna eat into the their future revenues even more


Red Hat has just posted massive interim profits for the first year which was totally unexpected, so investors are now seeing for the first time open source as profitable


Here comes the XBOX...


Nintendo's game cube has stolen the limelight from the XBOX outselling the XBOX 3.1 in the US and i wouldn't be suprised if Microsoft wasn't expecting the ratio to be a little less than this, but no one really knows the way this is going to go, but one things for sure, the internet will not be controlled or packaged by any one source


Mark