On 17 Jul 2001 federico@federicopaini.com wrote:
> Whatever M$ has in mind, I know one thing, in the long run is
> not gonna be good for the open source and is gonna be very good
> for M$.
> M$ is trying to do what they always did, cut the life support
> out of the competitors. They did it with Netscape, they did it
> with Apple (to a certain extent).
... heck -- the short version of the history (five years hence) is:
1. MS professes community spirit and 'freely offers' support, specs
and access under a BSD style license -- OS community is distracted
into chasing the tail lights, and fragments ...
2. MS gets past DOJ matters, and during the first two versions of
.NET [on the standard 18 mo MS release cycle], beta tests and gets
market share
3. Three years in, MS finally 'gets it right' in .NET v. 3.0, which
just happens to break binary compatability in the name of 'adding
features needed by our customers' -- BSD license allows an
enhancement fork to be developed without releasing for use by
others.
4. MS then declines access to the 'enhanced' specs, and the
Open Source community variant is a orphan puppy, beloved only to a
few OS geeks. See the Blackdown Java port's recent commits -- i.e.,
'none' after IBM dropped the hammer.
http://www.blackdown.org/java-linux/info.html
5. The BSD license and the good intentions of the OS community are
'giggle fodder' at Gates' next cocktail party. "We used their own
tools against them ..."
-------------------------
-- Russ
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