What most Microsofties vs the Open Source adherents seem to have missed in all the drek passed back and forth is that Microsoft was taken to court in the US and the EU on its monopolist practices. The EU forced Microsoft to comply with the disclosure of source it required for "inter-operability" between Microsoft's OS and the rest of the OS world. That was something the DoJ flying monkeys in Washington DC couldn't seem to understand and that it was the important legal precedent needed to allow ALL operating systems to be able to communicate with each other.

SAMBA compatibility for Microsoft's OS seems to finally gotten through to the idiots' brains in MS's legal department as something that might actually be good for Microsoft. What it means is that the last 10% of computers in the world that won't be running Microsoft software will now hopefully be able to talk to Microsoft OS images on the other 90% of the world's computers. DUH! That is what is truly significant here.

What Microsoft has to understand is that cooperating with organized open source programmers is good for them. They can learn from a programmer culture that is NOT Redmond-centered and can learn something new and perhaps even better than what the droids in Redmond can do.

Programs like Linux, Apache and SAMBA go through a fairly stringent peer-review process that may or may not be going on in Microsoft. The peer review process used in Microsoft though is likely so heavily influenced by the marketing department that its not complete or through enough to mean anything.

If you want proof of that statement, look at Vista, look at XP etc. Vista betas sucked yet they went ahead and released a product they knew was flawed. Talk about Vista SP1 began almost immediately after the release. Microsoft claims better security and so forth. They also claim lower piracy rates. Could it be that lower piracy rates equates to better security? The majority of corporate users using Windows are using XP and Win2K still. Having Vista around will not change that significantly for 5 to 7 years. It took XP nearly 7 years to reach 50% of the installed base of corporate users.

Opening up to large open source projects enough to allow Microsoft's protocols to be understood will allow the "interoperability" that the marketing flacks tout. Gee! Maybe they can sell more servers if people know they will work with other OS systems in the same server room? Ya think?

What's really funny is that if Microsoft published their source code under a copyright, had it printed up, distributed and sold as a book it would qualify as a bestseller immediately. Microsoft could then use peer review both inside and outside Redmond to make their operating system cracker-proof. It also would be covered for more years than a patent. Take all of the other add-ons like DirectX, Multimedia viewers etc out and then they could be sold as add-ons. If you don't play games or watch movies, why have those chunks of code in the OS? I don't think many users would scan all that printed source code into their computer, correct all the errors the optical scanner made, compile the OS and then try to run it when they could go buy a copy of the compiled OS for say, $90?

I know that it could be done. Microsoft is half-way there, they just haven't published the source. Its called Windows XP Embedded.

Sam Ranji of Microsoft has admitted that he can work with somebody without Windows in his bloodstream. (See: http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12558-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=
42516&messageID=784926&start=0

What's a little unusual is that all revelation of the relevant protocols will be handled through a third party arrangement. I hope that this is a sign that the 800 lb Gorilla will change its ways and start acting graciously to all of the other players on the Internet. That they will become more open and not so willing to bully the standards committees and other people like its customers!

http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9836784-39.html?part=rss&subj=
news&tag=2547-1001_3-0-5

(the URLS need to be pasted together at the =breakpoint on both of them)

I'm going to take a "wait-and-see" pose on this and see what happens.
Nothing tells me that Debbie is going to be replaced by a Windows box any time soon!

I had an interesting experience this morning. I had clicked on a link in an email and my default web browser dragged itself up into the RAM and starting running. I got an error page, that's not entirely unexpected. FireFox 2.0.0.11 is my default browser. I checked my restrictions and a bunch of the add-on extensions were reporting the site wasn't pushing 3rd party pics or any other foreign stuff. I turned on pictures and I looked at the page.

There were animated things and some other ads that were running flash-like items. They were all operating just fine but the central frame was reporting an error. So I looked at the URL and it had a little clue...aspx stuck on as a file extension. Oh crap! An Active Server page. Well that happens a lot and a lot more lately. Its getting really annoying. But this one wasn't really doing much in the page's center frame. Everything around on the edges was running just fine. It was just dead in the center frame. Usually if something craps out, the entire page doesn't get rendered by the browser and you'll get some Apache or IIS error page. Usually the server just can't send you the entire page.

This one has an error message that was supported by two small banner ads! That in itself was funny. Think of a TV test pattern brought to you by “the makers of Crapa-Cola! It leaves a slick fuzzy feeling on your teeth.” Wonder if their advertising contract has a “no-error message” limiting clause in it?

So I copied the link, pasted it into Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.11 and guess what? It did the EXACT same thing. WOW! Well this needed a little more investigation. The only other browser I had was FireFox 3.0 Beta 1. Same thing. I didn't have Opera or any other browsers to try on the site. So that was it.

Now the website was a programmer's site. In fact 80 percent of the staff were web programmers. And the owner of the site was a Microsoft MVP. I don't need to embarrass them any more than the error message was doing. How interesting.

Because the server that was the "front-end" was rendering an error message WITH the other stuff around meant to me at least that the Active Server was running at the very least on a VM or another instance of IIS on another cpu. The programmer was actually relatively smart, he did have an alternative programmed, it just looked like a error page with some moving bits on it. The deceased parrot, although gone to its final reward, chirping in the eternal aerial choir, was still potentially collecting mouse clicks!

It used to be that it was considered a courtesy to have text strings that were attached to a picture to describe what the image was displaying on web pages. That was for the poor guys on the Dial-up Internet that couldn't get better than 1200 baud service. That doesn't happen as much any more. I know that since I run my browser with cross-site pictures turned off on sites I don't know well. I have been to this site a few times but not often enough to loosen the browser restrictions.

Not so far back in the Internet Stone Age, there also was an effort to come up with a web page for browsers other than the ones that were not clearly identifiable or at the very least one page for IE and another html-only page for everybody else, usually Netscape. (Remember them?)

Now it seems as if Microsoft or at the very least the programmers that use its software aren't interested in programming for the instances when the Active Server isn't active! Should a programmer write an event or error handler in those cases when the Active Server functions or the server used to render them is down? Its sort of the same issue first brought up by ActiveX. This time the issue is the same for ALL web browsers. What do you do as a programmer to handle the times when the Active Server goes belly up? or gets maxed out? or gets hit with a DDOS or some other attack vector?

All the more reason to stick to the W3 standards and not get so wrapped up in cool looking stuff that might break or only works part time, no matter what the reason, for server or client.