On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 07:44:03PM +0800, Orlando Andico wrote: > and the open-source crowd isn't particularly innovative. where is the > visual studio .NET of open source? heck.. where is the .NET Framework > (or equivalent -- J2EE is not OSS either) of open-source? >
While I don't dispute your main point, Orly, I would hesitate to characterize Microsoft as being particularly innovative either. I've followed the history of the company since its humble beginnings in the late seventies and apparently they hardly do any innovation of their own either. Nearly every major thing they ever produced was either bought from someone else (take the product that actually allowed the company to become what is today: MS-DOS, take MSIE, and so forth), or are copies of already existing technologies (C# and .NET are arguably a realization of the promise of Java and J2EE, as even you seem to imply). They are no better and no worse than the Open Source Community as a whole in this regard, but for very, very different reasons. Sure, MS does plenty of research, but you almost never see Microsoft out there as being pioneers of some new technological innovation. They generally prefer to see other people get the arrows stuck in their backs first before they attempt to follow. Like most large companies, they tend to conservatism, and that leaves them at some points briefly away from the technological cutting edge. They let other people do the pioneering, and when they see something click, they muscle in on the action, by either embracing, extending, and extinguishing the pioneers who actually made it happen or by developing their own half-assed implementation that everyone will use anyway because it's there by default in a new release of Windows. It's classic Microsoft strategy. -- dido Sans les mathematiques on ne penetre point au fond de la philosophie. Sans la philosophie on ne penetre point au fond des mathematiques. Sans les deux on ne penetre au fond de rien. -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
