* Posts by lightweight

13 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Oct 2009

Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

lightweight

Re: Hitting Australia as well

Much of New Zealand is down, too. Just picked up family from the airport and *all* the arrival & departure screens, all kiosks, all commerce/tills, everything is down/blue screen. The broad dependence on 'enterprise Windows' is total folly. If there's any justice in the world, a lot of IT decision makers will be looking for new jobs (not in IT!) tomorrow.

lightweight

Enterprise computing monocultures

Just like their natural analogues, digital monocultures are fragile... and their inherent instability is readily obvious to many people. Not to most 'enterprise' software decision makers. Nor to the Microsoft Corporation. Apparently. I'm afraid I'm enjoying the delightful glow of Schadenfreude right now (happy that I've actively engineered my personal & professional life to be free of Microsoft and monocultures in general).

Copy-left behind: Permissive MIT, Apache open-source licenses on the up as developers snub GNU's GPL

lightweight

I think that the quiet co-option of FOSS communities by the Frightful Five (and those corporations aspiring to join them) has included a concerted, broad campaign to undermine Copyleft. When I first started doing FOSS back in the 90s, "open source" implicitly *included* Copyleft licenses... more recently, as we've seen the mega corporates barging their way into the space, we've increasingly seen them shifting the definition of "open source" to mean open source code *except* for Copyleft code. Given the disproportionate dominance of the tech media by those mega-corps (all of who have built their fortunes by exploiting users of their proprietary software) I'm cynical enough to think that this shift is not accidental.

lightweight

Re: Poison

Yup, this is the key. Businesses that can't make money from GPL'd software don't deserve our sympathy (note, I sold my pure-play GPL-only software dev company 5 years ago after 14 years in business, so I *know* it's possible).

Microsoft rains cash on OpenBSD Foundation, becomes top 2015 donor

lightweight

Re: Microsoft...

MS is trying to cloud the waters - they don't want to really support Linux, because it's GPL licensed. They want to encourage FOSS projects to adopt more "business friendly" (read "most easily exploited by proprietary software company) open source licenses. If I was an MS shareholder, I'd expect this... but then again, I am no fan of MS shareholders, so I see this as a crafty way to undermine copyleft and user freedom.

No, Microsoft: Your one-billion Windows 10 goal is just sad ... really sad

lightweight

Re: Goodness.

He's been more of a hindrance than a help to FOSS for years.

You've come a long way, Inkscape: Open-source Illustrator sneaks up

lightweight

Re: Replace Illustrator? In your dreams

If you rate an open source app on its ability to open the proprietary files created by a proprietary application, then yes, you'll find shortcomings. But let's remember, those shortcomings - from a user's point of view - are Adobe's fault for not publishing the specs of its files, not the fault of Inkscape developers who have had to painstakingly reverse engineer the .ai file formats to achieve any sort of compatibility. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Illustrator_Artwork

I think you'll find that Adobe doesn't *like* open source apps being able to open its files as well as its proprietary software can... so (as MS has done for over a decade) it changes the formats subtly from time to time to break compatibility as soon as the open source developers reverse engineer the formats well enough.

Microsoft: It's TIME at LAST. Yes - .NET is going OPEN and X-PLATFORM

lightweight

If they wanted to make a real impact, they'd release the .Net stack under the GPL. As it is (with an exploitation-friendly MIT license), they're going a bob each way. Pretty pansy, really.

New Zealand to bar software patents, again

lightweight

Re: Unfortunately...

Actually, Charles, I think you greatly underestimate the value of the local market. Also, you miss the other major rationale for the industry railing against software patents: most of our patents (80%+) are held by foreign corporations. They could (and have done) patent widely used algorithms and file formats (they have attempted to do so - XML) and then use those patents to kill innovative kiwi companies before they get to the size where they can afford to export. They do this routinely in the US already, and in other jurisdictions. This legislation means that NZ can become an incubator for small firms who can build their businesses in a relatively protected environment until they can enter various export markets with a bit of mass and capital behind them. I'm already aware of several US and Canadian software companies who are moving to NZ to benefit from our less septic and less litigious environment.

Microsoft sucks open source into its WebMatrix

lightweight

Microsoft: Bandwagon Jumper

They know that free software stacks, languages, frameworks, CMSs, etc. are where the market's been going. The vast majority of those are now hosted on LAMP systems.

Microsoft is DESPERATE not to be left behind. So they've swallowed their pride somewhat, thrown a bit of money at open source developers, got them to port open source stuff to run on a Window's proprietary stack. Microsoft is hoping to avoid oblivion by catering for the "developer" demographic who are happy to point and click rather than know what they're doing.

So now we can all look forward to an updated version of the travesty that is/was MS Frontpage: people with the power to create, but zero judgement or aesthetic to know *what* to create (or how to fix it when it goes badly wrong).

Microsoft U-turns on WebKit extension for Mobile IE

lightweight

MS: throw in the towel...

Alternatively, MS could just do what it should've done years ago and dump its trident rendering engine (which is behind the IE6-9 and, I assume, this Win mob IE) altogether and adopt a real, standards compliant (and then some) rendering engine built by the open source community like Webkit or Gecko. Doing so would immediately remove their massive functionality and web standards compliance deficit, and give them a chance of having a credible browser, which would be a big win for all involved.

Shuttleworth heir opens up on Ubuntu biz

lightweight

I agree on apt-cache

Our company has probably 40ish machines (desktops, laptops, physical and virtual servers) behind a single apt-cache using a mix of Hardy (8.04) and Karmic (9.10)... that's a roughly a 20 to 1 ratio of installs to downloads... wonder how many other businesses like ours and other organisations (universities?) are doing the same...

Windows 95 to Windows 7: How Microsoft lost its vision

lightweight

Silverlight cross-platform?

Why do people say that Silverlight is cross-platform?

As far as I know, it only works on Microsoft platforms. Are people talking about the open source "moonlight" effort? The one that'll always be behind the curve because Microsoft will continually change the APIs around to stymie compatibility and anything that remotely smells like competition. Of course, moonlight seems to be getting minimal developer love because smart developers know that Microsoft is holding a patent axe over their heads. You'd be a fool to contribute.

Let Microsoft have Silverlight. It's not actually necessary for anything you can't do better in other ways.

Dave