[web] Mozilla Creates For-Profit Unit, But Insists It's Not 'Selling Out'
Quote:All profits would be invested back into the non-profit's projects.From what I've read of the document, I'm okay with it. I've donated to the FireFox project and still feel that I owe them more. They've done a wonderful thing for not only the internet, but also the open-source community.
Looks fine to me. Rainbows, puppy dogs, sunshine, "the love of the game", the joy of giving back and all that only powers you so far. Commercial software is generally better than open source software for a reason. Organization, funding to do even the dirty unsexy programming work most coders dislike.. Most open source programs evolve out of a "this would be neat" mentality and end up going through revision after revision to fix issues that could have been dealt with much earlier in the game if everyone involved had a cohesive goal structure and set of standards.
I hope they and the browser benefit from it. IE 7 thus far looks disappointing..
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Michael Tanczos
I hope they and the browser benefit from it. IE 7 thus far looks disappointing..
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Michael Tanczos
Quote:Original post by Michael Tanczos
IE 7 thus far looks disappointing..
You can say that again. I have to wonder what Microsoft was thinking, not having an IE team active for 3 years..
Quote:Commercial software is generally better than open source software for a reason.
That's actually a nonsensical statement, because open source isn't the opposite of commercial. I would say that Firefox is a commercial, open source browser; whereas IE is a commercial, closed source browser.
I agree that commercial software is generally better than non-commercial software for the reasons you mentioned. (Perhaps this is really what you meant.) However, I would say that open source commercial software is generally better than closed source commercial software.
In terms of this post: by commercial, I mean you are getting paid to work; by non-commercial, I mean it is volunteer work.
I don't believe this Mozilla move really will bring any noticeable changes about. It sounds like it's just something to help them accept money while still living by the law.
I don't mind that they are doing that. Rob was right when he said that they have done a lot for open-source and the internet.
Quote:Original post by konForceQuote:Commercial software is generally better than open source software for a reason.
That's actually a nonsensical statement, because open source isn't the opposite of commercial. I would say that Firefox is a commercial, open source browser; whereas IE is a commercial, closed source browser.
I agree that commercial software is generally better than non-commercial software for the reasons you mentioned. (Perhaps this is really what you meant.) However, I would say that open source commercial software is generally better than closed source commercial software.
In terms of this post: by commercial, I mean you are getting paid to work; by non-commercial, I mean it is volunteer work.
I don't believe this Mozilla move really will bring any noticeable changes about. It sounds like it's just something to help them accept money while still living by the law.
Thanks for clarifying all that. =) That's actually what I meant.
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Michael Tanczos
Quote:Original post by FuzztrekQuote:Original post by Michael Tanczos
IE 7 thus far looks disappointing..
You can say that again. I have to wonder what Microsoft was thinking, not having an IE team active for 3 years..
That they already had a browser component for their OS, and thus didn't need to waste more money? IE was and is still not a product as such, it is a component for Windows, no different then the Windows TCP/IP stack or Paint.
IE is not designed to compete, it (along with Outlook Express) is designed to make Windows (out of the box) a viable internet browsing platform, to let Windows take a major share in the "Web terminal" market (actually the introduction of IE as a standard component basically killed the whole Oracle "everyone will use the internet from a dumb terminal. Oh, and they'll be paying us a monthly fee" web terminal. Oddly enough the only surviving member of this family is WebTV, Microsoft WebTV)
Quote:Original post by FuzztrekJoel Spolsky has one theory.
You can say that again. I have to wonder what Microsoft was thinking, not having an IE team active for 3 years..
The author of that article basically shares my exact same views...
At the end, when he's talking about everyone switching to web development... he doesn't mention how truely horrible and fragmented web development is. And he doesn't talk about databases one bit, which are a part of just about every single important web site ever.
He should have looked at the web market situation a bit more:
- PHP and ASP and ASP.Net are all up in the air, and nothing's really dominating the market.
- No client-side richness such as javascript yet works the same on all end user platforms. Except maybe Flash with the server communication components, which nobody that I'm aware of uses.
- Heck, HTML itself isn't consistently rendered on end user systems.
- Security issues involved in rich features is a major, major issue.
I've heard people saying that Longhorn's Internet Explorer will basically run in a sandbox to prevent anything from really doing anything bad to the user's computer. Doing bad things to the user's computer is why we don't see a standard rich-client layer that lets the developers skip all the annoying HTTP session, URL-encoding, hidden form field CRAP that people come up with to do secure transactions and user-state tracking.
Hey Microsoft, I hear people talkin' about your browser having a sandbox. Why don't you just let us run sandboxxed Complete and pure C# (or any MSIL) apps inside the web page? MSIL apps are tiny: you can do most advanced junk that you might want to do on a client's computer in like 30K of executable. You don't have to worry about those apps installing anything because you can start them in an extremely restricted environment where they don't have control over the storage devices, registry, whatever. Just provide a safe interface that those applications can use to:
- Store configuration info on the client side.
- Open a secure TCP communication line with the web page host so that you can do some real binary transfers of data that aren't bloated to hell by F*ing HTML tags.
- Be able to create a System.Windows.Form inside of the internet explorer window, but for the love of god don't give them a way to draw outside of that in order to make fucking annoying pop up advertisements. Let the ad companies use Flash.
- Store data and perform fast computations! You don't even understand how much you can reduce server load if you let the client do a simple database query and sort/search that set on the client side. And you wouldn't be increasing network traffic significantly because you don't have to transfer the resulting data inside of bloated (but I concede, probably compressed) HTML text.
- Anything else you can think of that developers commonly want to do.
Think about it. Longhorn using .Net a lot more... Internet explorer doing some sandboxing, standard apps-in-a-web-page-without ActiveX, portable MSIL already running on other operating systems...
Microsoft just has to finish what they've started by implementing this capability in a browser, and web developers will love them, too.
And while they're at it, just do the added work of porting the browser to ALL operating systems. For Microsoft, that can't be that big of a task for how much market they would end up with.
It'll be what people wished Java could have been.
[Edit] Forget waiting for Microsoft, I'll just write a browser that does this first and take over the world.
Microsoft is like a pornstar; Whoever does It the best gets f***ed with the most.
[Edited by - Nypyren on August 5, 2005 10:29:26 PM]
At the end, when he's talking about everyone switching to web development... he doesn't mention how truely horrible and fragmented web development is. And he doesn't talk about databases one bit, which are a part of just about every single important web site ever.
He should have looked at the web market situation a bit more:
- PHP and ASP and ASP.Net are all up in the air, and nothing's really dominating the market.
- No client-side richness such as javascript yet works the same on all end user platforms. Except maybe Flash with the server communication components, which nobody that I'm aware of uses.
- Heck, HTML itself isn't consistently rendered on end user systems.
- Security issues involved in rich features is a major, major issue.
I've heard people saying that Longhorn's Internet Explorer will basically run in a sandbox to prevent anything from really doing anything bad to the user's computer. Doing bad things to the user's computer is why we don't see a standard rich-client layer that lets the developers skip all the annoying HTTP session, URL-encoding, hidden form field CRAP that people come up with to do secure transactions and user-state tracking.
Hey Microsoft, I hear people talkin' about your browser having a sandbox. Why don't you just let us run sandboxxed Complete and pure C# (or any MSIL) apps inside the web page? MSIL apps are tiny: you can do most advanced junk that you might want to do on a client's computer in like 30K of executable. You don't have to worry about those apps installing anything because you can start them in an extremely restricted environment where they don't have control over the storage devices, registry, whatever. Just provide a safe interface that those applications can use to:
- Store configuration info on the client side.
- Open a secure TCP communication line with the web page host so that you can do some real binary transfers of data that aren't bloated to hell by F*ing HTML tags.
- Be able to create a System.Windows.Form inside of the internet explorer window, but for the love of god don't give them a way to draw outside of that in order to make fucking annoying pop up advertisements. Let the ad companies use Flash.
- Store data and perform fast computations! You don't even understand how much you can reduce server load if you let the client do a simple database query and sort/search that set on the client side. And you wouldn't be increasing network traffic significantly because you don't have to transfer the resulting data inside of bloated (but I concede, probably compressed) HTML text.
- Anything else you can think of that developers commonly want to do.
Think about it. Longhorn using .Net a lot more... Internet explorer doing some sandboxing, standard apps-in-a-web-page-without ActiveX, portable MSIL already running on other operating systems...
Microsoft just has to finish what they've started by implementing this capability in a browser, and web developers will love them, too.
And while they're at it, just do the added work of porting the browser to ALL operating systems. For Microsoft, that can't be that big of a task for how much market they would end up with.
It'll be what people wished Java could have been.
[Edit] Forget waiting for Microsoft, I'll just write a browser that does this first and take over the world.
Microsoft is like a pornstar; Whoever does It the best gets f***ed with the most.
[Edited by - Nypyren on August 5, 2005 10:29:26 PM]
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