[ILUG] Re: [ILUG-Social] GNOME to "embrace & extend" .NET !

[Glen Gray]

Lets face it, we all new this was coming and it really does have to
happen. The whole idea of Bonobo etc. was all leading to this. And for
anyone who got to speak with Micheal Meeks at last years Linux World
after party here at antefacto or hear his speech at the conference can
tell the kind of attitude Ximian have to .NET. If your not in you can't
win. And they see .NET as a winner and a killer if there isn't an
alternative.

Having spent most of the last 5 years working on Client/Server
applications under the Microsoft technology umbrella and seeing how
popular that approach is with the majority of mid-sized business (which
is probably the largest sector) I'm amazed that there isn't the same
level of "ease of development" available for linux. Now before you all
go mad and flame the shit out of me hear me out. 
Microsoft has spent a lot of time and effort pandering to the needs of
developers and doing lots of hand holding. Early access to new
technology and tonnes of samples and write ups via MSDN (which is a
wonderful service). Stuff like ODBC came along to make life easier when
accessing databases. They then took that further with a few different
technologies and have settled with ADO+. I don't want to get too caught
up in all of this but the point I'm making is that there are a LOT of
developers out there that depend on the levels of abstraction that
Microsofts technologies provide to enable them to build applications
quickly and easily. Ximian also see this and are trying to brin GNOME
into that field of play. It was one of the design goals of GNOME to
allow this to happen.

Now whether your personal opinion is that these people aren't really
developers if they need to work in environments like that or that
Microsoft are wrong to do those things is irrelavant given the fact that
there is such a large portion of the development community out there
that are just as I described. I personally think they are doing good
things in certain areas but frustratingly they can still make a balls of
it e.g they've gone through several versions of the COM architecture
over the last 8 years or so, mostly each release required massive
changes to code to keep up with the technology and often meant adopting
new versions of other technologies, OLE became COM which blened heavily
with RPC to become DCOM which progressed into ActiveX which evolved into
COM+. ODBC abstracted to RDO which branched off to ADO and now has
evolved to ADO+ and I think that RDO died at ADOv1.2. They tend to
promote technology for adoption that just isn't ready and just as it
becomes stable and usable there is something else being pushed to
supersede it. This is really annoying when you are working on really
large projects with long timescales, when you've finished what was a
cutting edge project it's not quite as shiney as when it was designed 9
months ago. It makes it hard to re-use code too as there are always
subtle changes in the way the COM interaction is done or DLL interfaces
change a little. 

I'm seeing .NET as a maturation of alot of what Microsoft has been doing
with these technologies over the last few years. Their converging into a
single "mission statement" type of scenario where there is actually a
unifying purpose to all this COM+ and ADO+ technology. Your not only
using what Microsoft are claiming to be the new wave of tech but they
are too, in a much more visable manor. Now these technologies aren't
neccesarily anything new or great. CORBA already did most of what
Microsoft wanted when it came to designing COM, but true to their
strategies, they took from it what they wanted and went and did it their
own way. Lets face it though, everyone does that kind of stuff, Bonobo
is heavily based on where COM+ is now. But Microsoft had a direct
channel to developers via MSDN and pushed the adoption of these by
developers and that approach has served them well.

What I'm mainly interested in is what Microsoft is going to do about
projects like Mono. On one hand they've seen the flaming they get from
the general IT public and media for their Embrace and Extend tactics and
are trying to get this framework accepted by pushing it as an open
standard. But how are they going to turn it to a propietry framework /
defend their market where they'll make their money as a service portal.
 From all the press snippets I've picked up over the last year or so the
whole .NET machine that MicroSoft has put in motion is effectively a
change in direction of their business model. They are effectively
turning themselves into THE software services company. We've all read
the recent shifts in attitude to what the license entitles you to. Newer
version basically will turn into a rental agreement where you don't own
your version of the software, you are merely renting a service from
Microsoft. They seem to be heading for the Sky Box Office approach to
software. It seems that alot of eggs are being placed in the .NET
basket.

I think it's safe to say that subtle changes in protocols and the
Microsofts version of "Embrace and Extend" may resurface at a later
stage. How successful those tactics will be this time around will be
questionable. IIRC they didn't get away with it using Kerberos.(What
happened there, did we all have to adopt their extensions or did they
revert back to kerberos standards ?). But then they are such a large
company that they will be able to refocus if/when things don't go their
way with .NET. 

Sorry that turned into such a long one, I don't write often, but when I
do I tend to jabber.

Glen