Tag: OSS

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New laptop & Another try at Ubuntu

Well, as I dicussed in a previous post, I have been in the market for a new laptop. I have finally bought one. I decided to go for a Dell XPS rather than Apple (mostly due to cost). Such is life – maybe I will try a Mac next year. It is my intent on my new laptop to either dual boot Vista and Ubuntu, or (if I have a good enough experience with Ubuntu), just run Ubuntu and do all of my Windows stuff in hosted virtual machines.

So, last night I take my brand new laptop, and my newly burned Ubuntu CD, and set out. Ubuntu boots up from the CD just fine, but the screen resolution sucks because Ubuntu is philosophically opposed to loading the drivers for my video card. No big deal, I can live with 800×600 until I get a proper install done. So, I click on the install icon, and away I go. Or, actually, I don’t. It seems the Installer UI is not expecting 800×600 resolution, and the buttons to let me proceed through the installation are lost off the bottom of the screen. I also do not seem to be allow to resize this window. It being midnight and all, I gave up. I am sure there is some way around this, but I did not feel like screwing with it.

I will probably have another shot at trying to set up Ubuntu or some other Linux distro this weekend. Maybe I will have better luck and not just give up on Linux (sorry folks – this is stuff that should just work!)

PS – Vista is working fine on my new laptop. Transfered my files and settings from my old machine using “Windows Easy Transfer” – not a problem.

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Why No One Plays on CodePlex

In response to the post Microsoft’s Open Source Software is Junk? and the article which triggered it, I would like to offer a few comments:

  1. CodePlex is not “Microsoft’s Open Source Software”. CodePlex is a sandbox where others can create open source software based on the Microsoft platform(s). 
  2. To say there are no interesting projects on CodePlex is something of an exaggeration. To say that it is “all junk” is just a sensationalistic headline trying to suck in readers. That said, much of the more interesting stuff actually comes from Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices group (such as the Enterprise Library), and so open source zealots do not recognize it. I would agree that there are few, if any, mature projects there which did not originate inside Microsoft.
  3. Do people not enjoy developing in .NET? Well, given the number of people using it, I would say many do enjoy developing using .NET (and no, they are not all Microsoft cronies, and they are not all forced to by evil, imperialistic employers). 
  4. While there are few mature .NET projects on CodePlex, that does NOT mean open source project based on .NET do not exist. Look around SourceForge. There are a lot of successful, valuable projects there based on the .NET platform.
  5. Look at the profile of the typical open source developer. Typically, they are coming from a very anti-Microsoft state of mind. Given that, they are not likely to develop their great idea on the .NET platform (even if it would be an ideal platform for it – they are making emotional and philosophical decisions, not technical ones). Even if they can bring themselves to use a Microsoft platform, they are definitely not going to host that project on a Microsoft-controlled site, where the evil empire could steal their radically brilliant work.
  6. Until relatively recently, there were no Microsoft-supplied free tools to develop on .NET (there have been a couple of open source tools, such as #develop, which is of course hosted on SourceForge). Open source developers are even less likely to pay Microsoft for the privilege of developing on .NET.
  7. Look at the life cycle of “successful” open source projects. Apache and Linux have been around for a very long time. Of course they are going to be much more mature than anything on the .NET side (though I am not sure many open source projects in any context will have the level of success these have had). FireFox hardly started from scratch, but from a large code-base of pre-existing code. A significant advantage. If Microsoft were to open source IE, you might see a big jump in open source browser development over top of it (though I doubt it, given point (4)).
  8. The existence of successful open source projects (again, leaving aside Apache and Linux) is largely a by product of having lots of open source projects. It is like ideas, the more you have of them, the more likely you might have a good one. There are not enough open source projects on .NET to have that “critical mass”, and given point (4), there may never be.
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