The Desktop Fishbowl
Charles blogs all the random nerd stuff he can find.

Monday, 4 February 2002

Winamp has started nagging me about a new version being available. Bugger off, Winamp. No, really, bugger off. If I wanted a new version, I'd go look for it. The simple fact is, all I want is a program that plays my mp3's, and manages my playlist. If I wanted anything more, if I wanted bells, whistles, minibrowsers and related shite, I'd go looking for them. Software reaches a certain stage where it does everything a reasonable person wants it to do. After that, any upgrades are just dancing paperclips and changing file formats to force people to upgrade. This is why Microsoft wants you to rent their applications now instead of buying them - people are starting to realise that Office '95 does everything that Office XP does, just with a different colour scheme and an incompatible .doc file. Of course, if you're making software, the last thing you want is for people to stop upgrading, even if the software is free. Stagnation is death and redundancy. So you do stupid things like nagging perfectly content users into trying your new version. Well, it's only so long, only so many repetitions of that popup window before the annoyance exceeds my inertia, and I go looking for something that won't tell me off for not keeping up with the Joneses.. (Some thoughts in this entry stolen from Joel Spolsky) 9:12:44 PM

It's conspiracy theory time! Feel free to add as many "allegedly"'s below as are legally necessary. Exhibit A: Mono class libraries are released under the MIT X11 license. This means that anyone can take the Mono code (Mono being the GNOME project's implementation of .NET), add their own features and release a proprietary version without contributing their code back to the open-source project. Exhibit B: GNOME head programmer says that it will be based on .NET My cynical little head here says that Ximian (the company that Miguel de Icaza, the head of the GNOME project started to support GNOME) is planning mischief. They'll leverage the Open Source community to help them build their .NET clone, and then pull a fast one. Ximian will license code from Microsoft for the bits of .NET that MS aren't giving away - the important things like Passport and My Services (Hailstorm), integrate it with the Mono class library, and having Ximian sell the "Enhanced Mono/GNOME". If this is the plan, it's very, very bad. It's derailing one of the major Free Software projects, tying it to a closed standard that Microsoft are free to embrace and extend to their heart's content, and then pulling the rug out from under it in a way that delivers everybody's souls to the Beast. Nice one, Ximian. 5:10:18 PM