Thursday, February 20, 2003

Download IE webcontrols "I probably won't have been the first to notice this, but just in case, the ie webcontrols have become opensource [http://www.asp.net/IEWebControls/Download.aspx]." [Yves Reynhout] 10:13:05 PM    comment []

MS Loses One You can't win them all the first time around... "A Washington court ruling could see SQL Server developers liable for millions of dollars in licensing fees...every Microsoft customer, including ISVs, VARs, and corporate end users, who wished to customize SQL Server by adding code or product to meet the specific needs of users would have been required to purchase a license from Timeline to do so. Given the basic design and intended purpose and use of SQL Server ... the potential economic benefit to Timeline would have been staggering. ...(That economic benefit would be) from the future sale of licenses to essentially all of Microsoft's SQL Server customers." [The Register] 7:18:13 PM    comment []

ASP.NET Starter Kits The ASP.NET starter kits are out. They look pretty cool. Task loggers, reporting, etc. [ASP.NET] 1:09:54 PM    comment []

Microsoft Urged to Innovate "An influential Merrill Lynch analyst and a departing Microsoft developer say the company must embrace the open-source model of software development and reinvent itself." [Wired News] This is a pretty funny concept, embrace open source and innovation at the same time. When is the last time you saw an innovative open source project? IMO, the open source movement is 10x worse about cloning software than MS ever has been. KDE / Gnome are cheap knock offs of Windows. KOffice / StarOffice are cheap knock offs of MS Office, GIMP is a cheap knock off of Photoshop, etc. And unlike MS, who did a 1-up on Java with .NET, the open source projects move at such a slow pace that they never seem to equal, let alone improve upon the thing they are cloning. In any case, who is actually turning to open source because of the inclusion of some source code? They just like it because it is free (hopefully, you don't need to spend hours tinkering with your OS's source code when you could be doing something productive). I would much rather extend MS Office with VBA (or C# soon) than extend StarOffice by hacking the source code (which is quite messy if you haven't seen it...lots of comments / variables in German too which does not help things). 9:25:07 AM    comment []