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Miguel de Icaza sur Linux vs Microsoft

Miguel de Icaza serait-il lui aussi un agent secret de Microsoft?


For instance, I remember the glorious days when Linux started: a
comparison of Win 3.1 vs Linux 1.0 always came down with Linux winning
every time: we had a multi-tasking OS, a sort of reliable system, a
good network abstraction, a slowish windowing system (but hey, who
used X anyways? we just wanted a text console), we could run web
servers out of our boxes and so on. We could do things that Windows
would never be able to do: because they did not have a multi-tasking
system. 

Then Windows95 came along and Windows NT came along. Now those systems
were catching up. Of course, they still performed poorly when it came
to reliability, but their user interface was nice (which we lacked),
and they had the applications (which we also lacked). 

And now Windows 2000 has been released. Sure, it still crashes, but it
is getting better on every release. And it no longer has such a large
impact on users. 

Unknown to the untrained eye, a large revamp of the core of those
operating systems was happening at the time: their COM component
architecture which was originally developed to solve other problems
was found to be a very good general solution to many problems: from
scalability problems for software development, to code reuse and to
consistency[2]. 

Are we going to be able to deliver a system that is ten times better
than the proprietary offering? I think we should. 

I do not think free software will succeed in its current shape: a lot
of work needs to be done to address the needs of modern users. 

Remember, this is software for making people's life easier.

(...)

Various people like to criticize Microsoft for producing "bloated and
monolithic applications". Before we criticize Microsoft, lets take a
look at the end user applications that we have on Unix outside of
GNOME: Netscape, GhostView, XDVI, Acrobat, Mathematica, Maple, Purify,
FrameMaker, Star Office. 

The only common denominator on those applications is libc and Xlib.
Some share Motif, but that is about the extent that these applications
are sharing any code. And of course, the Unix "components" play no
role in the equation: they are basically never used (I can only think
of the printer spooler daemon being used, and even in this case: it is
not even compatible across operating systems). 

Now, lets look at Microsoft "bloated and monolithic applications"
again: lets consider "Internet Explorer". 

Internet Explorer is not a single executable as you might think.
Internet Explorer is built of a collection of COM components. These
components are developed individually, debugged individually, exported
individually, and eventually, all of them create the illusion of an
integrated application. 

Now, the beauty of this is that these components can be reused outside
of Internet Explorer: programmers outside of Microsoft can use those
components in their applications: the HTML rendering engine, the XML
engine, the JavaScript engine, the toolbars, their scripting engine
and so on. 

Microsoft applications reuse pieces of Internet Explorer. 

http://www.helixcode.com/~miguel/bongo-bong.html

Quelqu'un peut-il nous expliquer comment KDE envisage son
développement en comparaison?

GP
--
La Masse Critique
Les «non-lethal weapons»: de la science-fiction?
http://pages.infinit.net/mcrit/meilleur.html
Rencontrez Néfertiti, Einstein, Tocqueville, etc.