Licensing &#39;appeasement&#39; triggered Longhorn change
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Microsoft wants to release its Longhorn client operating system in 2006 in order to &quot;appease&quot; the customers that have bought into its Software Assurance licensing package, according to analyst Gartner.
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I will turn down free beer software in favor of freedom software when both exist. If you don't know the difference, that's OK. You cannot see the source code for the video drivers from ATI, for example. You can get them for free but they are not freed. The same with Adobe Acrobat Reader and plugins for the Firefox web browser.
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Microsoft has decided to remove a key feature of its next major Windows operating system, codenamed Longhorn, in order to keep its 2006 shipping deadline intact.
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Plans to ease licensing restrictions would have won company plenty of fans, so why did it reverse course at the last minute?
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The changes are in response to a complaint by Google that a feature of the operating system is anticompetitive.
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On 19 October 2004, Microsoft announced that its software licensed on a per-processor basis will continue to be licensed on that basis when installed on hardware that contains dual-core and multicore processors.
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Service Pack 2 is the long-awaited mega-bug fix for Windows XP, and pretty much the last bit of excitement until Longhorn. But what does it mean for you?
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Because of a bug in Windows Vista's antipiracy technology, some users are being told that they need to reactivate the operating system after installing new device drivers or software.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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While developers are naturally curious over tweaks to the Longhorn road map, many IT administrators barely take notice. Enterprise IT customers typically lag at least
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AUGUST 27, 2004  - Microsoft Corp. today announced a significant change in plans for the next major release of Windows, code-named Longhorn.
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Longhorn needs a new name. It&#39;s not just because I&#39;m tired of the bovine references and the &quot;shorthorn&quot; jokes. No, the problem is that the future version of Windows, formerly known as Longhorn, in many ways
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LOS ANGELES (CBS.MW) -- Microsoft said Friday that it plans to broadly distribute the next version of its Windows operating system -- dubbed &quot;Longhorn&quot; -- in 2006, but conceded that it had to pare down a much-anticipated search feature to move ahead with
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Some say Win XP SP2 enhancements cause conflicts, don't protect as claimed.
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Microsoft is applying for a patent for an operating system that starts out crippled.  You must pay to do things like take the throttle off network speed, disk access, install drivers, install software, and more.  Trust me, I rarely even visit Groklaw, even if this is my second consecutive blog entry with a link to a Groklaw article. My VarLinux.org readers posted the article, A Brave New Modular World, and I had to share it.
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Changes aim to address Google antitrust concerns. Also: Redmond talks for first time about when service pack will arrive.
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Microsoft wants to release its Longhorn client operating system in 2006 to appease customers that have bought into its Software Assurance licensing package, according to analyst Gartner.