Re: [DotGNU](slashdot) Microsoft dumps Hailstorm ?

[Norbert Bollow]

> > It's pretty significant news for me.  The threat of Hailstorm
> > was one of the major reasons that prompted me to commit to the
> > DotGNU project in the beginning.
> 
> Perhaps, but "Hailstorm" per se was never the real threat.
> It's the technology behind it.

I saw three major threats:

(1) The data collection aspect of Hailstorm.  (From my
    perspective, Hailstorm wasn't primarily about technology.
    It was about making every internet user's information
    accessible in a totally unified manner.  That is evil.  It
    is evil in a way that is different from the evils of
    proprietary software.  There is IMO a very manifest evil in
    the attitude of this company which gets the idea of holding
    everyone's data.)

(2) Privacy violation through centralised authentication.  (If
    proprietary software is sold as a service, and it uses
    passport.com or something similar to verify validity of its
    license, then it probably becomes possible to monitor who
    does what when.  For this conclusion it's not even necessary
    to assume that the centralised auth servers could be
    compromised by crackers or "social engineering" or whatever,
    mere traffic analysis of internet traffic close to the auth
    servers would already reveal MUCH.)

(3) .NET is a direct attack on all non-Microsoft software
    platforms, including GNU/Linux.  (Microsoft wants to be
    the de facto proprietry standard for Web services
    technologies, and use that monopoly role to take over the
    market segment that is currently held by applications that
    are based on Apache, Python, Perl etc and which run very
    well on non-Microsoft operating systems.)

> MS is looking to repackage the technology and resell it to
> others to turn into services.

That will results in lots of collections of consumer data, which
are in principle not so totally different from the databases of
today's CRM systems.

So, as far as I can see, threat (1) is gone.  

> So, there is still the possibility that they will establish a
> de facto proprietry standard for Web services technologies and
> starve everyone else out.  This still needs to be fought.

Absolutely.  Threats (2) and (3) remain.  And since there are
now only two instead of three threats to address, the overall
strategic problem that DotGNU needs to solve has become smaller.

Our task hasn't become smaller in terms of lines lines of code
that need to be written.

However, without a "Hailstorm" to battle against, the task of
marketing our solution (with sufficient success that we can
prevent .NET from becoming a de-facto standard for all "web
stuff") will be much easier.

Also, writing a "DotGNU Manifesto" has suddenly become much
easier.  I'll try my hand at this now. :-)

Greetings, Norbert.

-- 
A founder of the http://DotGNU.org project and Steering Committee member
Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet   (near Zurich, Switzerland)
Tel +41 1 972 20 59       Fax +41 1 972 20 69      http://thinkcoach.com
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