OSNews

I can't speak about ASP.NET specifically, but the .NET is only just open enough to make some .NET applications barely run. However closed so much that applications are buggy or even unusable because of major features being unavailable.

One great example of this is the DRM extensions; and thus the reason why Netflix, Lovefilm and so on cannot run on Linux (albeit not without running native Windows libraries on WINE).

What's more, .NET was invented because MS couldn't play ball with Java (see below).


OOXML was written because MS wanted to lock people into MS Office but were forced to use an open standard by the EU.

If Microsoft really cared about open standards, they'd have used ODF like nearly every one of their competitors do. Instead, they create their own incompatible standard that nobody else uses but them.


C# is another example of MS creating a new standard to trash an existing standard. In this case .NET was invented to trash Java (though C# / .NET has evolved since). What's more, .NET was only developed after MS got sued by Sun for releasing their own incompatible Java run times.

If MS cared about standards, they'd have released a Sun Java compatible IDE like Borland had.


Please do, because every one of your examples demonstrates how MS had shunned established standards


Firefox 1 & 2 were significantly more standard compliant than IE (hence why I used Phoenix & Firebird) and Firefox 3 was released in 2006. Plus there was Opera and kHTML-based browsers. Hell, even webkit was released in 2005, nearly half a decade before you claimed the competition began.

So I really don't know where you pulled the '2009' figure from, but it's grossly inaccurate.

Edited 2012-12-18 12:43 UTC

I agree with you. I still don't understand why .net is not open sourced yet. I understand about Windows or Office. But why .net is not open source yet?
Open sourcing it is not going to affect their business anyway. Even in case of Asp.net MVC is open source but Asp.net is not. Confusing.

Well they aren't the same thing then are they?



What are you on about?



Again, I dunno what this has to do with parts of ASP.NET being Open sourced.



So?



Well the de-facto standard is MS Office, so any competitor that wants to be able to read the same files need to support that or get out of the market.

Sun trying to make people use ODF was a silly move.



C# version 1.0 was a superior language to Java, Properties alone in the language make it vastly superior as well as the better designed DateTime libraries (two things I can think of off the top of my head).

C# is Java Improved.



One thing so far is true at least.



Borland Java IDEs were crap, thank goodness they didn't



What established standards? A Document standard on an Office suite with a quite a small user base and a programming language developed by the same people that wanted the said document standards.



KHTML and Opera have always had low market share and aren't significant enough to be relevant to the
conversation.

Firefox 1 was more standards compliant than IE6 because it was newer. What the OP always misses is that the reason people moved to it was nothing to do with standards compliance and the fact that at the time it was a better browser with more features.

2009 was when IE8 got released and was the first browser to support CSS 2.1 and XHTML 1.1 properly (I am sure you bring up Opera, but I don't see them as a serious competitor to the other browsers in Market share).

Edited 2012-12-18 13:04 UTC

Says you. The Mono team disagrees and has heavily praised Microsoft opening up the various ASP.NET stacks. They were integrated into the Mono codebase in days.

That is a textbook example of open source.



Yeah, because Netflix was going to take that sitting down, right? No.

For all the whining people do about DRM, they sure do clamor for it. Of course, the real reason is they need something to beat MS over the head with, and this is low hanging fruit.

Why don't you talk about instances where having Moonlight on Linux furthered the experience? The Olympics in Beijing being a major one, without Moonlight it wouldn't have been watchable on Linux, period.

Microsoft made documentation and test suites available to the Mono team ahead of time. Everything else is an ECMA standard.



This is true, but I think the blame is overblown. At the time, and you need to be old enough to remember this, but Java was terrible when C# came out. It was still interpreted, for crying out loud.

C# came and provided clear and concise improvements, and more importantly, the tooling around C# was second to none. I mean, Anders was at the helm. He was the genius from Borland, Microsoft's major strategic win.



What does this matter? They're two competing standards (Nothing wrong with that) which have arguable strengths and weaknesses. Both which I think are slightly above either of us to get into too much detail for.

OOXML and ODF are massive, sprawling, complex formats. Its hard to standardize something like that correctly. ODF reflects design decisions made to better support OO and OOXML reflects design decisions made to better support Office.

WebGL is like the OOXML of the web. A "standard" (eh) made around the technological needs of a specific technology. Just like Microsoft rejects the OpenGLisms in WebGL, Open Office people reject the MS Office-isms in OOXML.



C# was a quantum leap over Java when it was released. Sincerely someone who used both at launch. PDC01 was a game changer. Absolutely. No doubt about it.

MS is damned if they do, damned if they don't. I guarantee you'd be the first one complaining if it wasn't an open standard.



I hope you're joking. By the time .NET launched, Borland IDEs were floundering. I sincerely am questioning your recollection of events.



IE6s problem was not intentional deviation from standards. IE6 when released was the single most standards compliant browser. The problem arose from a lack of developer attention and a stagnation.

IE6 is what happens when IE implements a bunch of Working Draft standards. Microsoft is only guilty of virtually abandoning IE until Vista was released. That's five years.



Browsers still weren't completely CSS2.1 compliant when IE8 came out, for fucks sake. People were still excited about browsers passing ACID2 and ACID3 tests.

News flash, all browsers have ridiculous quirks. IEs are just the most well known.

How about the 12 implementations of the Flexible Box module out there across all browsers. Is that adherence to standards?

The applications are not buggy and only unusable because Netflix is not designed to work in Linux. The problem isn't .NET, it does exactly what it is supposed to.



If Java didn't run and look like crap in Windows then .NET never would have gained traction. Java is OK now but back then it looked awful. That's partly due to Sun insisting that it didn't use native controls or cleartype. Even today it still doesn't look great which is why it is rarely used for shinkwrap applications.



My experience leads me to believe that the truth is somewhere in the middle. I agree that Microsoft does not care about open standards but the ODF was not built to handle everything in Excel. There would have been a conflict of interest regardless since MS would want the format designed around Office.

OOXML is an open standard, the issue is more that LibreOffice/OpenOffice developers do not care about providing 100% compatibility. I could even dig up a link where one of them states this explicitly.



That goes back to Java running like crap in Windows, which was the fault of Sun. Windows developers were ready to embrace Java but Sun was stubborn about non-native controls and the JRE.

Others already explained that IE was the slowest to adopt standards, OOXML was used to subvert ODF and regarding OpenGL - let's see any kind of support for it on their Xbox and Windows RT. Whether it's OpenGL ES or full blown OpenGL is purely theoretical, since neither is supported there.

Firefox was always far more standards compliant than IE...
Their support for standards in earlier versions was limited not by a desire to lock people in but by shear practicality, with IE having as much marketshare as it did firefox needed compatibility, not implementing more standards that wouldn't have gotten used at the time anyway.

You failed to address the "vendor lock-in" part.
Open source is not open standard.
Mono is far from being an alternative.

OOXML has so many "extensions"(read - blobs from the earlier Office formats) and even Microsoft does not implement OOXML fully.

Now look at actual viable alternatives and how Microsoft reacts to those...


But what am I saying... Microsoft fanboy will always come to defense.