An odd choice to help government with open source strategy (ars technica) [LWN.net]

An odd choice to help government with open source strategy (ars technica)

Posted Jan 22, 2009 21:22 UTC (Thu) by bucky (guest, #53055) [Link]

I visited the inauguration site on the 20th. I was notified I needed SilverLight. I clicked on the Linux link. I was directed to http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/ which installed the Moonlight xpi.

Far out.

I revisited the inauguration site. I told I needed version 2.0. So I went back to http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/.

Nope. No 2.0.

I went to http://www.go-mono.com/. Nope.

Google for Moonlight 2?

Found http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight. It told me that Moonlight 2 was pre-alpha, and I'd need to compile Mono myself from the SVN repository. It did not guarantee anything would work. Indeed, my understanding of the term "pre-alpha" is that it is guaranteed to fail.

So, perhaps the article was delighting in the fact that if one were in the inner circle and knew that Moonlight pre-alpha was definitely going to work, you could have compiled Mono yourself, from source, bright and early on inauguration day, and if you made no mistakes, you could have watched the webcast when it came on at 9:00 in the morning, PST.

I have nothing but sympathy for the Mono team, but this is just poor planning on the inauguration committee's part.

An odd choice to help government with open source strategy (ars technica)

Posted Jan 22, 2009 21:40 UTC (Thu) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]

It would be strange if the inauguration committee had taken how Mono worked on GNU/Linux into consideration for the inauguration process...

Yes, FOSS is big, but it is not that big

An odd choice to help government with open source strategy (ars technica)

Posted Jan 22, 2009 21:57 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

Your mistrust is disappointing. Some projects have a requirement that any snapshot of the development tree works at any time. I don't know if Mono has that policy, but it's better to assume that things work and report if they don't.

An odd choice to help government with open source strategy (ars technica)

Posted Jan 22, 2009 22:25 UTC (Thu) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964) [Link]

The Linux news sites like LinuxToday.com did cover the issue before the big day, with MS & Mono Miguel working into the night to check Moonlight would work. The news was out in time, if you were very keen on it.

An odd choice to help government with open source strategy (ars technica)

Posted Jan 22, 2009 22:28 UTC (Thu) by sobdk (guest, #38278) [Link]

You didn't need the beta of moonlight, but the inauguration site wasn't very well designed.

I ran into a similar problem since I read on slashdot that the moonlight developers worked hard to make sure moonlight would display the inauguration. I followed the link, installed moonlight, and they when I clicked to watch the video stream it told me that the video required Silverlight 2.0 but I only had 1.0 support. That is when I noticed on the same error screen there were two links. One that that said something like "watch with default Silverlight player" and one that said something like "watch with moonlight on Linux". I clicked the "watch with moonlight on Linux" and magically it worked. No 2.0 support required.

An odd choice to help government with open source strategy (ars technica)

Posted Jan 22, 2009 22:33 UTC (Thu) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link]

You did see this, didn't you:

http://lwn.net/Articles/315859/

An odd choice to help government with open source strategy (ars technica)

Posted Jan 23, 2009 0:14 UTC (Fri) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link]

I look at Scott McNealy from a different perspective (in 1989, I was working for Ready Systems -- a Silicon Valley startup, and in 1990, at Cadence Design Systems -- in San Jose).

20 years ago, at a Sun Microsystems "power breakfast" in Mtn. View, CA, Scott McNealy was asked if Sun would continue to develop XView and OpenLook, or join the move to X Windows.

His reply: "When a man has ham-and-eggs for breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. We (Sun Microsystems) are committed!

And this, from the man who abandoned the Motorola-series CPU for SPARC architecture, after "assuring" Sun's existing customers that that wouldn't happen. BTW: XView, OpenLook, SunOS, and Motorola CPUs were gone by the end of 1990.

It's now 2009, and Sun Microsystems has, only recently, made OpenSolaris available (sluggish and application-starved). I wouldn't trust Scott McNealy as an advisor for the US government's possible adoption of open-source software, any further than I could throw Steve Ballmer.

An odd choice to help government with open source strategy (ars technica)

Posted Jan 23, 2009 0:20 UTC (Fri) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link]

OK, SunOS/4.1.5 (the last-gasp of Sun's Motorola-compatible OS), with XView and OpenLook, was released in 1993, but there was no new Motorola-based hardware after 1990.

An odd choice to help government with open source strategy (ars technica)

Posted Jan 23, 2009 4:01 UTC (Fri) by whacker (guest, #55546) [Link]

> His reply: "When a man has ham-and-eggs for breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. We (Sun Microsystems) are committed!

Hey, there's a Dilbert cartoon on that!

Dilbert does ham and eggs

Posted Jan 23, 2009 7:54 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Indeed. As a coffee joke it is amusing; but as a motivational slogan it is pretty stupid. The worst part is that people that repeat it like parrots think they are so smart.

Dilbert does ham and eggs

Posted Jan 23, 2009 12:18 UTC (Fri) by zotz (guest, #26117) [Link]

Indeed, reminds me of when my folks trotted out:

"Hard head bird don't make good soup."

when I was being hard headed. I figured they must like me being hard headed as surely they knew I didn't want to end up as soup...

drew

Pigs and chickens

Posted Jan 23, 2009 7:13 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

When a man has ham-and-eggs for breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.

I have too often heard that slogan in various company spirit-raising sessions, and it has a good rejoinder: the pig can contribute to the breakfast project only once, the chicken can do it many times. Sensible people and companies prefer to be the chicken here.

Now now .... there's the story of the pig with a wooden leg

Posted Jan 23, 2009 17:57 UTC (Fri) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

Guy driving down a country road when he sees a pig with a wooden leg, just like a pirate. He pulls into the driveway and finds the farmer.

"I couldn't help but notice you have a pig with a wooden leg."

"Mister, that there is no ordinary pig. That there is a *hero* pig."

"What do you mean?"

"That pig saved my life! My tractor overturned and trapped me, and that pig ran back to the house and got help."

"Wow! Is that how he got the wooden leg?"

"No sir! I'm telling you, that pig is a hero. One time, our house caught fire middle of the night. That pig woke us up and we got the fire out. He saved all our lives."

"And is that how he got the wooden leg, from the fire?"

"Mister, a fine pig like that, you don't eat him all at once."

An odd choice to help government with open source strategy (ars technica)

Posted Jan 23, 2009 12:41 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

On the other hand, it was Scott who made Sun the company that invested the most into Open Source, far more than IBM or RedHat. Also, Sun is one of the very few companies who give away for free (both as in free speech and free beer) code that is years ahead the competition, as compared to some old cruft IBM and SGI used to give away.

An odd choice to help government with open source strategy (ars technica)

Posted Jan 29, 2009 14:50 UTC (Thu) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link]

The company he helped start was all BSD-based, but they had to buy *$@#@! Bell 32v licenses to be able to ship their product. I suspect he and any of the old Sun hands are aware of free-versus-tied software at a very deep level (;-))

--dave