"​Mozilla, Gnome mull united front against ​Longhorn&qu​ot;

Tom Malone wrote:

One of the major problems i have with microsoft, is that in the past they have not supported open standards, and as a result, the internet is not sharing information the way it was designed to. You have to use ie, for online banking etc. The scary thing with longhorn is not that the web that is meant to allow the whole world to communicate will really so much on microsoft technology that the whole world can only communicate on microsoft machines. This to me does not sound competitive, people should be given the choice of os, if they choose windows or another variation, they should still be able to choose, only then will innovation occur.

Tom,
You do have a choice of OS's and browsers. Mozilla, Opera and the other browsers support HTTPS which makes banking secure.

~ Knute

Tom Malone wrote:

One of the major problems i have with microsoft, is that in the past they have not supported open standards, and as a result, the internet is not sharing information the way it was designed to. You have to use ie, for online banking etc. The scary thing with longhorn is not that the web that is meant to allow the whole world to communicate will really so much on microsoft technology that the whole world can only communicate on microsoft machines. This to me does not sound competitive, people should be given the choice of os, if they choose windows or another variation, they should still be able to choose, only then will innovation occur.

According to Tony Chor, that was because the IE team was split up after IE6.

DMassy wrote:

Hey Tom,
I'm not sure where you got this impression. Take a look at Indigo the communications pillar in Longhorn. this allows developer to easily communicate reliably and securely. From the FAQ:
"Indigo includes support for the latest Web services standards, including SOAP. Applications built with Indigo will interoperate with any application built on infrastructure that also conforms to these standards. This includes IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and other Web services built in J2EE that are SOAP-standards compliant. Microsoft is deeply committed to platform interoperability, and an active member of the key standards organizations defining the latest standards for Web services including SOAP and XML."  

Thanks
-Dave

In the uk microsoft wrote a website for the UK goverment allwoing for more communication between departments and the general public it was meant to be a step towards e-democracy, big thing in the UK press, microsoft was awarded the contract, they kept going on and on about how they will use open standards , all machines would be able to use it, they ended up using some XML technology. When the system was built, it did not work on all machines only microsoft ones, it used open standards then changed them to ensure that other machines could not use it. It cost the UK goverment lots of money.

TCP/IP another open standart windows uses, does not follow this standard again it has been changed, leading to the set up of samba, to allow networking between windows and the rest of the world.

There is a choice of browsers and os's currently using https, but this has mainly been brought around by the increasing use of apchae and linux as web servers, over 50 % last time i checked. Longhorn may be a last ditch attempt to retake it by locking people into techs like xaml.

With all these issues only time will tell

Tom Malone wrote:

In the uk microsoft wrote a website for the UK goverment allwoing for more communication between departments and the general public it was meant to be a step towards e-democracy, big thing in the UK press, microsoft was awarded the contract, they kept going on and on about how they will use open standards , all machines would be able to use it, they ended up using some XML technology. When the system was built, it did not work on all machines only microsoft ones, it used open standards then changed them to ensure that other machines could not use it. It cost the UK goverment lots of money.

Tom,
Please provide the URL to the site you mention in your post, I would be curious to find out more about it. Also if you have any press links about this story I would be interested.

I was not aware that Microsoft was in the Web Development business, I thought they were a software/hardware company...

~ Knute

Sorry did a quick google, most i read was in newspapers, magazines etc. it was a big thing here.

http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/articles/issue11/gateway.html

Personally this line cracks me up, "Finally, and in a surprising context, we appear to be witnessing the first, tentative moves by the UK to catch up with European governments like Germany and France in their understanding of the need to support open source/free software." 

Yea...right....  Because the French and Germans are supporting open source out of the Goodness of their Hearts....yup....