Does it matter if Vista makes an impact?

This should have been posted last week. Forgot to take it out of draft mode. :-/

I just read an article by John Dvorak entitled, "Will Vista make an impact?" It seems the real question is, "...does it really matter?" Dvorak writes this long article about how boring Vista is and how Microsoft really hasn't put much effort into promoting Vista. Then at the end he says, "... Eventually this will settle down and we'll all be using Vista..." Which basically means it doesn't matter how boring Vista is or how much effort Microsoft puts into promoting it. The sad fact is that people will buy it anyway.

What does this say about the computer operating system industry? Because Microsoft has such a stranglehold on the desktop market they have absolutely no motivation to improve their product. It seems they only do so to marginally satisfy their critics that at least they are doing something.

I ran Vista for a couple of days because I wanted to see what great things they had done. Ok, that's a lie.. I wanted to see if it actually ran on my three-year-old laptop. It worked fine, but there was nothing really compelling, and in fact some stuff was just annoying.

Red Hat will not include Mono in RHEL 5

This article was passed along to me by a colleague. Though this is not big news it is one of those "good to know" things. Back in January when the Fedora project first announced they would include Mono and some Mono-based applications, Red Hat said they would not consider using Mono in RHEL. However, if Red Hat wants to include features like desktop-wide search, they need to include Mono. The above mentioned article says, "I think there are other good alternatives for searching." What would that be then? Locate-db? Regular expressions? All kidding aside, I am curious if there are alternative technologies Red Hat may use to fill this void, so if anyone has a suggestion, please leave a comment.

I'm also curious about the statement, "...I wouldn't be surprised to see an equivalent type Tomboy thing to emerge." The argument is that a relatively small application needs a huge amount of infrastructure to run. I'm not going to debate this statement, I'm not a developer and in no position to confirm or deny, but what this demonstrates to me is the OSS community's obsession with forking. "If you don't like some aspect of a project then start a new competing project!" Now, I'm not saying this is never called for (i.e. xorg), but I will say that it is very rarely the solution. Tomboy is becoming a more mature and useful application everyday, and there is no reason to throw all that away and re-invent the wheel. That is just stupid.

Ultimately, I think the most relevant statement is, "We also think the whole Java way to go with Web Services works just fine. Obviously with JBoss we made a strong commitment to that." That is the meat of it. Red Hat invested big time in Java and has always been a big proponent. Now that Java will be open source they can really go whole hog, and bet the farm on Java because it fits into their "open source or nothing" policy. Congratulations, Havoc. ;-)

Pinch me...

When I first heard it today I thought it was a joke. Microsoft and Novell come to an agreement? And Microsoft is going to recommend SUSE Linux Enterprise to their customers!? Apparently, it is all true. I can't help but have a healthy bit of skepticism, but overall I think this is a good thing. Amazing, really, but really good to see. If you read Novell and Microsoft's open letter to the open source community you see that Microsoft will actually pay engineers to work on open source software. They have funded some open source projects before, but afaik they don't pay open source developers. Very tired right now, but will write more tomorrow.