[NTLUG:Discuss] Bad Signs for Open Source

[Steve Baker]

Mike Hart wrote:

> Yahoo has quietly been the number one open source site

I find that hard to believe - I've hardly seen any major
packages hosted there.  Pretty much everyone is on SourceForge
these days.

*Maybe* they are number one in OpenSource-for-Windoze packages,
but certainly not for Linux....I doubt that too.

> (even if they haven't released the code for their IM's
> etc...)  If yahoo starts requiring IE... that will
> greatly reduce what you can do with netscape or any
> open source java enabled browser that doesnt run
> winmedia and active X.

So AOL requires IE for it's subscribers and is using
active-X for it's internal services - that doesn't
prevent people who use AOL from using Java on their
web sites - and anyone who is supporting OpenSource
from an AOL-hosted web site will most likely do that.

The worst effect of this that I can see is that non-Windoze
users have to go find some other ISP.

You can see why they are doing this though - since M$ has
chosen not to ship Java with XP, AOL has a harder time supporting
it.  Since that's likely to be a larger percentage of their
users than Linux/BSD/MacOS/whatever put together - you can see
why they might go that way.

The thing about Active-X is that if everyone started using it,
the scope for delivering viruses, etc, etc is VASTLY increased.
I'm no expert, but I recollect that an Active-X program is just standard
x86 machine code - when you enable Active-X on your browser, you
are opening up your machine to allow any web site you visit to
do essentially ANYTHING on your system.  No security, no privacy,
nothing.  Java programs are constrained by their 'sandbox' - but I
don't think Active-X programs have any such restrictions.

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