Time after time we've warned that Microsoft's involvement in 'open source' would prove detrimental to Free software [1, 2]. One company of a ex-Microsoft employee spreads FUD while another company that houses former Softies uses and advocates Mono. Here is another one, Ohloh, which was founded by Microsoft people and tends to attract like-minded folks. In the following post, which is probably shared lacking background of the parties involved, an impression is given that everything but C# is declining.
I came across my name in a site called Ohloh. I remember it coming out a few years ago. Now it has had time to really get going, I thought it was about time that I review the site here.
Stanford and Harvard teach businesses how to squash open source
[...]
It's nice to see that $48,921 in Stanford MBA tuition going to a such a worthy cause.
More intriguingly, despite open source's still-small market share relative to the Microsofts and Oracles of the world, it's surely meaningful that professors from the world's elite business institutions are turning their attention to figuring out how to beat open source. If it weren't a threat, there would be no market for research like this.
--Windows platform manager, Microsoft South-Africa
Reference: Outrage at Microsoft’s independent, yet sponsored NT 4.0/Linux research
Comments
Needs Sunlight
2008-09-23 17:35:11
The originals (Java, perl, python, and everything else) still dust M$ imitations.
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-23 17:43:19
__ [+] Vista licensing also limits benchmarking http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2218/061101vistalicense/index.html
Baby In The Bath Water
2008-09-23 22:01:35
I'm guessing that you are comparing Java to .NET, but if that's the case I think that "dust Microsoft's implementation" is a bit naive.
Microsoft's Java implementation dusted Sun's Java implementation.
As far as .NET, I haven't seen any comparisons there, but considering you can't even say that Java "dusts" Mono using the Debian Language Shootout tests (which are more likely to favor Java than Mono), even there it's not quite so clear-cut.
Java is typically faster, but not by much and Mono typically uses a lot less memory than Java.
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=javaclient&lang2=csharp
With the Linear IL work that Novell is putting into Mono, Mono 2.2 should be quite a bit faster than Mono 2.0 (which is already noticeably faster than 1.2)
http://www.mono-project.com/Linear_IL
Considering that it is very likely that Microsoft's .NET implementation is faster still than Mono's, I would not be surprised if it outperformed Java 6 in both memory usage and performance.
Note: this comment was posted from Novell's headquarters.
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-23 22:03:05
Who are you with? Your comments in this site fit a pattern.
AlexH
2008-09-23 22:49:22
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-23 22:52:05
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 00:18:03
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-24 00:20:43
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 00:30:54
Says a lot about you, doesn't it?
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-24 00:33:30
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 00:49:33
Don't confuse my arguments with yours.
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 00:50:23
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-24 01:15:02
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 01:19:44
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-24 01:27:29
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 02:54:52
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 02:59:08
AlexH
2008-09-24 07:41:05
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-24 08:42:01
My point was that I do not endlessly argued with people whose site says stuff I disagree with.
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 12:02:06
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-24 12:07:52
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 12:14:20
Where Roy gets his ideas about how "everything is declining but C#" is beyond me. I can only assume he didn't read the article and that instead he wanted to badmouth Microsoft/C# and thought he could fool his readers into not clicking the links to actually read for themselves.
AlexH
2008-09-24 12:18:35
I think he looked at the graphs; I don't think he realised that the scales were not the same and therefore can't be compared directly...
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-24 12:22:13
Microsoft did a lot of this to give a false impression of Silverlight adopted (and got smacked for it).
AlexH
2008-09-24 12:28:28
Someone created a graph on Ohloh to compare C# to Objective C. Not surprisingly, C# looks stronger on that one graph. But that article also says C# is "not heavily used in free/open source software" (true) and doesn't seek to compare them to other languages.
The article doesn't state that C# is the only language growing, and no-one who can read a graph is going to think that either.
But because Ohloh has some ex-Microsoft people on board, you've quickly misinterpreted the article and shot the messenger, again.
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 12:45:15
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-24 12:47:45
AlexH
2008-09-24 12:51:13
CodePlex is a project hosting system, and stats on CodePlex are only useful for judging projects on CodePlex.
Ohloh do not host projects; indeed, all the projects I work on are tracked by Ohloh. So, there is an obvious difference there that I'm surprised you missed.
Can you give an example of the bias you think they have?
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-24 12:59:50
http://www.ohloh.net/licenses/Microsoft%20Shared%20Source%20Permissive%20License
This may not mean much, but I expect projects to earn inclusion based on the inclinations of Ohloh staff, who are former Microsoft chaps.
AlexH
2008-09-24 13:12:27
The MS-PL is a free software license, and you can find out how inclusion works just by visiting Ohloh (hint: they automatically track any project hosted on known free software hosting systems, and you can self-include any other project for free).
AlexH
2008-09-24 13:17:18
Maybe you should go to Ohloh's site and actually find out how inclusion works before speculating about, because you're way off the mark.
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 13:24:17
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-24 13:37:38
The mentioning of the licence of the saturation of C#?
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 13:44:34
AlexH
2008-09-24 13:45:02
On what planet is that "saturation"?
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-24 13:49:50
http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/bto/20080807/Language_540x404.jpg
AlexH
2008-09-24 13:54:24
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-24 13:58:06
http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/bto/20080807/Language_540x404.jpg It's almost as though the site blocks references from other sites. See the figure here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10009669-16.html
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 13:58:06
j/k
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-24 13:59:25
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 14:02:22
Ohloh gathers statistics on F/LOSS software based on actual source repositories.
From the article:
So basically, the TIOBE stats are not based on code sampling, they are based on other criteria.
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 14:05:54
Ohloh represents only F/LOSS projects which may or may not be a representative sampling of the entire market.
TIOBE is based on guess-timation based on web searches, # of books on the topic, etc. This is hardly an accurate statistic.
AlexH
2008-09-24 14:05:59
The graph you link to shows Java at ~22% right now, and C# at ~2.5%.
The Ohloh stat mentioned (which is commits per month, a different metric) says Java is ~15%, C# ~2%.
So they're about the same. An indeed, if we look at the monthly lines of code metric on Ohloh we see Java regularly bounces over the 20% mark. So for the month of August, 2008 - when the Tiobe study was done - they're actually in complete agreement.
And your point is, again?
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-24 14:09:56
Dan O'Brian
2008-09-24 14:15:31
AlexH
2008-09-24 14:20:31
Your "main criticism" defence doesn't stand up. We're not looking at the second part of the article. We're looking at claims like this one:
... which have been thoroughly and factually debunked. Ohloh didn't "publish" any "study", let alone those charts (users create them), and the charts do not show C# beating everything - they just show you didn't read them properly. We've also seen that Ohloh's numbers are in line with other studies that you trust.
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-24 14:22:50
Read what I wrote a moment ago. It has nothing to do with Ohloh. it's the study Asay links to.
Baby In The Bath Water
2008-09-24 15:37:59
I guess he has concluded that if he can't fight the facts, he'll try his best to attack the messenger. Luckily, the Free Software community is made up of intelligent people like myself who do not fall for such garbage.
If I back up my claims with facts, what difference does it make who I work for?
(FWIW, I'm an undergrad student)
Note: this comment was posted from Novell's headquarters.