Thursday, November 08, 2007 Ng: Cebu Innovation Day By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
IF you are a web developer or a data administrator, you might be interested to attend the seminar by Microsoft on Nov. 9, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Dubbed Cebu Innovation Day, it will feature the region’s top speakers on some exciting technologies, like Microsoft Silverlight, Web Expression, Windows Server 2008, and also the interoperability issues between Microsoft and other open technologies.
Microsoft Web Expression is the new web design tool of Microsoft that takes over the former FrontPage. FrontPage used to be part of the Microsoft Office Suite, but has now spun off to include the Expression suite of products.
There is Microsoft Web Expression (for standards based xhtml web editing), Expression Graphic (for graphic design), Expression Interactive (for application design) and many more.
This is a heavy duty web design tool suite of products. The best thing I can say is that it is a tool that is positioned to be a counterpart of Adobe or formerly Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Microsoft Silverlight is the new tool for rich interactive web that can run video, animation and advanced graphics. It is positioned like Adobe Flash, and thus, will allow you to create websites that not only run on Internet Explorer, Firefox and other browsers, but also on Mac OSx or Linux systems.
The major product, of course, is Windows Server 2008—which has been known for quite a number of years by its codename LongHorn. It is the server version of Microsoft’s newly released operating system.
Windows Server 2008 is slated to be released around February next year, and this is a good time to check it as it crosses the advanced beta version and nears completion.
The Microsoft seminar is for free but organizers require participants to pre-register. Since there are limited seats, interested parties should immediately register at www.msevents.ph.
One of the interesting things that have come to my attention is the development of an open source Linux distribution called Cent OS. Cent OS, they say, stands for Community Enterprise Operating System.
According to its website www.centos.
org, they openly advertise themselves as an enterprise-class Linux distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor.
Cent OS, they say, conforms fully to the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100 percent binary compatible. (Cent OS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork).
If you go further and look towards the many articles and blogs, you will easily find out that the North American Enterprise Linux vendor, which they don’t name, is actually Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
In short, they are saying that they are fully 100 percent binary compatible with Red Hat, and the only thing that is not there is RedHat’s name and logo, plus of course, they don’t charge what Red Hat does.
Now, obviously, this company is actually trying to benefit a lot from Red Hat. What can Red Hat do? It seems it cannot do anything.
As it has been able to create a business based on open source, it seems that other companies may be able to benefit from its work as it was based on the GPL license which uses open source.
Can you imagine if you are a perfume or bag manufacturer? You create a perfume, and somebody copies your formula, and then sells or gives away the product for free?
What would happen to your business? Or let us say you have a Rolex watch. Because you are based on open source, somebody can copy your watch design, take out the Rolex brand and logo, and sell it 10 times cheaper.
If this is legal, where would that put your business?
This could be one of the challenges that you could face if you are planning to launch a business based on open source. I would like to get your opinion on this.
