[self-interest] Re: Grammar changes - comments?

[Gordon Cichon]

On Tue, 16 Nov 1999 thorsten.dittmar at daedalos.com wrote:
> I'm not sure if I get your point, but this company named micro.... (you
> will know what I mean;-) tried to do something like this but language
> independent. The name for this stuff is IP means Intentional
> Programming and you can get some infos at: http://www.research.microsof
> t.com/ip/

Yes, this company you are talking about has always been very
innovative at extracting other people's ideas and reimplementing
it by themselves.

I by myself have serious concerns doing development on a platform
whose IP (intellectual property) is owned by another company who
has a rich tradition of copying other people's ideas as soon as
it turns out that they are good. Going this way, your IP is only
valuable in conjunction with the platform, and if your development
was too good, you don't have a chance as soon as your platform
chooses not to support you any more.

I personally believe that the way COM differentiates from CORBA 
is that Microsoft took into account the Self object model while
OMG did not. So if you wanted to integrate you work in Self into
an exteriour OO framework, you would get readily supported by COM,
while with CORBA you would shoot yourself in the knee.

Some years ago I thought about implementing a Self system on top
of COM. After a few experiments, I discontiuned this approach
tough, for political as well as technical reasons. I heard that
COM had been patented, and at this time it came to the public
how Microsoft treats their "competition". On the other side, COM
still has some serious problems with memory management which I
concluded was too tedious to fix them without source code. (BTW,
I can also release this code if anybody likes to have it although
I assume that hardly anybody could read it besides me)

Gordon.