...but I would reaqd VERY CAREFULLY the entire licence and compare it word for word with another copy of the Apachce 2.0 licence just to make sure tehre are no ticking time bombs in there.
This is not The Mouse that Roared, but the Proved In Court Monopolist here.
Caveat emptor! even if the price is supposed to be NIL.
Way back when SPOT was unveiled it was an interesting idea. But in my opinion the monthly subscription charges was what made it a non-starter. (My how things have changed, now a smartphone probably eats up 3x that in a data plan subscription.)
Back then pagers were still pretty popular, too so maybe nobody needed them for that reason either.
Neat technology, had to cost a small fortune to get nationwide radio coverage, but not worth the subscription.
> It morphed out of the Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT)
Errr???
.Net came to being to solve the COM mess and to "fight" Java a bit. It has done both those things rather well. Most MS developers now use .Net unless you are into games stuff (C++) or very specific stuff (smart cards for example).
axe 3,000 staff and try to get the open source community to do their work for you... that's pretty low, even for MS. I can only hope that the community roundly tells them to shove it up their collective arses but that'd probably be wishful thinking.
The TCP/IP part that they can't release this way is "licensed by a third party". I don't understand that. If "licensed from a third party" and therefore not belonging to Microsoft to give away, I would understand.
The article made it pretty clear it was talking about this single portion of the whole .Net beast, and not the whole thing.
Bye Bye anyway, you clearly won't be missed.
Has the original devavation of "Apache" been lost on Micro$haft? as in "a patchy" server, a little freudian slip methinks.