[Pipet Devel] clarification on Piper vs. .NET

[J.W. Bizzaro]

A number of people have told me that .NET is another name for Microsoft's
future product line, the entire product line.  If that is the case, how could
Piper ever hope to compete?  Piper, after all, is not an operating system, or
a word processor, etc.  What is Piper trying to achieve?

When I say that Piper is a "GNU alternative to .NET", I mean that it is a Free
Software alternative to Microsoft's recent adoption of the concept of
distributing application components.  That's pretty much it.  Piper cannot
possibly replace Microsoft's entire product line.

Also, note that I use the word "alternative" and NOT "equivalent" or "copy". 
Piper may be used instead of Microsoft's distributed application system, but
Piper is NOT a technical or free equivalent.  The concept may be the same, but
Piper and .NET are taking some very different approaches.

If you want to compare Piper with something concrete (as concrete as Micosoft
vaporware can ever be), you can compare it to BizTalk.  It's probably
something like BizTalk mated with AVS and Gnutella.  But, since BizTalk forms
an integral part of .NET, we can also say that Piper compares to .NET...in
some ways.

And, please note that we don't want to say that Piper will not be usable until
it is a Microsoft Killer.  We should get it running ASAP, and then add
features from there.  Let's try to get Piper running before BizTalk is, which,
from recent announcements**, will be early next year.

** http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-2871745.html?tag=st.ne.1002.srchres.ni

Cheers.
Jeff
-- 
J.W. Bizzaro                                           jeff at bioinformatics.org
Director, Bioinformatics.org: The Open Lab     http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
               -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
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