acceptance of industry standards does indeed make standards-based software development much easier. And if a truly open version of Hailstorm were developed, I would not hesitate to jump on the bandwagon when the time came. Whatever the license, as long as it is free-as-in-speech, I will be reasonably happy with it. My concern is that there will probably be many developers who will not stop to consider the ramifications of working with MS Hailstorm, simply because it looks to be the defacto "standard", when it might be better to either 1) put up with the inconvenience of not having such a framework, or 2) develop for ourselves an open framework similar to Hailstorm, but without the licensing, copyright, and IP issues. Anyway, thanks for the clarification. I hope the articles were informative. Dave On Thursday 31 May 2001 15:48, thus spake Joshua Jore: > Perhaps I should have clarified myself. I like what hailstorm is doing > for pushing SOAP and RPC in general into the teeming masses of devices. > As a corporate developer, this sort of thing just makes my life so much > easier. It's not as if I haven't had other ways to get stuff done this > whole time, this just happens to be a new way. So for all that, it's > nifty stuff. > > The other bit, and this is a biggie, is the control this gives to MS > over the whole protocol. Since MS holds all the authentication and > related data there's a huge gaping wide chasm between the raw MS > implementation and MS-less hailstorm. I'm likely to check out Sun's JXTA > since I've actually read more stuff on that and it seems less likely to > be an analogue to selling my soul to MS's data centers. > > Essentially, I like the idea of a Megaco-less Hailstorm. I won't, > however, be using Hailstorm anytime soon given it's current > dependancies. I just think the issue is more complex than Hailstorm == > Microsoft.Bad(). Unless I'm missing something I'd probably really like a > GNU (or even better, BSD) licensed Hailstorm. > > Josh Jore > > ___SIG___ > -- "Nihil tam munitum quod non expugnari pecunia possit. (No fortification is such that it cannot be subdued with money." - Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 B.C.