After watching the Longhorn- RSS and Browsing Teams 1 hour video, I was so amazed. At first it was something really unexpected from Microsoft. Supporting RSS at OS Level? Having APIs for RSS? Is Microsoft approaching to the open source guys by supporting RSS deeply?

Days passed and I see the things much clearer.

After reading this passage, you’ll understand the Microsoft way and Microsoft’s idea about computers and computer users (plus developers). The question you should ask to yourself is “What is an Operating System?”
According to Encyclopedia Britannica Operating system is :

Software that controls the operation of a computer, directs the input and output of data, keeps track of files, and controls the processing of computer programs.

With one sentence maybe this is the best explanation you can find.
My point is, an operating system’s duty is not supporting custom operations. For example, your can not expect an operating system to have an internal spread sheet support or word processing support.
Those are called: Applications or simply software and from Britannica: Instructions that tell a computer what to do.

Quote from MS RSS developers’ manager: “We want developers to build good applications rapidly without going all through the hassle of rewriting lots of code.” (I don’t really remember what he exactly said but his point was this.)

This is a great objective for a project! However, is operating system level suitable for this kind of support?

Generally when developers write their codes, if they plan to re-use the same code again and again, they put the re-usable code together and call it a library. They share these libraries with each other and call it open source. Most of the time the reason they share is just for the sake of sharing or feeling sorry for the future developers who will go through the same problem. This is not a foreign term for most of us. For an open-source developer it’s the foundation of all software. (Java, C, PHP, Perl, Python and many more all live with shared libraries.)

However MS mind has a different point of view. As it seems they see the open-source community not useful way for software evolution. Instead of allowing people to access open libraries they hide their code. They bury their code deep under the OS to hide it.

It’s the main reason that any MS operating system will not be better, faster and useful then any simple open-source operating system supported with vast open-source libraries. When you boot your MS box, it will deal with huge amount of garbage that you’ll never even use through all your life. The OS will try to handle hundreds of thousands (soon possibly millions) if API calls and not give you a hint of performance and usability.

When you need a support for a special application for like RSS you don’t build it on OS level, you “extend” the OS with a library. But it is so far for MS to build a library and distribute it for free. They want us to pay for every bit of the code they wrote. That is MS point of view.

In the end I can not blame them not to give anything for free. They are a company for making profit. But I can’t let anyone to tell me that :
“Longhorn loves RSS”.
No one is yet stupid to believe this.What I’d say :“Longhorn loves money”.

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