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If You Port It, They Will Come
An anonymous reader submits "An excellent rant^H^H^H^Harticle is up over at LinuxLaboratory.org, encouraging proprietary companies that make software for Windows to provide a full-featured equivalent for Linux. The argument being made that users aren't cheap skates, they will pay for good software. But many companies that port software to Linux will only ship stripped-down versions, leading to people not buying the software when they can buy the complete version for Windows, then the company not providing the software for Linux because it didnt sell. The argument is made that if the Linux version were equivalent to the Windows version, then people will buy it."
Really what would be nice would be if companies would include both Windows and Linux versions on the same disc. The two versions can share most of their data files and resources -- only the executable portions of the applications need be modified. If both versions sit on the same disc, would that not solve the problems and lower long-term production costs? Plus it would force companies to make the two versions more similar.
-James
Linux has how much of the desktop market ? 10% ?
Why would a company devote time and resources for only a 10% return where they could spend 100% effort into marketing to a 90% MS desktop market. Added to that whatever FUD that MS or such pulls out with GPL myths etc, and you will scare people away from developing for linux.
And at the same time, if there were all the good ports of software for linux, I think a lot more people would have switched to it.
A catch-22. I dont' know the solution
You mean like these guys who posted serial numbers for the Linux version of Opera here at Slashdot ? (at an Opera article some months ago)
And like these people who would rather download distro iso instead of buying a full distribution ?
And like these people who would use OpenOffice because it's for free instead of paying a very moderate price for SunOffice ?
There main arguments has in fact already proven wrong: Open Source users are unfortunately often cheap skates.
This "stripped-down" argument is just a bad excuse for warezed Windows programs.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Holy crappy developemental platform Obvious man!
.rpm only thing? Why aren't you taking advantage of XRENDER? I want my aa fonts, dammit. Where the ALSA version? It doesn't cut and paste right! (It never will. As long as gnome and kde doesn't work perfectly with each other, it ain't working on one of them.)
Which came first?
Poor Linux port sales or poor featured linux port? or...
Not so cool environment for commercial programs??
Let's face it. Linux programs are high upkeep projects. Wrote a motif software? People call it ugly. Wrote your own widget? People still bitch. Wrote it in GTK 1? Gotta upgrade to GTK 2 now. Nevermind all those bitching KDE users. Go ahead, write it with QT3 and the fancy KDE3 integration. I'm still bitching; I use windowmaker. It's x86 only? Mac linux people whine. It doesn't work with the latest glibc? It's redhat only? WTF is this
Think of all the varieties of linux. To cater to every single one of them out there, we need exactly what we have now: open source projects with volunteers and an active community. That doesn't sound like commercial software to me.
Face the music: there are not enough users on Linux to justify having any developers work on a port of, say, Photoshop. It would take millions of dollars to port, and nobody will buy it. Given that Linux has maybe 0.5% of the desktop, and that maybe 1% of that will ever buy software that costs more than $30, I doubt the expense is justified.
How about promoting more useful projects like Wine/Winelib instead? A company with even marginal resources (Codeweavers) can do wonders with Wine, such as run MS Office and MSIE quite well. If some other company spent some more resources on improving it, it would be able to run 90% of the apps out there, including Photoshop and all the other stuff. It would also have a good chance of increasing that 0.5% market share to something more reasonable.
If you still don't believe me, just consider what would happen if Adobe ported Photoshop to Linux. 10 or 15 people would actually buy it. It would get press coverage. And then, nothing would happen and no other company will bother porting anything. Kind of like what happened to Loki.
Users, including me, will pay for good software up to and no further than the point when equivalent, if not better, freeware/open source/[insert other it's-free license here] software comes along.
I'm a Linux user, and I wouldn't consider myself a cheapskate. However, while I spend a considerable fraction of my annual income on new computers, hardware and geek toys, the total amount I spend on stand-alone software is £0.00.
This isn't because I'm 'cheap'. Nor is it the case that I pirate software instead of buying it. The fact is, I don't need to buy software. Some packages, like virus scanners and Windows performance enhancers are obsolete on Linux anyway, while other programs like Microsoft Word have sufficiently powerful and free couterparts (I use TeX myself, but others say great things about OpenOffice).
At the end of the day, the only other killer app for my computer is Web browsing and e-mail, with which Mozilla and Evolution cope gracefully.
If other Linux users have a similar computing environment to mine, then I would go so far as to say that porting proprietary software to Linux, whether full-featured or cut-down, is redundant. This may not be what the new generation of younger (and often naive) Linux 'advocates' want to hear, but the truth is that Linux is doing just fine without proprietary consumer software. If you are trying to convince the software firms that there could be a flourishing market for their tools on Linux, you are probably not telling them the entire truth.
Only Linux users will buy it. I'm tired of #include linux/network.h, we need full, cross-platform Unix games. Not Linux-only.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
Commercial software is an antithesis to the primary advantage of the Linux platform: openness. If you try to make Linux into just another delivery vehicle for commercial software you will fail because Microsoft and Apple are far better at creating operating systems for that purpose. Loki already bit it and many other vendor attempts to release commercial software on Linux have failed.
Linux is a niche market with a lot of users that will not pay for commercial software because the software is not worth the cost (monetary or freedom) to them.
Run Windoze if you want to pay money for software you can't modify. I use Windoze to run games, for example.
-Kevin
Perhaps AbiWord, KWord or OpenOffice Writer work for well you, but none of them even begins to compare with WordPerfect for professional writers or secretaries -- give me a break, the functionality simply isn't there!
The area of professional-quality office software is not dominated by free software in Linux -- frankly, there isn't any! OpenOffice is finally starting to come close with the 6.0 release, but still suffers on the stability and format compatibility front. I still use WordPerfect for Linux every day and crossover office when I need to use MS Office.
There are no Linux equivalents. For a big writing project or serious work, give me WordPerfect 8 over AbiWord or KWord any old day. AbiWord and Gnumeric? KWord and KSpread? I repeat -- give me a break. Obviously you are a computer professional and not a professional in some other industry... a word processor is a word processor is a word processor, but there are inifinite shades of nuanced difference between bash 1.14 and bash 2.0, right?
And by the way, I'd buy Nero for Linux in a heartbeat.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Forgive the rant, but this NEEDS to be said.
:-/
Do you REALLY think that everyone running Windows has these same problems? Do you really think that someone at Microsoft sat there and said, "Well, you know what, maybe we'll just make life miserable for everyone. How about we program a BSOD to occur with random frequency somewhere between every 3 and 5 days, just so people don't get too used to that 'stability' thing."
Hello! Earth to Linux user! You have a driver problem. Most Windows boxes do NOT have these problems, and if they do, the person using the box calls up his/her computer person and it's fixed the next day. Go check your system log (you DO know where that is in Windows 2000, right?) and figure out what's causing the problem. Then troubleshoot it and fix it.
I swear, Linux has a problem with a driver and you guys are out there doing everything from installing driver after driver to freakin' recompiling the kernel. Windows 2000 has a problem and your first response is "Wow, Microsoft sucks! I don't know what to do! Um, how about I just complain on Slashdot about how much Microsoft sucks!"
Here's a hint: Learn how to troubleshoot your system (besides upgrading to Service Pack 2, because that probably won't fix a driver problem. You did listen to those warnings about installing unsigned drivers, right?) If you've looked at the system log and really can't figure out what could be causing the problem, go get on Google Groups and hit up the microsoft.public.* newsgroups. There are some really great people on there who volunteer their time to help you with problems like this.
So yes, that's my rant, and I decided not to post anonymously because I really think more people need to hear this. Mod me down as a troll or whatever, but you know if the guy was having the same problems with Linux, the person who posted the solution (even if it WAS just "RTFM") would get modded up.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
As with many things in life, your opinion will depend greatly on your perpsective.
;-).
To my knowledge (which may be biased living in a so-called third-world country where software is really expensive), the biggest customer of commercial software is big business.
Granted, quite soon open-source solutions will extend from the file/print/web/mail server to the desktop, and include the basics the average administrative user needs (email, documents, spreadsheets, simple databases).
But, currently there are no real solutions for the business-critical software that actually pays the bills (unless you do web design or server hosting, which may not pay the bills either).
Coming from a mechanical engineering background, the software that we spend the real money on (one license can often pay the entire balance of all the other non-technical software) are things like 3d associative Computer Aided Design Software, software for Finite Element Analysis, Computational Fluid Dynamics.
I imagine other high-tech industries will also have software they depend on, for which there is currently absolutely no viable open-source solution.
Fortunately, a lot of this software does already run on free OSs (notably all the CFD software I listed, and also most of MSCs structural analysis software), and Pro/E will apparently be coming soon. But, of course, there were not ports from windows, rather ports from commercial Unix (in many cases, so were the windows versions).
The problem for us is that we can't migrate until all the tools one person will use are available, since work often requires interaction between at least two pieces of software. But, presently Pro/E is the biggest piece missing, and we hope that this will be addressed by the end of the year.
Then, we only need to replace the stuff the use, but I think that's going to require a different kind of solution, unless it's easy to port VB on MSSQL software to linux.
Please, don't do other linux (and OSS) users a disservice just by stating that all your home computing needs are catered for by current OSS software, thus there is no need for proprietary commercial software.
Having more linux users around is a good thing, since that will mean that hardware vendors and website designers will have to take notice, and hopefully the number of HTML emails will drop
The quickest way to do that, is to ensure that businesses can migrate easily to linux/OSS without losing the functionality they currently have, at which point they will start to see the additional advantages they hadn't considered.