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If You Port It, They Will Come

Posted by timothy on from the or-they-will-get-by-regardless dept.

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."

2 of 373 comments (clear)

  1. DUH by ljaguar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Holy crappy developemental platform Obvious man!

    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 .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.)

    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.

  2. Not for me, thanks by AirLace · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.