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Talk to the GNUWin II Team
imevil writes "GNUWin II is a collection of Free Software for Windows, and it also includes articles about Free Software and explanation pages. It is multilingual (it was born as a Swiss product). You can browse the CD online or download the ISO from one of our mirrors. The GNUWin II team is ready to answer to your questions, about GNUWin II, and also about GNU Generation, the student association at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne who gave birth to the GNUWin project."
- dealers choice
I think these two words spell out the biggest problem I have with the M$ Windows world. I much prefer 'users choice' which I only seem to get in the Open Source world.
I was a hardcore Windows developer. I downloaded a lot of free software, started to like the open source concept, and now I have Linux installed on both my home computers and I write open source apps. I just wanted to say that open source on Windows is a good thing, even for the Linux community.
"DOS" is just another application on the system, all it does is fire up command.com. No more different than "bash" fires up /bin/sh. There's no reason not to use a better CLI if you need one, and they do exist because I've seen 'em.
Thing is, they're pretty much irrelevant. It's just the CLI vs GUI thing; Windows is a GUI driven OS, and there's really no need for DOS save backwards compatibility.
Fankly I'd love to see the OOP goodness of COM partnered with the process control and flexibility of a good CLI like bash. Which is why I wonder why COM (or something like it if it's so abhorrent to use something MSFT invented) hasn't been implemented in the linux world.
Heck, they could start with a consistent method of cut n' pasting.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
DLL Hell.
Windows already runs more software then linux.
People who use windows often pirate copies of commercial software so they don't need or want open source software.
Believe it or not, there are people who prefer to use open source software on windows. Some of these people consider piracy to be ethically problematic.
The biggest point about open source software is not price, but freedom. Even though I get Microsoft products legally for $5 a CD (one perk of university life), I still don't like the closed security model, the license restrictions and the understanding that using the software after I leave the university will require shelling out $400.
The fact that I use (and pay for) some closed source software on windows, does not mean that I should not benefit from open source software when available.
>People who use windows often pirate copies of commercial software so they don't need or want open source software.
I'd say people as a whole don't like getting into the porn pop-under world of serial websites, P2P spyware, etc just to use a common app. It makes you wonder why the software world is such a free-market failure. Not only are the major players few in number, but they can afford to let others copy their software just for the name recognition, format dominance, and free advertising.
There's also the question of ethics. I'm sure technophobes wonder why they have to either pay through the nose or "steal" and office suite. I wonder how many acrobat users out there know there are free Windows alternatives to producing PDFs?
I think Open souce and linux can only win by becoming more prominent in the windows world. Not only will people go for the easy install and stop serial/crack hunting they'll be exposed to OSS philosophy, name recognition, etc which can only help the transition from Windows to Linux, that is if that's all you care about.
That way you actually encourage people switching to linux.
Lemme stick some numbers out there for you. Of all the people currently using Windows, I would only say that about 10% feel comfortable in a Unix environment. And lets say that another 5% are beginners, but are willing to try. And of that 15% who might switch, at least half will switch right back again. So really, you only have roughly 7% of all personal computer users that would end up choosing Linux (and feeling comfortable with it).
Given these numbers, why would you even want to keep open source programs like Mozilla, Apache and the GIMP away from 93% of your possible user base? Why not expose as many people as possible to the chewy goodness of open source? Why cut them out because they are unwilling or unable to use anything except a operating system from Redmond, WA?
Free as in speech, indeed.
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That's really impressive until you remember that the whole, original, blasted POINT of Windows was to present a Graphical User Interface.
The fact that there exists a backhanded way to sit there, at a console, and figure out how to direct buttons to be pushed is exactly like something that's a good idea, but backwards. The fact that this is the most efficent way to conduct this automated task is nothing short of laughable.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
"Linux (as distributed by Linus)" is a kernel. There are no applications. There is no commandline interface, because the shell isn't there. There is *nothing* but a kernel. So I think its fair to call a working system GNU/Linux. Windows will boot without GNU tools. It is complete unto itself.
Well - yes and no. Yes, in that COM has "proper" scripting support, but no, in that most apps don't expose services in such a way. Believe me, OLE Automation as it was known when I learnt about it is a total pain in the ass for developers, the only reason it's possible AT ALL is that Windows IDEs have lots of wizards to do it all for you. It's not just a case of building a COM object, you've got to provide the IDispatch interface (to allow for method invocation), you've got to register it, give it a ProgID, set up the server when the app is running, deal with cases when then server isn't running so the app has to be specially started etc....
Don't get me wrong, OLE Automation is cool, but it's HARD and therefore rare outside of Microsofts own products. Also, it's harder to program. Because it's available via actual programming languages, to do something like access a file via WSH you create an object, call it's methods etc.
Scripting on Linux (with the command line) is totally, totally different. bash started out as a command line, and mutated into a programming language as well. All command line apps support scriptability to some extent because they take input, parameters and output. It's crude, but it works surprisingly well.
Oh, and for those who are wondering about GUI apps - the boys over at freedesktop.org are working on a new message bus architecture, similar to DCOP, called DBUS, which looks like amongst many other cool things will allow for simple object scriptability in a desktop-neutral fashion, from the command line or other languages. It's not as powerful as ActiveX, but then again most of the power of COM/OLE/ActiveX was never used anyway, so that's not too bad, and because it should be simple and easy to add support hopefully we'll see lots of apps adopting it.
Disclaimer: nothing about DBUS is actually official, it's a bunch of KDE and GNOME hackers working on something that may or may not be adopted by either project. You know how it goes - it'll be adopted when it's shown to be mature and better than the current solutions.
why make it so that it runs on windows. Aren't you discouraging people from using linux by doing that?
Because it's better to advertise on TV during the superbowl than put a small ad in the back of a trade journal?
Just getting the concept of free software across to the windows using world is a major feat.
The main obstacle to moving to Linux for many people is the perception that "it's too different" despite the fact that in any discussion about window managers every other post usually complains "they're too the same".
Way to go on this one moderators. Um, ever heard of CORBA or ORBit? They too are ways of moving objects around (CORBA being the standard, ORBit being an implementation thereof). Yet, CORBA is considered an accepted standard. DCOM is not. Microsoft once again decided to reinvent the wheel. There's no reason you can't use CORBA on Windows
.conf or .rc or .ini or even have no extension at all, let alone standardizing the format of the files. The only standard way of getting data from some applications to others is as a stream of text, it's very difficult to move structured data around on Unix - why do you think, after decades, that it's still so hard to cut and paste in X windows? Maybe XML can address that, but your point stands: why reinvent the wheel?
Yes, there are ways, but that's not the point. COM is deeply ingrained into Windows. You can use the same basic technique to request that the OS add a user as to request that Excel draws a graph for you as to query SQL server on a remote machine. Once you get your head around it, it's enormously powerful.
Meanwhile, on Unix, they can't even decide if a configuration file should be
Authors of Windows programs generally adhere to no standards except their own. Open source projects are pretty predicatable.
That simply isn't true. Example: if I want to pipe the output of lynx to a file, I need to use -source on the command line. If I want to do the exact same thing in wget, it's -o. In netcat, I can just use the redirection of the shell. Open Source programmers are notorious for doing their own thing (and why shouldn't they, not as if it will hurt their revenue stream). In the commercial world, on NT or Unix, playing well with others is much more important.
"I must have downloaded/purchased hundrerds of Windows apps over the years and I have NEVER, let me say that again, NEVER found myself in a situation where I had to go "get" something to make that application run."
Dude you've never had a windows app missing a .dll, or that had a conflicting .dll? Never had to go download DirectX*.* to get something to work? Dude, how long ya been in the business again?
"Believe me dude, I'm a computer pro."
Dude, I believe you, I believe you.