Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Don't Be a Sharecropper

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the stuff-to-read dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Tim Bray, best known as an XML Heavy, has an entertaining rant about why you should be developing for *n*x, OSS, or (especially) the Web. Because if you're on a proprietary platform, you're a "sharecropper"."

1 of 431 comments (clear)

  1. Announce the Obvious by Idealius · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I just had a conversation about this topic with one of my co-workers: Seems Microsoft just lets new software markets run until a clear victor is decided by the end users, then they completely redo it and destroy the competition taking the valuable ideas from the previous victor.

    One way to go is to cross-platform develop. Most of the development I do is for games and as such I use allegro:

    http://www.allegro.cc/

    If you go to the site you'll see plenty of mediocre games, but once you realize the power and dev-friendliness behind the allegro library you'll be hooked.

    One could create an OpenGL accelerated game (using AllegGL) without changing a line of code! Realistically, you would want to change some code anyway, but everyone interested in game development should check it out.

    The only thing it's missing is a bonified network library. It has some out there, just none that I would consider complete or complete & useful.

    Can't wait to finish the game and then release it for DOS, Windows 98, ME, 2K, XP, Linux -- possibly Mac and even BeOS! (stability issues with the last two, I believe.)