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McAfee, Macromedia Flirting With F/OSS Community
xbsd writes "Those computer industry specialists claiming that the end of Linux is fast approaching may be interested in two recent movements inside the industry. Two weeks ago, McAfee, one of the world leaders in computer security products, launched its first commercial antivirus solution for Linux, and just yesterday, Macromedia announced that it is joining the Eclipse Foundation and plans to deliver a next-generation rich Internet application (RIA) development tool code-named Zorn based on the popular open-source IDE."
Shows his lack of background knowledge. He brings up the fact that Mac OS X uses a BSD kernel (which, if you've ever written assembly code on both platforms you know it's very unlike Linux), and then somehow tries to relate that to Linux's lack of easy-to-use menus?
Newsflash. The kernel doesn't make the menu look slick.
Why are they wasting their time with a new initiative when most of their existing products are not usable on Linux?
I still can't create flash content on Linux; and I can't even use shockwave applets.
The odds of people believing Linux will somehow overtake, replace, otherwise compete with Windows on the consumer and workplace desktop are inversely proportional to the odds of those people ever spending any time in programming and end-user customer support.
/all" at a prompt on XP through the nail removal with pliers like torture of dependency resolution.
Linux is the fitting shoe being worn by an army of geeks who believe that difficult and esoteric is better than easy and obvious. Some of them are merely children who aren't old enough to have fought with DOS to get things like Doom and Syndicate to run properly. Most aren't old enough to have ever had to twiddle bits day in and day out and grow tired of it before the age of modern professionally supported GUIs. There are however a huge number who should definitely know better, especially those who did years in the Unix early days.
Do time in the end-user support trenches and you should quickly realize that they aren't ready for Linux and never will be as it currently exists. Of course, those who do realize this, instead of re-examining their position, will quickly conclude that the end-users are mentally retarded and they the Linux users are demigods of intellect who know better.
It's that arrogance in the Linux community regarding Windows and its users that is consistantly going to be its undoing. That inability to recognize that Linux was dumped out of the bowels of one of the most horrendous OS species ever to slouch across a computer, is a server OS and not an end-user desktop OS, and is at roughly the same stage of useability as DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 but instead is celebrated for precisely those reasons is mind boggling and rightfully so to the outside Windows workaday world.
It's like trying to make your people do a production run of seven thousand parts on a two-axis CNC retrofit Bridgeport with manual Z quill running on hand input codes and looking down on a five-axis center running from point and click cad/cam just because someone was throwing out the Bridgeports and you got them for free while the center would cost money being paid to, gasp, a corporation.
How dare anyone be expected to pay for something that works? That's awful. Better they should get their tools for free, even if they don't work right and have to in fact be made by scratch from blueprints noted in a language you don't read. Any manufacturing plant that tried to work their shop the way Linux works, would be put out of business by their local tech high school's junior class, never mind a competitor who had half a brain. "So we have to make all the shell mills, flute mills, lathe bits, and pretty much everything else from scratch before we start this work? And we have to finish in the same amount of time as if we had the centers you should have bought? Uh boss, come over here to the bandsaw and put your head down there under the blade for a minute. I want to show you something."
This statement comes from a programmer, software/hardware and network support tech, Linux and Windows user/dual-booter, former OS/2 user/supporter (I'm free, I'm free!). Not some Windows luser, no matter how much you want to think otherwise. Difficult is not beautiful, hand written configuration files for everything is moronic and asking for a cut from Occam's Razor, and free does not beat paid support. I'd rather keep chasing AV and AS definitions on Windows than trying to step the same people who can't execute "ipconfig
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Let's really be honest about what Macromedia is doing. They are going to leverage the Eclipse IDE for building a their new development platform and they will get the platform for Free. However their server side technology is not free and is not going to be OSS. It is in fact, rather expensive for what it is.
This is all very lame. They are effectively riding on the coat tails of everyone else's hard work to sell their server products. This kind of corporate free loading shouldn't be tolerated.
Also, do we *really* want Macromedia participating in the development of eclipse, a well designed ide and software platform? Flash has been an ever evolving mess of crap since it's inception. In fact, it's still crap or they would have decided that the current Flash IDE was still useful, and they would have not decided to camp others work and get a free IDE.
Note that Coldfusion was an allaire product and was not orginally developed by Macromedia.