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Windows Beat Unix, But it Won't Beat Linux
Onymous Hero writes "The amazing thing isn't that Windows beat the pants off Unix; it's that so many of the Unix companies survived until today. An article from eWeek looks at why Linux has been so successful where Unix failed." From the article: "While the Unix companies were busy ripping each other to shreds, Microsoft was smiling all the way to the bank. Because the Unix businesses couldn't settle on software development standards, ISVs (independent software vendors) had to write not a single application to get the whole Unix market, they had to write up to a half-dozen different versions. Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems? "
Make that three.
NeXT are still in the Unix business.
.. you just have to choose your API's/frameworks carefully.
.. as long as you're developing on Unix.
i mean, its not so difficult to set up a project that will cross-compile, use GTK+ or one of the other, smart, GUI libs, heck even SDL+libcairo works wonders, and then get it running on Solaris, Linux, *BSD's, OSX, and Windows
but you certainly can't easily do it the other way around: develop on Windows, and port across. It can of course be done (with GTK+, etc), but its not as easy as it is to do under Unix.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Micro$oft may be smiling all the way to the bank, but when they realize the bank systems are running on the mainframe, they'll cry all the way home.
"You killed my yogurt!" --Fred Fredburger
And it won't for one simple reason. Its open source and free. Time and time again people say that Linux won't be able to last another year against Windows, and time and time again Linux is still here and stronger than ever. It is for one simple reason. It will last so long as people still have an interest in it and keep developing for it. Theoretically, Linux could last forever against Microsoft because there will always be people who don't want to buy into them. And there will always be people who want software for free and be able to modify their software. We could sit at 24 million Linux users for the next century and be fine. Still using Linux? (version 8.6.12-ac3) You bet I am.
Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems?
Well let me think... I'll write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, after they pry my cold dead fingers off my smoking gun.
If Microsoft was mass, stupidity would be gravity.
From TFA:Hold on a second...according to Ulrich Drepper, the LSB was fundamentally broken.
(Note: see the Slashdot discussion regarding Ulrich's assertions here.
If Ulrich is on target, LSB, far from being the saving grace of Linux, could well be its downfall.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I guess it is now official: *BSD is dying :7
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Cost
Back when Unix ruled the world you programmed in C at the OS level, you had to understand about pipes and processors and threads and lots of other elements of the OS. This meant it was a pain to re-learn across all the other platforms.
Now there are (for enterprises) only two real choices, Java and
Linux is winning in large enterprises because its the cheapest, and safest, way to run Oracle RAC and J2EE Application Servers. If you really don't care about the OS (and most of the time you don't) then you might as well pick Linux.
If programming was still at the OS level then IMO Linux would still struggle as you'd have to understand a lot more about it. J2EE in paticular has made hardware a commodity, and in the commodity world Linux is the best choice.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I always wanted to get my hands on some of that stuff to learn and play on. The cost was way too high iirc.
I got rid of my old unix magazines from back in those days or I could get some pricing for you all.
all the best,
drew
--
http://www.ourmedia.org/user/17145
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
haha I know this is off topic, but...
When clicking on the story to ready it, there was a sun ad saying "With their evil systems, it's no wonder their name rhymes with hell"
haha Classy.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
Take installation. Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
Linux zealots are far too forgiving when judging the difficultly of Linux configuration issues and far too harsh when judging the difficulty of Windows configuration issues. Example comments:
User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Linux?"
Zealot: "Oh that's easy! If you have Redhat, you have to download quake_3_rh_8_i686_010203_glibc.bin, then do chmod +x on the file. Then you have to su to root, make sure you type export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5 but ONLY if you have that latest libc6 installed. If you don't, don't set that environment variable or the installer will dump core. Before you run the installer, make sure you have the GL drivers for X installed. Get them at [some obscure web address], chmod +x the binary, then run it, but make sure you have at least 10MB free in
User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Windows?"
Zealot: "Oh God, I had to install Quake 3 in Windoze for some lamer friend of mine! God, what a fucking mess! I put in the CD and it took about 3 minutes to copy everything, and then I had to reboot the fucking computer! Jesus Christ! What a retarded operating system!"
So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that what seems easy and natural to Linux geeks is definitely not what regular people consider easy and natural. Hence, the preference towards Windows.
Linux is following the well-worn path to self destruction. LSB doesn't even have a C++ Gui api, let alone a media framework!
Windows will "win", because choice creates chaos.
Choice and chaos means though that by the time Linux is "beaten", we'll be on the next cycle of rebirth - and there will be a "Windows beat Linux, but wont beat Ubuntu (or whatever)" post... to whatever has replaced slashdot by then.
has he ever actually tried to install a 3rd party piece of software in linux?
imagine if Microsoft had to edit the source code of every 3rd party application in order for the 'setup.exe' program to work.
that is the situation we have with linux, where some programmer must modify the programs installation code so that it will work on a particular flavor of linux.
go and try to download almost any 3rd party program for linux. it will either be in source code form, or it will say something like 'rpms for mandrake, rpms for suse, rpms for fedora core, debs for debian' and then various versions of these depending on mandrake 9 or 10, fedora core 3 or 4, etc etc etc.
to get java installed on the various linux platforms requires editing various text files and visiting several different websites.
the 'linux standard base' is a wonderful idea but people have been trying it for 10 years and it hasnt worked. there is something fundamental in the 'open source' leaders in general that destroys ideas of backwards compatability and simple consitency.
I find the whole question rather odd. You can just as easily write a single application that would run on all UNIX systems of a particular flavor.
Why group the different UNIX vendors together then complain that they are different? Why not put microsoft in the same group with them and complain that what you write for UNIX does not run on Microsoft?
What?
i mean, its not so difficult to set up a project that will cross-compile, use GTK+ or one of the other, smart, GUI libs
But, for Windows:-
but you certainly can't easily do it the other way around: develop on Windows, and port across. It can of course be done (with GTK+, etc)
In other words you can do it easily on Unix using GTK+, but it's harder to do it on Windows as you have to use GTK+.
I must be missing something, but this seems to be the most extreme example of double standards I have ever seen.
the Unix businesses couldn't agree on software development standards
Oh, and Linux can?
This is exactly what you get when you have the open source, we don't need no stinking standards operating system.
If you are running a small company you don't have the time or other resources to support a hundred versions-- you go where the users are.
I can see Linuxers reading this article and spitting their coffee into their monitors (wooooot).
Great falme-bait for a Friday!
Cogito Ergo Sum
The penguin will smash the Windows and will find Bill Gates and stick that goddamned paperclip into any one of his open orifaces.
TUX 4 LIFE
Why is it that for Linux to succeed Microsoft must fail and vice versa? Surely there's room for both of them in the market and competition is a healthy thing to prevent stagnation. No one looks for ATi to destroy Nvidia or wants Sony to put Nintendo out of the market so why the constant desire to see Microsoft fail? I actually like a lot of what Microsoft is trying to acheive with its next round of software. At the same time I love the progress made by Debian, Ubuntu, E17 etc. one spurs the other. If Microsoft fails surely thats bad for the American economy and in the long term means less jobs for people like ourselves, it's almost like wishing another Katrina on yourselves, doesn't make much sense to me.
http://jtauber.com/blog/2005/09/23/microsoft_blame s_sun
No surprise!!
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
" Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems?"
Now how does that make sense? Microsoft didn't meet anyone elses standards either. If anything even though the Unix guys didn't exactly pull it off, they still did a better job meeting standards than Microsoft. The truth is they were all doing their own thing, just MS managed to sell enough to get the userbase it needed to make developing for their platform a no-brainer.
In short, it wasn't Windows standards compliance or lack thereof that made them win, Windows won in spite of it.
Sigs are awesome huh?
you're so funny.
Meh.
WHat is up with all of the osnews.com clone stories????
"In a world without walls and fences, who needs Windows and Gates?"
From the article:
The second advantage was it had Linus Torvalds.
There are other open-source Unix operating systems: the BSDs.
None of them, though, have had even a fraction of Linux's success.
Because Torvalds is the single leader of Linux, it has avoided the old Unix trap of in-fighting, which continues to bedevil the BSDs.
Excuse me? Sure, there is in-fighting among the BSDs, but there is certainly more in-fighting and more competition among the Linux distributions.
For instance, the ports/packages of OpenBSD is inspired by FreeBSD's, while NetBSD's pkgsrc has been selected by DragonFlyBSD. OpenSSH, from OpenBSD, has been adopted by both FreeBSD and NetBSD (not to mention countless other OS) and pf has also been imported into FreeBSD and NetBSD. And so on and so forth. That does not sound like in-fighting to me.
So... in-fighting? Sure, there is competition between the BSDs, and a fair amount of sniping and name-calling, but I don't think this is worse (or better) than the in-fighting between the different Linux distributions.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
As hokey as it may sound, I think some of it has to do with the attitude or "coolness" surrounding Linux. When people were introduced to Linux, it was this new hip cool thing, and if you didn't know what Linux was, then you were out of the loop! Unix always conjured up images of the old greybeard sitting in the lab tinkering with the machines.
The business world loves to be hip and Linux certainly provided that.
Sure they were.
Besides, Apple of today is very much NeXT. Just look who's running it.
1. Most Unix operating systems ran on proprietary hardware only. NT could be installed on cheap hardware you could buy from a store.
2. The exception was SCO Unix. But SCO treated it exclusively as a high-end product, so it didn't end up on desktops.
3. No serious push was made to put Unix on the desktop. As a result, Microsoft was able to sell NT as an operating system that the majority of system administrators were familiar with, as opposed to Unix where almost nobody had it on their desktops.
If these issues had been knocked on the head, Unix might have stood a chance. As for "rival" versions all making different decisions, who gives a crap? So "Unix" wasn't one operating system, but several: if it was five different operating systems, then it had five chances to be successful. Any one of them could have succeeded and changed the market. None of them did, not because they were rivals, but because they all had at least one major flaw as documented above:
- AIX might have been successful had it been available for x86 and with low-cost desktop versions available that were properly pushed.
- Solaris might have been successful had it been available for x86 (before Linux) and with low-cost desktop versions available that were properly pushed.
- HPUX might have been successful had it been available for x86 and with low-cost desktop versions available that were properly pushed.
- DEC Tru64 might have been successful had it been available for x86 and with low-cost desktop versions available that were properly pushed.
Whether, of course, it would have been capable of being properly pushed, given Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop market in the early nineties, is open to question.What the summary documents is a nonsense and ignores the real issues. Arguing that AUX didn't succeed because it competed with Solaris would be like arguing MSDOS didn't succeed because it competed with CP/M. The fact all of these operating systems shared a brandname does not mean they didn't independently fail. They may have failed for the same reasons, but they didn't fail because they were all slightly different yet had a brandname and some code in common. That's ridiculous.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
As far as I can tell, Unix is still winning as an enterprise server OS, Between AIX and Solaris, there's a pretty nice chunk of Unix servers out there. (Not to mention IRIX or any other Unixes). Plus BSD's will never die, since the BSD licence >> than the GPL. Linux just was the "in" thing for nerds, and when the next OS fad comes along the article on here will be how windows killed Unix and Linux, but won't kill the resurgance of BeOS or something like that.
Would you rather have 1 tyrant (Bill Gates) 3,000 miles away or 3,000 tyrants (open sourcers) 1 mile away?
Cogito Ergo Sum
You have this comment saved up somewhere waiting for a chance to use it? I recognise it.
/ 1128201&threshold=-1&tid=156&tid=163&tid=8&tid=106
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/19
Come on, you can do better AC.
all the best,
drew
--
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/57503
Paper Plane 001 video at ourmedia
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems?
Lets see... Windows NT, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional, Windows 2003 Server(Standard Edition,Enterprise Edition,Datacenter Edition, Web Edition), Windows Vista
You would be out of your mind to think a application compiled on one of these platforms would work on all!
Reason #32767 not to use VB6: Integers are 2 bytes... Think about it!
Are you suggesting that there's a better way than writing everything for the curses library?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
someone tells microsoft about a problem, and microsoft ignores it. that means microsoft is evil.
someone tells open source people about a problem, and they get modded -1 troll. that means open source people are gods gift to humanity and know more about computers than anyone else and are right beyond reproach.
wonderful attitude.
On the side of the software box it says: System Requriements-
If a system doesn't meet the requriements the user has an old computer and needs to upgrade. World of Warcraft won't run on an 8088 machine and you wouldn't be happy with the CGA graphics version if one did exist anyway.
Cogito Ergo Sum
but:
Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems?
Seems a little bit oversimplified. I'm not directly affected because I don't use Microsoft software, but I've heard where I work that it takes months to verify if every service pack for Windows will work with existing software. And when I was a Windows developer, we were doing some pretty low level stuff with the authentication subystem, and things were very different between Win 98, 2000, and NT 4 (was that really still around then?). Granted, for a simple GUI app, Windows is very portable across its products, but if you get a little lower into the OS, things get nasty quick.
History says that if you build an app for Solaris first and that gains marketshare, then maybe it might be worthwhile to port it to other Unices if the development and porting costs can be recouped with sales and support. Linux has been changing that somewhat, but I'd still wager that most development houses that write for a Unix market almost always have Solaris as a primary platform.
As to why you'd do this (and to some extent, this is still valid), it's because Unices provide a stable, well-mature platform for apps and are capable of more processing power than your typical Windows system -- all desirable traits for an application that people are going to depend on. People use Windows because the time-to-market for development is typically shorter than that of Unix development, mostly due to the fact that 95% of the world can write an app on their Windows desktop and copy it to a Windows server platform without modification. Doesn't mean it's good code or a well-thought out development strategy, but it's an enabling technique that keeps Windows development prevalent in IT.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
What I usually read on the internet, is not that linux is dying, but that it is growing and that it will conquer the desktop market (well I am not seeing that happening right now either).
And that is the point. It's not if it's going to be around for a long time (it will be, for all the reasons the parent posted), but if it will grow to compete with windows on the desktop market. What is really stopping me right now from switching to a linux desktop is software support... I don't want to set up a server here, and I think I have the skills to use linux and do what I want, but the software isn't there. And the software will come, only if linux somehow finds its way to more homes (hmm I sense a paradoxical loop here).
So "being around" is not the problem with linux, the real problem is that people that want to use it (I know I do) should be able to... In my case, software support is stopping me.
... at least fix the "greater than 1%" to "less than 1%". By not doing so, you are not only a troll, but a god damned stupid one.
Meh.
Good grief what bull - anyone would think you've never been able to write large scale single source apps until you ship on one platform (Linux, Windows or the Mac, choose one). Between 1990 and 1994 I worked for Laser Scan (out of business for about a year now) www.laserscan.co.uk. We wrote GIS systems for VMS and 6 Unix platforms. All single source, in C, using X11 and Motif with Oracle I think, using object based code (the GNU C++ compiler wasn't up to much in 1990 when we had to choose). There was I think one header file with the few platform specific things in (like missing macros on Solaris) etc. I can't remember how many lines of code, but I think about the 1 million line mark, excluding comments. 11 years is a long time to try to remember that stuff.
But single source - that is the majority of your headache gone right there. Which leads to the next FALSE assertion:
Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems?
Write a single App for VMS and six competing Unix vendors from single source - why thats the same as write an app for seven different Linux vendors from single source. You STILL have the seven unique quality assurance and support problems because each distribution will be different.
It would be nice to assume that because you built it on RedHat it will run on Suse. Maybe it will most of the time. But will it always? And when it does not, will the cause necessarily always be the same when it fails on Linux vendor #2 compared to failing on Linux vendor #4? Maybe, Maybe not, that is the question, for alas quality assurance and support did not exist when he wrote plays in Stratford upon Avon.
Still, I'm sure the informed journo that wrote that article has a nice pay cheque.
Depends on your application.
I work with a system that is 95% system independent, it runs on anything from Windows to mainframes. After each release, the main code goes to platform porting to actually port it to the specific flavour of UNIX, i.e Solaris, AIX (4 and 5, difference between these releases), HP-UX, Tru64, Linux (both 32 and 65 bit). So, for a lot of applications, it is a huge mess porting to various platforms, each platform with their own porting group.
The problems with multiple UNIX flavors are not of much concern for most of the programs geeks write anyway, but for big mission critical systems, it's a hassle and a big and costly one.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
How can you not look at an article title like: "Windows beat Unix, but it won't beat Linux" and not laugh. Ha, Slashdot is freaking hilarious.
To the AC in the corner. You know who you are.
I commend you on the post. You write and communicate your ideas and thoughts very well. That will help greatly in your programming career. I do however, take exception as to the content of your post. You simply need more experience in dealing with different areas of computers.
Kill the command line? What about all the people who have to administrate these machines and automate that process? Command line tools and scripting is still the best way to do that. Until somebody makes a fully comprehensive set of GUI tools that duplicate the power and flexibility of command line tools, the command line will be of utmost importance to the productivity of computer professionals everywhere. Maybe you can start on that conversion process. Not a completely bad endeavour.
Red Hat should not allow their source code to be seen? I hope you meant something else and I misunderstood your intent. Please read up on the tenents of Free Software and Open Source and take those words to heart. This is your career and livelyhood in computers.
Too many flavors of Red Hat? Red Had is not my favorit distro out there, so any words I say will be biased in that regard. But in a sense, that is the core point. With so many different variants and distributions of Linux out there, people are free to pick and choose which one suits their needs the best. And when their needs change, they can change distros as well. It is a double edged sword. There is great power and flexibility in multiple versions, but that power is overwhelming to those who are just getting into the world of Linux.
-waves
My money is on the BSD to take a significant part of market share in the future although no where near what Linux will hold and take. However, I have seen very little on BSD in enterprise Clustering solutions.
Are there any companies successfully deploying BSD clusters that be used cost effectively in the enterprise realm? Or is this just something that Universities and the like are playing around with with little commercial applications.
JsD
dude... I know of hundreds that would work, and have worked.
Applications that followed a (sarcasm)lowly thing (/sarcasm) called "standards".
While I know for a fact MS Office 2000 would run on all of them - that's too much of a giveme..
but I bet...Hell, I bet even open office would run on every one of those.
I also know that firefox works on every one of those OS's, including NT Server..
oh yeah - Btw,
you forgot NT 4 Server..
;)
UNIX is not dead, it still has its market place that will remain for some time to come. Yes its not the biggest shipped operating system in the world but at the same time it still does the job it was designed to do in many cases. Its not only the lack of open standards that inhibits the UNIX market place its also the excessive costs of many of them. Look at Tru64 as a classic example. The licensing there is so restrictive even more so than Microsoft Windows. Not only did the prohibitive licensive costs kill it but also the issues that each individual OS had that would often be critical and the time to fix could often be several months. Then there was the issues of patching the OS often with each flavor having completely different methods and reliabilities when it came to patching. Many of the big unix operating systems that survive today are extremely good at what they do. I dont see linux taking the market share from them in their sectors any time soon however as linux matures and support contracts for certain operating systems die off it will be time to switch.. but to what?
An example that we have is the Compaq Tru64 turns into HP Tru64.. thats fine until HP EOLed the OS that we had as our base and wanted us to port all our applications over to HPUX on Itanium. Now the Itanium is EOL WTF do we do now? Our account manager likes to mention that they have a strategy to deal with this but its not what we want. We use the advanced features of our Tru64 platforms all the time and realistically there are no products that directly compete or complete our solution on different platforms. It must have been a business decision to turn so many long standing VERY VERY happy customers away from using HPs products again.. ohh so smart!
There can't be a competition because Windows WILL NOT permit Linux's existance to continue. Given the oppurtunity, Microsoft will kill Linux. They just haven't figured out how. So Linux's continued existence and Microsoft's continued existence are mutually exclusive. For Linux or any other F/OSS Operating system to survive, Microsoft has to collapse, be split up or something....
Make no mistake, THEY WILL DO WHATEVER IS NESSESSARY TO KILL US!
Bullshit. Over 10 years ago, I was regularly writing code on a Sun and simply typing 'make' on over a dozen other platforms (included some very non-Unix platforms). Hard? I guess hard must mean 'taking the time to understand what you're targetting.' Or maybe hard means actually thinking.
Curiously enough, the last time I looked at gainful employment on the-pile-of-poo-OS, I saw a great deal of concern about working with this API thing on different version. Remind me again, what is an API for?
Well, I guess it contains both Windows and Linux in the same phrase, so it must be news! Actually, it really should contain Google in it somewhere...we should really be posting a summary of every Google Blog post.
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
May I suggest you tell Apple that "MacOS X is not Unix"?
According to you tf Apple site:
"Beneath the surface of Mac OS X lies an industrial-strength UNIX foundation..."
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/unix/
Luckily I commented on you so that I am not tempted to mod you overrated.
Wether you call BSD dead or not, I don't care, I just use what works the best for me, sometimes it is windows sometimes it is Mac other times it is bsd. I tried linux but I am more experienced with BSD's.
The other thing is biting the hand that feeds it: Geeks. Yes, I know, we geeks are unmarketable, economically unviable, socially inept, prone to expect other people to know how to do Really Complex Stuff like unzip an archive, but before you burn us all at the stake just to get us out of the way so you can sell Linux for $14.99 off the shelf at WalMart, you might want to preserve a couple of us. Nobody else is going to make more Linux for you to sell. Programs do not write themselves.
No kidding: Programs really do NOT write themselves!!!!! So if you throw out the compilers based on the notion that including them with the distro will just confuse Joe Sixpack? That's disabling the programming process. If you get rid of the command line? Programs are written there. Throw out programs like vi, Emacs, gcc, gdb, yacc, sed, awk, and man just because they have funny names that won't look tasty on the flashy label? Wait, those are programming tools, we need those! If you make Linux into a Windows clone, thinking you'll attract all the Windows users and be just as rich as Bill Gates (because that's exactly what people are thinking!)? But Linux programmers would really hate that, and you'll scare them all away to BSD or BeOS. Hang lots of whistles and bells on it, decorate it with frosting, throw out every particle of substance and dumb it down? Yes, you will win points with the very lowest common denominator market segment - the ones who spend the money, after all - but you'll ostricize all the other users, who will get tired of being locked in another playpen and wander off looking for better stimulation. Believe it or not, Linux did NOT get to where it is by being Just Like Everybody Else.
Yes, yes, yes, I know this post is getting flamed to a crisp the moment I hit the "submit" button. That's OK, you don't have to listen to me. Look around in three years, five, ten, and see what happened.
Little things like different error returns from system calls. EAGAIN varied on socket calls. Been a while since I struggled with this, but I remember having to code up shared memory and threaded apps differently for AIX, Solaris, etc, simply because some methods worked better on different systems. Some wanted mutexes in shared memory, or soemthing else some other way, and it was a real pain in the ass to deal with. HP-UX changed some socket return code semantics in some OS release, in some very subtle way.
Infuriate left and right
"Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems? "
.INIs, then some .INIs and half a registry, then Win32s, Win32, then Win 9x and the registry, then NT, it's unique registry, then running 16 bit in 32 via thunk and later WoW, ad nauseum! Then, its C, then VB, then, Visual, then VB + VC++, whatever...
.dll, then VxDs, then .NET,...
Development, installation and running on multiple MS platforms was NEVER easy: how quick everyone forgets...
In Win 3.x installation was text files, then
Never mind the network. Monolithic, NDIS, NDISII, II(?), Netbios/NETBEUI, then Bill Gates invented the Internet and IP, then broken IP stacks....
Then COM, COM+, ADO, then AD, then....
Then this
MS Easy to Develop and maintain for, and runs on all machines my Rear.
Linux/OpenOff, etc. were 200-800 dollars in licenses as the current MS suite cost. We might all be MS underground supporters and be ruthlessly giving Linus rectal exams in these blog pages. Follow the money.
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
Although linux has a good chance, it will likely lose as well. The reason is because the server market is influenced by the desktop. This may not be true in businesses that don't interact with desktops but those that do will likely prefer an OS that can integrate with the desktop. For example, Microsoft's Active Directory may not be the best thing around by a large corporation will likely go with Windows Server, instead of say Red Hat Linux, because the Active Directory integrates better with the client desktops.
With Microsoft pushing a web service platform in the future, I expect even more server losses for linux as companies develop products for Windows Server that will interact seamlessly with Windows desktops.
Until linux gains a foothold in the desktop area, their servers will simply be used for specialized needs (eg. webserver only) which will likely remain a small part of the market (similar to how mainframes and supercomputers are still used for specialized needs but the market is small).
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Because the Unix businesses couldn't settle on software development standards, ISVs (independent software vendors) had to write not a single application to get the whole Unix market, they had to write up to a half-dozen different versions. Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems?
I've written several reasonably big Unix server programs over the years (mostly workflow engines and document management systems written in C and C++ with CORBA, multiple DB backends, etc.) and I think the posters statement is nonsense. Typically, one has to write an app for one version and make only minor tweaks to make it run on other versions. Often, those tweaks will point out mistakes made in the original and so are quite helpful in QA.
The headache is the patch management systems for all of the different vendor's OS versions. When the customer of your product says "We have problem X" and the solution is to tell them to install Unix vendor Y's OS patch 123456, that becomes a support headache. But it really is not very different from telling the customer they need to install a Windows service pack when a product that runs on an MS OS has problems.
Complaining that Unix OSs aren't perfectly standardized clones is like complaining that RDBMSs don't all implement the SQL standards perfectly. But most server application architects/programmers don't have too many problems converting their apps to use DB2 instead of Oracle. These kinds of minor differences haven't led to a monopolist RDBMS supplier.
FreeSpeech.org
The economics were: DOS==FREE (forced bundling) -- XENIX $400
When you have 1 or 2 machines, this is not too much of a problem. However, when you plan on deploying 20 or 100 or 1000 machines, this $400 adds up very fast. Management balks....
In the early '90's, we had to pay EXTRA to Dell to get 486 PCs without DOS and Windows. So the cost was EVEN HIGHER. Management would look at the cost of XENIX (or other UNIXs which were comparable) and ask why you could not do it with DOS. As a result a lot of extra, unpaid OT happened to write executives and multi-taskers for DOS when XENIX/UNIX would have been an ideal fit!
Another factor is price elasticity of demand -- lower price, more demand, higher price, less demand. DOS=FREE (or even $29) versus XENIX $400 -- now which would management let you purchase or design into your product? Concurrent (?) UNIX was $99 and it was an option, but not widely supported. It has taken FREE versions of UNIX/UNIX-like O/Ss (Free BSD, LINUX) to change the market dynamics -- it is hard to compete with FREE and with FORCED BUNDLING.
What's this us stuff? I love Microsoft :-)
You too will be assimilated.
Cogito Ergo Sum
I miss cdrom.com. The bastardization that exists now is a pimple upon the face of the Internet... :-/
No middle manager gave a rat's ass about the difficulty of porting to different vesions of UNIX. Certainly the effort to port a UNIX app to Windows and retrain all those programmers was far greater than merely adding a few IFDEFs to existing code. UNIX lost just as squiggleslash says. When time came to add a simple print server or file, managers said, Whoa, I can add a cheap Windows commodity system, or I can buy an expensive UNIX box that has to go in the dataceneter with special power and cooling requirements. As for who would admin the damn thing, since none of the UNIX guys would touch it, the answer was as simple as Microfoft's ad campaign, why the manager would, it's a GUI, what could be simpler?
UNIX ignored cheap systems, everyone knew the money was in the big boxes, and as for the desktop, that was an insignificant market to be sniffed at. No serious vendor paid attention to desktops, only (sniff) Microsoft and their toy operating system.
Infuriate left and right
of saying bring it on. I mean, look what happened to America vis a vis Bush when he/we said bring it on. Other than that, all true. :-)
Or have you only comfort...that stealthy thing that enters the house and guest then becomes host, then master - KG
I love Microsft because of their standards.
You too will be assimilated.
Cogito Ergo Sum
Interesting? Mods, please check the site mentioned at the bottom of the post.
An employee suggested to me that we install Windows XP on a few machines here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using Windows XP instead of a (arguably) harder to use Linux distro. I decided to let him install it on 5 machines to see how the employees got on. Besides, our IT manager had been using Windows at home and he hadn't reported any problems - why not try it on our employees?
Once he'd got the employees up and running with Windows we let them try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: The Windows systems were a pretty good replacement for some of the Linux boxen we'd used before and the employees could still do their work as normal.
Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from our employees. Users could not do things they could before (like use gcc). The final straw came when one employee lost several hours work when OpenOffice suddenly froze up, destroying the 70 page legal document he had been working on.
Needless to say, Redmont, having been stagnant for half a decade, offered no support whatsoever. I dismissed the employee and made him remove the Windows systems before he left.
You have been trolled.
as long as I have SUN's Interactive UNIX.
Well, actually, I have the the box with 3.5" and 5.25" floppies and manuals. But I'm gonna install it as soon as I get that AST Bravo out of the garage. Man, with 64 megs, it's gonna scream.
HP/UX, AIX, & Sun OS, and USS(MainFrame Unix) are probably still the top four for large companies in terms of dollar spend. Large companies are slowly migrating to linux, but I would argue that one of the big reasons isn't that Linux is that much cheaper. In reality the OS is one of the smallest components of IT cost.
Reasons
1) x86 hardware is getting more reliable and scalable
I was at an IBM presentation yesterday and had a look at their x460
Scalable up to 32-way with 500 GB RAM. Hot swap everything except for CPU. Amazing I/O. Amazing machine and is catching up to Unix systems. Similarly blades scale out well - something Unix based systems don't do.
2) Momentum and software support
The idea that you can write your software for redhat or suse and then port it to another platform without extensive changes is very attractive PowerPC/zSeries etc. Vendors are pushing it partially in fear of Microsoft dominance (Oracle/SAP/IBM etc)
3) In the long run open solutions win.
That's what the Soviets said. And they're still going strong while the capitalist countries...
Wait a minute!
However, if Linux wins and Microsoft loses, there are still N-1 companies competing in the OS market, where the -1 is the loss of Microsoft. So still (almost) as much competition as before, and it's still good for everyone.
I want NVidia and ATi both to succeed as while they are both there, there is real competition. Linux doesn't work that way, it's not a good analogy.
That's the beauty of the GPL. It's all in the licence, stupid.
43 - For those who require slightly more than the answer to life, the universe and everything.
2. The exception [to running on non-properietary hardware] was SCO Unix.
Not true. Of the Unixes the article lists:
Consensys - Ran on x86
Dell - Ran on x86
Interactive - Ran on x86
Microport - Ran on x86
UHC - Ran on x86
Univel - Ran on x86
And we are not talking propriatary x86, just standard 386/486 machines you get from the store.
Well, the reason I think Microsoft won was because IBM didn't stop the PC cloning business and that deal? with IBM, maybe if Apple had have allowed the MAC to be cloned it would be in the same position as Microsoft is today.
The reason Linux is popular, and arguably more pervasive than Windows (Settop boxes/ mobile phones/ foobar construction sets etc...) is because anyone can copy it for free, maybe if Solaris was released under GPL it would be in the same position Linux is today.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The problem is that that while PCs were starting to take off the UNIX vendors were bickering and resting on their laurels, confident of their superiority. This was particularly evident to me while I was working for IBM in the mid-90's. OS/2 was widely viewed in the company as a toy -- if you wanted a serious multitasking system you bought AIX or one of the high-end mainframe systems. IBM didn't make more of an effort to develop and promote OS/2 partially because it directly competed with their more profitable products. Meanwhile PCs and other consumer hardware was quietly getting better. The Amiga was really the first system I noticed that gave you UNIX workstation class multitasking for cheap, but unfortunately Commidore couldn't have marketted eternal life if they had sole rights. Microsoft's contribution didn't do "real" multitasking, the UNIX people were quick to point out, so it was largely ignored because it's obvious inferiority to the UNIX way meant it was not a threat.
Meanwhile if you were an enthusiast or wanted to work with a system like the one at college you could either drop enough money to buy a car and pick up a UNIX workstation, you could drop enough money to buy a car and get a complete SCO license or you could go the BSD route. BSD was widely regarded as extremely difficult to set up and use so only the most die-hard did that. Meanwhile PC hardware was quickly overtaking UNIX workstation hardware and Microsoft was busily improving their multitasking model.
The whole PC thing happened in the blink of an eye from a corporate inertia standpoint. From the moderately crappy 286 that was popular in the late 80's to the 486 that was actually competitive with the lower end UNIX workstations in the mid-90's was barely enough time to have a budget meeting in most companies. The pentium rolled around and there was an "Oh... SHIT!" sense in the UNIX industry as a lot of companies realized they'd been had, taken in by the fluffy nature of Windows and the previous PC hardware. They hadn't even noticed that they were being overtaken and in the time it takes a party of executives to get lunch, most of the UNIX companies no longer had a leg to stand on. There was no way they could compete with the cheap PC and they'd been so busy fighting amongst themselves that they hadn't even noticed the real threat looming.
I used SCO at work in '87 briefly (Company didn't like the licensing cost and eventually dropped the product) and interacted with it again a couple of times in the late '90's. Linux evolved more in the first two years that I was exposed to it than SCO had evolved in over a decade, at least from a usability standpoint. For a while Windows and OS/2 were evolving as quickly as Linux was. The plodding course of most UNIX vendors also helped lead to their downfall. You got rapidly evolving features from the newcomers, while UNIX was pretty much set in stone and guaranteed not to change very much, providing an easy target for the newcomers to hit.
Ultimately the UNIX vendors seriously misplayed their hand. Had they been working on software usability features and providing some added value to justify their higher prices, some of them might have survived. Unfortunately for them they all blew it and Microsoft ate their lunch. Ironically, NeXT was the most promising UNIX from a usability perspective as far as I could tell, and they actually managed to survive, albiet in a somewhat different form.
It'll be interesting to see where we go from here. The remaining UNIX vendors are aware of what they need to do to compete. I think Apple has an excellent chance to take a good bite out of the market. Linux is constantly evolving due to its development model and Microsoft is slowing down now that it's pretty much out of low-hanging fruit. The next few years should be pretty interesting.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
But don't let that get in the way. The article makes the claim that the only Unix players today are SCO and Sun. This isn't true. They have forgotten about IBM AIX and HP-UX. Not to mention there are still less mainstream Unix distributions from much smaller companies trying to break into the market.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
You are absolutely correct in every respect. I suspect that you got modded as "troll" more for your attitude and sarcasm than from what you were trying to say. But the core reasons like what you describe are exactly why I will not try to push Linux on family for quite some time.
.5 is the only version that is available on Sunfreeware.Com. So, I downloaded the source code. I couldn't compile it because my version of GTK wasn't correct and I didn't have libpcre installed. So, I decided to get the source for those. Well, some libraries that THEY needed weren't installed. When all was said and done, I needed to download and install SIX packages/libraries just to run BlueFish 1.0. One of them wouldn't compile due to some error that I don't remember, but fortunately was optional.
For example, just recently I wanted to install BlueFish 1.0 on a Solaris 8 system. (No, it's not Linux, but the principle is the same.) Unfortunately, BlueFish
I also ran into the same problem last week when trying to get Apache to play nice with Sun Java System/ONE Directory Server. Because Apache assumes that you use OpenLDAP, it didn't see DS. The only options that I could find were to either install OpenLDAP and use its libraries or install SASL. Well, OpenLDAP wouldn't compile because it claimed that it couldn't find libraries that *were* installed and available! I even told it specifically what directory to look in for those libraries, but it still didn't take it. SASL wouldn't install due to a shitload of syntax errors in the DES header file. I found numerous issues regarding that problem on the Internet with the apparent conclusion that it will not compile on Solaris 8. So, I never got that to work. Fortunately, I came up with a solution that does not require Apache plugging directly into DS.
Am I a compilation and C expert? Hardly. I at least know enough to identify if libraries or paths are problematic to the point that I can get around or correct most compiling errors. (As I said, I know that I was talking about Solaris 8, so it's not completely an apples-to-apples comparison, but the underlying principles are the same.) That kind of knowledge is absolutely beyond the cognitive thought processes of the vast majority of Windows users, particularly the Joe Six Pack who uses Windows for nothing more than surfing the web and sending e-mail to his Aunt Bertha in Sheboygan! They want to put a disc in, run the startup program and be done. Linux can't deliver that yet when libraries depend on other libraries which depend on other libraries which might depend on other libraries, and a change to one requires a change to all.
So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that what seems easy and natural to Linux geeks is definitely not what regular people consider easy and natural. Hence, the preference towards Windows.
Very true. Don't get me wrong. Linux is getting there. I've run into a few distributions that are *very* user-friendly right from the start. But until Linux becomes as user-friendly as Windows, particularly when it comes to software and library dependencies, it will never be accepted by the masses as a Windows alternative.
I guess that makes me a "troll", too. In this instance, karma be damned.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I would much rather follow the King with millions of subjects thatn 3,000 Feudal Lords with empty kingdoms.
No subjects = no customers.
Long live King Bill.
Cogito Ergo Sum
Keep in mind that the basics of Unix are all the same. While you do have to "port" to different flavors of Unix, it's not at all the same as porting to Windows. Been there, done that. Windows is so different that you end up needing to have a massive abstraction library - let's not even get into the problems making a cross platform GUI app. In fact, most flavors of unix are quite compatible in most ways with the exception of OS X which decided that they need to do things "differently". Anyone trying to maintain a headless xserve knows what I'm talking about. While you CAN do pretty much everything from the command line, apple has made it VERY VERY painful.
Yes, windows is so complex with the point-and-click interface and all.
Maybe the employees need training.
Cogito Ergo Sum
Too true, yet, the other side of reality is that dll hell does exist. Why windows bigots ignore that escapes me. Maybe they have no exposure beyond their own limited teen life living in the basement bedroom at Mom's house.
This is of course, going to get modded down into oblivion, but damnit, this is going too far now.
Are are you mods on crack? This is the lamest troll I've ever seen and you tools are lapping it up? Fuck me, but is slashdot ever full of POSERS if you guys can't tell that this is pure crap.
FreeBSD has Linux have always been very neck to neck. While linux would be a touch faster at this, FreeBSD would be a touch faster at this, etc. Linux has better hardware support, FreeBSD tends to have better stability. It goes on like that and pretty much always had.
FreeBSD has not benefitted from Apple. Apple has benefitted from BSD. Purely a one way relationship. Since when did Apple write FreeBSD's VM and SMP code, that makes "OSX running effiecently" -- OSX is not efficent. Its bloated to the max. You might dig is GUI and design, thats fine, but you can't tell anyone that its effiecient code because you don't have to look hard for benchmarks to make that claim a joke.
FreeBSD does not run on Apples mach microkernel, holy shit, how did this slip by? Is this just Apple fanbois modding anything even remotely pro-apple up? This has got to be happening here. What the hell is this long and precarious history of FreeBSD -- its bloody free software, what exactly is supposed to happen to it? And... ooh! So annoying, the troll even posts about how FreeBSD has wicked HARDWARE support now -- argh! Like they even run on the same machines sand you guys still modded it up!
If god were real he would strike you down for modding this up, even if you are a mindless apple fanboi.
--SD
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
I looked into getting UNIX for a commodity PC. Every single one had its own bizarre requirements which were different from all the others. No way could you buy commercial 3rd party software for a generic x86 UNIX. If you ran free source software you were mostly ok, but businesses weren't interested in that route.
Infuriate left and right
This hoary claim about the "difficulty of developing for multiple Unixes" was ca-ca back when the trade mags first thought it up on a slow-news day; and it's still ca-ca now.
If you're a sysadmin, the variations between Unixes were tedious, annoying, and entirely surmountable. If you're a developer, and have any rudimentary skills at all, the variations are insignificant.
Plus, what's up with this "one Windows platform" bs? We spend WAY more time trying to figure out why something works on XP Professional SP 2 but fails on W2003 Oshkosh edition, than we do dealing with Unix variants. One Windows, my arse.
Linux bigotry blinds these folks from reality. Unix vendors such as sun sgi et al, were hardware vendors NOT unix vendors. They prospered because in the 1980's through 1990's they kept their high margin hardware 5 years more advanced than the commodity priced PC market. Example, a Sun Ultra2 had 4.3GB/s memory bandwidth when the best PC's had 512MB/s.
The "workstation" companies began to fail when they could not maintain this technology lead. Why pay Sun's margins for the same basic hardware you can get from the local whitebox shop? Unix and windows don't enter in to it.
IT is shifting from expensive big iron to throw away whitebox clusters.
Linux will succeed because it allows consumers to further commoditize the cost the computing for companies that have the staff to build and maintain their own OSS distributions (Google?). For companies that cannot do this and have to purchase Linux support contracts, its generally equal to or more expensive than Windows.
Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems? "
Wow, is there an IDE for Windows does that? Send me the download link. Oh, and be sure to send me the Windows 2000/NT/XP download link, not the Windows 95/98/ME link. Thanks!!
Now, let's be fair. The DLL situation - while true - has not nearly been as much of a factor in Windows 2000 and XP. Windows 3.1 and 95 were rife with DLL incompatibility errors, particularly with every fscking application just assuming that its DLLs were compatible with every other application out there. But I've been using 2000 and XP for many years, and I have yet to run into a DLL conflict using newer software (post-Win-95 software) on either of those operating systems.
And I hope that you're not calling me a Windows bigot. I'm a Solaris bigot more than anything else. I wished Windows and Microsoft would die ever since they *required* the DELETION of OS/2 in order to install DOS 6.2x in a dual-boot partition.
Maybe they have no exposure beyond their own limited teen life living in the basement bedroom at Mom's house.
Sadly, that myopic view that you mention describes probably 90% or more of Windows users of all ages who automatically equate "PC" with "Windows". This is an education factor more than anything else; but until Linux gets closer to Windows in user friendliness and software installation, teaching Joe Six Pack about Linux is like teaching a college-level calculus course to a fourth grater.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
He was commenting on TFA, which was about way back before glibc. Back then porting was a PITA, a daily struggle to keep track of what methods worked best on which operating systems, indeed which releases of which operating systems. The differences weren't as great as from one Microsoft OS to the next, but they were there, and there were more variants.
There was no glibc to be arsed to use. POSIX was a joke.
TFA dealt with that earlier era. You, sir, are off-topic and irrelevant.
Infuriate left and right
Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems?
As a programmer, I'd rather write six versions. This is because writing six versions takes longer without really being that much harder. It's not as if you'd have to write six completely different programs, just six similar ones. That would take longer than just writing one program, and then you'd have more to do and thus higher job security. Plus, it sounds a lot better claiming overtime when you're writing six programs versus just one. Of course, if I'm a manager or supervisor or something, I only want one program written. Depends on who you are and what you are looking for, I suppose.
http://xkcd.com/386/
It's 2005.... soon to be 2006. Unix has been with us how long? Some different flavors, but certainly not dead. Linux with its multitude of choices just keeps on advancing. God, I love choice. Where's 'Longhorn' or 'Vista', especially the promised innovations? Microsoft might get a better deal auctioning Steve Balmers chair than introducing yet another patch to NT (Vista).
One thing I really despise is when web sites require IE yet IE isn't standards compliant, it isn't secure, it's buggy and it's slow.
I'm going to update my site so it EXCLUDES anyone using IE.
"None of them, though, have had even a fraction of Linux's success."
What? Seriously, there are a lot of people who use BSD!
-=Zeus=And=Hades=-
Can you at least use a different title than the OSNews articles from three days ago...
Developers developers developers developers developers developers...
*pant*
developers...
developers...
developers!....
DEVELOPERS!!!
The parent post was modded correctly. It is the very definition of a troll post. Note the short line-length? I'm thinking whoever posted this just copied and pasted from someone elses anonymouse message from wherever/whenever. It's like a chain lettter, but in forum form.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Countries compete. Hitler took it to new levels. Should we just shrug out shoulders and say he was just doing what is natural?
The fact is that Microsoft has taken competition to levels not seen since the robber barons of the late 1800s and early 1900s. No other company is so bent on destroying the competition through every possible means. Do you remember that fraudulent video at the anti-trust trial? That pretty much sums up Microsoft's attitude towards the world: win at any cost. They may even have intentionally thumbed their nose at the judge sufficient to get him to do something stupid, and he did; he gave an interview which provided the appeals court with a handy excuse for knocking down his punishment (although not his verdict or facts). Microsoft has that kind of reputation.
Your excuses don't wash. Microsoft is not an ordinary comapny with ordinary ethics. Sony doesn't try to destroy Yamaha and other home electronic manufacturers like Microsoft has destroyed its competition.
About the only ethics competition Microsoft has is the RIAA and MPAA. It's hard to tell who is more ethics-challnged.
Infuriate left and right
Actually, FreeBSD does not use the Mach microkernel. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all use their own traditional kernels. The only free BSD flavor to sport a microkernel is Darwin (and its variant OpenDarwin). Actually, according to Apple, Darwin does not even support SMP on x86 platforms currently (though I'm sure this will change with Apple's transition to Intel)
Actually, this is only partly true. They tend to mix and match bits of the BSD userland from FreeBSD and NetBSD.
Apple's biggest contribution has been in the form of good press. Actually, Apple's OS only sort of resembles FreeBSD. The init plumming is all different. Directory structures are very different. NetInfo is very different indeed than FreeBSD's more traditional model for user management, etc.
And what's with the link in your last line to trollaxor.com? (Look at the period at the end of the last sentence.) As glowing an endorsement this would seem of FreeBSD and Apple (of which I'm fond of both), it would seem maybe that a lot of mods were cleverly trolled?
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
Ahem,
If you're using Linux, rather than solaris, then pounds to peanuts, some package manager like apt or emerge or yast or urpmi would sort out most of your dependencies for you.
Saying that Solaris is user-unfriendly, therefore Linux sucks is trollage worthy of adequacy.org, and I'd mod you down if I had the points.
Hope this helps.
, which can beat your computers!
For related 'extra' information... Chapter 2 in the Art of Unix Programming (Eric S. Raymond) contains a very interesting discourse about the history of the UNIX operating system, and offers insight into operating system wars in general.
One of his points is that many early UNIXes suffered because of licensing issues. I definitely feel that Linux's edge over older UNIXes is its open source license.
Back in the 80's (about 10 years before the compatibility issue resulted in POSIX), there was a complete, well defined standard for UNIX. This was ATT's version, which was BINARY compatible across all x86 versions (not just source code compatible).
UNIX should have won out over Windows then. It had networking back in 1986. It had graphics. It had far superior technology to the main competition, which was DOS.
But, AT&T did everything in their power to kill UNIX. Not deliberately, but out of greed and incompetance. And one of the key factors was that the people who sold cheap UNIX on the PC (Microport, ISC, etc.) all had to pay an exhorbitant royalty to ATT - while Microsoft didn't have any royalties to pay.
The royalty was about $100 IIRC. That's absolutely rediculous in the PC biz. This meant you simply couldn't beat Microsoft when it came to OEM deals. Nor could you beat them when selling to the average consumer, where price almost always won out. So this was the main reason why UNIX could never beat DOS, or later Windows. Not even binary compatibility could surmount that cost difference. Fragmentation of the standards was an issue later on, and was only a secondary issue.
As an amusing side note, for a while NONE of those small UNIX companies selling x86 UNIX were paying the royalties to AT&T, not even SCO. When AT&T found out about it, it caused a serious collapse in the x86 UNIX biz. Microport went out of business, Bell Tech got "aquired" by Intel (who was responsible for the licenses - via the ATT "Micro Port" program). That is, Intel paid AT&T in exchange for aquiring Bell Technologies.
Even SCO wasn't immune. They licensed their Xenix code from Microsoft. It was Microsoft who ended up paying AT&T, and in turn got 20% of SCO stock there for a while.
Now, with Linux, there are no royalties to pay. Everyone is on a level playing field with Microsoft.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
Check out ncurses. It's amazing the improvements that have been made.
Infuriate left and right
In the meritocracy of open-source development, the good code survives and the bad code dies.
This is true for most commercial software, too. But, as long as the machine keeps dumping millions of dollars in it and continue to force it down consumer's throat, it may survive for many, many years. There are many examples of this. *cough* MSFT *cough* *cough*
Coderz 4 Life
...is the fact that they mark everything before the flavor-of-the-month as 'legacy' as in 'you should port all that to the '. It took me years to figure out how all the various bits of MFC worked (so non-standard as C++ goes), and then COM was the thing, with all its templates. I got enough COM working to feel pretty good and now .net is where everything's at and I should do everything in C#, can't be trusted to allocate memory myself, etc.
.net is just a me-too way of re-organizing the deck chairs and throwing in yet another language and garbage collection. Woo freaking hoo.
And the thing that galls me is that it's all trying to do pretty much the same thing. No new "revolutionary" stuff took place...MFC was just a wrapper around the SDK. COM was a (theoretically anwyway) nicer way of doing DLLs and RPC.
To those who say that if I wanted to, I could just stick with the API, I say, sure...which one? Because of the underpinings of Win9X and NT were so completely different, there were just enough differences in a lot of the apps that I wrote that I either had to have a separate Win9X version, or just don't use that particular API, in which case, I either had to reinvent the wheel, or just not do it.
The nice thing about Unix has been its consistency. The C programs I wrote in college 10+years ago would still work now with minimal changes (I acknowledge that even some Unix APIs change a little).
Linux isn't here to gain market share. It's not here to give you a good desktop. Maybe that's what some distributions want, but even if that were to fail completely Linux will still be around. That's the point. As long as people still develop for it, it doesn't matter if there's 50,000,000 users or 25. That's what is so cool about OSS.
So there's no "problem" with Linux itself. It does what the programmers wanted it to do (mostly.) Your particular problem is that you want to use it for your main desktop but there's incompatible software you want to use. That's not a problem with the system, it's a problem with you.
While I'd love to see Linux become the standard desktop of the future and I believe it will happen eventually, I don't fault the system for not being so.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ah fuck!!! 65 bit...I just spent a grande on an AMD64. Now I have to buy another new computer *sighs* When will AMD65 computers start shipping from HP?
don't mess with those geekgrrls
You are talking about GUI based apps, I'm talking about system apps that needs direct access to hadrware due to performance. One that uses shared memory, semaphores, multi threaded etc.
This is one of the reasons that we release versions at different points in time due to porting. We port to anything from Windows, Linux, various UNIX'es, VMS, OS/390, z/OS etc. This is more like porting something close to a kernel or a compiler, just more complex.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
If anyone is screwing themselves up, its Microsoft. They are trying to make their earnings targets by raising prices and cutting services. MSDN used to be excellent, but now, how often do you just get a book about the topic instead and use Google to look for answers to Windows issues. The search in MSDN is useless and getting worse.
Programs -don't- write themselves, and that is the ultimate point.
Right now, the entry level system for Windows, Visual Studio Express, is completely crippled, for $50. Even the $500 offering lacks source control. The only suite that really wins is Team System, and that's $2500, a year. That's almost enough to make a car payment with. I've been working with Beta 2 and for C++ its actually worse than KDevelop and for the rest, well, I don't see the justification of a $2500 premium.
If you are a small indy developer, the economics of writing for Windows is almost absurd. On the other hand, you can do a lot with Linux for the money. I have to believe that this trend will fuel the wider spread of adoption of Linux. That's not to say that it will be easy, but, the more developers switch, the more MS has to raise prices in its tools division to show growth, causing more developers to switch. Microsoft is in a feedback loop and even now licensing costs are starting to get even large IT concerns to take notice.
It used to be that Linux advocates were a minority, and they still are, but now they are less of a minority than before.
This is my sig.
I really think you need to do some further investigation here. Apple only uses userland code from FreeBSD in their OS. The kernel space code is pure Apple/Mach code that can be seen in via the Darwin project. FreeBSD milestones are not dependent on Apple releasing their changes back. The relationship is not all that deep and really only one-way when it comes to BSD. KHTML is vastly different.
I worked on a C code base that spanned several UNIX systems (the standard ones and wierder ones like AIX or IRIX). It also ran on MPE and VAX systems.
Let me tell you, there were a LOT of ifdefs going on to deal with vagaries in the size of an int, byte ordering, even memory management.
You seem to claim that POSIX gives you just as good cross-platform abilities as a system like Java or Python. But that is simply false; at best Posix is only an order of magnitude worse in terms of testing across systems that is required to be done compared to a cross-platform language like Java.
One reason for this (at least in the case of Java) is a really rigorous set of tests that help ensure to what degree Java will do the same thing across platforms. Posix is not as well defined as Java to start with, and as a result simply cannot be tested as throughly to insure a similar level of behavoral similarilty across systems.
The common Joke with Java is that you "Write Once, Test Everywhere". But in my extensive practical experience I have seen no code changes required to easily develop day-to-day Java across Windows, Solaris, and Linux. There is NO WAY if I were writing POSIX C code I would be as comfortable just writing on Windows or Linux and then deploying straight to Solaris.
Java has moved out the bits that you really do need to "test everywhere" out much further on the fringes of coding than C has.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful
OMG! I just realized what that is - God was trying to bypass someones MD5 on DNA!
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
And that would be a valid point of spliting resources. If you've ever configured linux, you may have experienced the odd little things that one has to do to make the hardware fully functional. Most of the time it can be done without much effort, but the process typically reveals that developers could have spent more time working on their product compatibility (assuming that the drivers were written by the hardware manufacturer). At least, in my limited experience.
But, while in that kind of situation, I usually catch myself saying that at least something is available and I can make things work. But if we move on to the case of software, then there are scenarios where it isn't meant to work at all (and because WINE is not 100% we cannot consider it a solution, especially in the business world). The best example of this is video games typically only being supported on windows.
So, I give you a scale: 0 = Fully compatible and configured with the ease of at most a wizard, or wizard like device (I count rpms and apt-get as wizard like devices) 1 = Compatible but a little work and manual reading may be required 2 = Not compatible at all
It is my experience that anything greater than 0 will be ignored or marginalized by the public, because they don't want to RTFM, assuming they can find one that caters to their needs. The only problem is that the majority of companies will only focus on one operating system, and again, the apex of this property would be games.
So what is the advantage of only having one operating system? Simple, compatibility and ease of installation. It would be nice if companies hired on more computer professionals to implement this in all operating systems, but, depending on the project, that would cost more, and potientially not even see a return on investment.
Now, the problem with microsoft is that it uses it's power gained over the last 20 years to lock customers in, and not support other OS' (unless they don't see them as a real threat, like apple). Office being the best example. Another one can be found here. Given that they will do this every chance they get they become very dangerous in the world of standards. If you don't think they can have an impact on linux, think about the impact of "trusted computing", which at the very least is going to make the x86 architecture even uglier.
Most people who want to see windows become unpopular want it for the sake of the computing world, even if it comes at a cost to themselves. And, it's not like you're the first to sound the alarm about the loss of jobs as open source expands. But, as an analogy, what would you prefer to have: mafia protection, or no crime at all? Even if the later costs police officers their jobs.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Only one thing could have saved *BSDs and that would have been the GPL. Like most any free software *BSD will never die, but because people aren't forced to play nice, not everyone will. Just look at linux and GPL where everyone is forced (legaly) to play nice, yet many people still try to keep their changes private.
The extra freedom provided by teh BSD style licenses is not worth the loss in BSD contribution.
Luckly the *BSDs have some good teams that do a great job on maintaining them. but as those teams shrink BSDs growth will dissapear.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
In theory Apple removes one vector of choice (hardware) from the whole PC equation. So your logic would seem to dictate Apple will eventually win an Microsoft is doomed.
Personally I think that's Microsofts big problem - If your theory is right, Apple wins. If the theory of choice is correct, Linux wins. Note there seem to be no scnearios under which Microsoft "wins", only ones where they cohabit a space... and that's all most detractors have ever really wanted. A world where Microsoft does not win but instead cooperates.
A concrete example of that world would be Office supporting the open office doc formats. I still think we'll see that happen within five years or so, after some large shakeup.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While most people who have used CDE just think of it as a rather clunky mid-late-90s desktop interface, if you know anything about its capabilities you see the story of a huge missed opportunity.
Specifically, CDE had the potential to put an entirely different desktop model forward that could have driven sales by UNIX companies. It combined the benefits of the X Window System with a distributed object model to create a user interface for the average user that was completely abstracted away from the computer--whether PC, workstation, or whatever. Instead, the user simply sees applications and files, and doesn't care about where they are running or stored. You can have 5 applications running on 5 different computers all on the same desktop, with seamless multimedia drag and drop between them--and never know they are running on different platforms, from different vendors, on different parts of your network.
That means that CDE could have made it possible for a desktop model to be pushed that was based around heterogenous computing resources and a combination of X terminals and desktop machines--a cheaper, more maintainable, more flexible model than the 'PC on every desktop' model. It allows for an interim solution between mainframes and PCs--that is, to have a flexible distribution of computing power (say, office apps running on your local workgroup machine, browser running on your X terminal, more compute-intensive apps running on a server, etc).
It's clear that the UNIX companies poured a huge amount of money into developing CDE and then completely wasted the effort, maybe because by the time it was done it was too late--Win95 had already taken over. But it seems to me the people engineering CDE had a lot more insight than the people paying for it. They seem to have seen that it was actually possible to create a superior desktop model based on UNIX and X, but this was never marketed to anyone.
If UNIX vendors in the mid-90s had realised what they had created, they could have sold full 'desktop solutions' to companies, rather than simply accepting that PCs had taken over and therefore leaving the desktop to a PC-based operating system--i.e. Windows.
But as you say, they only wanted to sell big iron--maybe a good decision for short run bottom line, but a huge mistake for long run success.
You do have to write a different version of your app for every version of Windows. OK, maybe it's not 6, but there are massive differences between Windows 98 and, say, Windows 2000. Windows XP represents another, albeit less disruptive, set of changes. Windows Vista will probably represent the biggest set of changes yet. Each of these is a development target, with its own QA requirements and so on.
I've worked on software that had to be supported on HPUX, AIX, Solaris, and yes even SCO's crappy UNIX. There were notable differences and QA requirements, but the differences between the Windows branches are much more significant.
Windows won for one reason. It was pretty, so you could trick people into learning how to use it. Well that, and people had windows computers at home, and they brought that skillset with them to job interviews.
It can't beat Linux because Linux doesn't have stockholders to answer to. And it's losing share to Linux in direct proportion to the degree to which Linux is getting prettier.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I will simply point out that Solaris on x86 has existed for some time now. It has just sucked. And, obviously, Sun was traditionally more interested in selling their own hardware too.
So, the fact that Solaris does not have an adequate package manager means Linux sucks?
1) Solaris's shortcomings are not Linux's fault
2) Most Linux distros have *much* better package managers than Solaris. You would not have had these difficulties in almost any Linux distro.
3) Use Blastwave instead of Sunfreeware; Blastwave has a much better package manager than the native Solaris one.
4) Solaris 8 is obsolescent; it's not surprising you had trouble getting and using decent freeware for it.
Chris Mattern
Who says that?
People often say that Linux won't displace Windows, that it won't overtake Windows on the desktop, and so on.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
There is a big difference between beating something and outselling something. The average UNIX (HPUX) system where I work costs about $50k...the average Wind'oh's system about $5k. You wouldn't catch me or anyone else I work with putting a mission critical app on one of our Windows machines...ever.
The gates in my computer are AND, OR and NOT; they are not Bill.
Microsoft isn't losing market share to Linux, but to to a whole bunch of Linux based distributions. Any distro that has more than a quarter million installations is a threat, and there's quite a few of those. People here are posting complaining about the lack of standards, but that really is just showing that Linux is a kernel, not an OS. You're free to build your own OS or distribution around it and try to take over the world. If you're building software for business, get popular enough so the distro vendors take care of packaging your warez for you.
I alluded to this (this article's premise) myself, here earlier this week:
.h file in a
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=162921&cid=136 14370
I am forced to stick by it, because I stated it, and also this article's premise:
The standards in place for Linux, governed by 1 person afaik @ the kernel/core level @ least in Linus Torvalds, & std.'s organizations for Linux SHOULD prevent this from happening to Linux...
"The UNIX Wars" as the article calls them. What imo also, is what knocked UNIX dead up the heck out, & especially vs. Win32... Microsoft was indeed, doubtless saying:
"Yup, you UNIX people go and get greedy - start fragmenting your apps & API's so that writing to various UNIXES will destroy the very idea your OS & main coding language (C) were intended for... please, DO KEEP THIS UP!"
(We'll slaughter you in the end - and the best part? You'll do it to yourselves!)
And, imo as well as this authors? They did.
Sure, UNIX still kicks butt on higher end & midrange servers... but, the trend? Is to lower-cost X86 systems with performance that can be extended via clusters of systems, OR H/T-multithreaded code on them today's X86 cpu's... gone are the days/YEARS of the 486 66mhz CPU, which "ruled the X86 world" FAR too long.
Nowadays? X86 CPU's are impressive & speeding up all the time from Intel & AMD... code is evolving too, along with those CPU's. Multithreaded apps, that really take advantage of those SMP & H/T or DualCore cpu's is coming out faster & faster also.
Provided it's done right in the code's engines for proper threadwork (no race conditions chasing same data for example)? You don't NEED to work @ the CPU level, thinking "Oh, the mhz of the CPU will make up for it"... the design of the code, where it should be done, will make maximum efficient use of any & all available CPU's, w/out having to stress the OS process scheduler too much to do it (threads work here, true SMP aware code? Makes it even moreso imo).
Anyhow...
And, the very "governing body" (Free Standards Group) in place to set those same standards for Linux is what that URL above I put up was about as another great controlling mechanism from starting up "The Linux Wars" from EVER happening hopefully, to the Penguin crowd.
Many coders here made points about porting... with C/C++? It never "panned out" to be as SIMPLE as theory said it would/should!
(Especially regarding specific platform API calls @ the system core level... but, this again, boils right back down to what I called "Unix fragmentation @ a binaries level" in the URL above)
That same 'fragmentation @ binary levels' is why, imo, we're ALL not running some form of UNIX on our personal computers today - "The UNIX Wars".
Am I am "Pro Linux" guy, vs. "Pro Win32"? No! I like Windows... a lot. However, I do and have stated this here a lot also:
I respect what Linux has become, especially the 2.6x core (although it's bitten a TON of Unix and Win32 OS design (threadwork anyone? Especially @ the OS core/kernel level ring a bell?))... & I like KDE too!
HOWEVER - The Win32 API? It is pretty damn consistent, even across the diff. types of Windows (9x/ME based vs. NT-based family (NT/2000/XP/Server 2003)).
Have I run into diff.'s in the API regarding them? Sure, who really hasn't who codes anything, & especially anything of appreciable size??
E.G.-> Things in mousing on grids for IS/MIS/IT coding for instance is one I have hit... but a GOOD 95% of the API remains consistent across Windows variations of their OS families.
AND, When you hit those diff.'s? You do an OS version check, & branch your code accordingly for the OS being used & the code handlers for it for diff. OS & their API idiosyncracies.
To myself @ least?
That's a HELL of alot better than assuming some
If people are discussing ease of use for packages and patches. Nobody beats Aix. The maintainance levels are labeled 0-to-1, 1-to-2, 1-to-3 for example. All the regular packages sort out dependencies automatically too. Solaris and Linux would dream of such uniform consistencies.
you cheap bastard.
Buy Oracle. Install is the same as Windows. Buy a Loki game. Install is as easy as windows. Buy UT2003, install is as easy as windows. Buy your software in the same way as you buy your windows software you cheap cnt.
As for the freeware stuff, these are as difficult as each other. E.g. CDEx needs an ASPI driver installed. DVD::Rip needs some transcode codecs installed.
PS if you *do* insist on compiling from source, despite the lack of need to do so, that is a LOT more difficult on Windows than on Linux.
Would you mind telling us what product that is? (I'm genuinely interested.) Sounds like a dbms.
wxWindows is a well-known very easy to use cross-platform UI API for Windows, among others.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Apple claims: "Beneath the surface of Mac OS X lies an industrial-strength UNIX foundation..."
Fact is: The FreeBSD on Mach hack that is OS X is not suitable for server use.
How are the GNU tools superior? Have you ever even read the GNU man pages vs. the BSD man pages? The BSD man pages are always complete and 99.9% correct. The GNU man pages are filled with "TODO!" and "Not finished". You call this quality software?
I used to think Linux was cool -- then I turned 14.
I think the article would have been beter served to discus how closed source *nix is under fire from open source *nix. The assertion that linux wins and unix looses is silly. Both are flavors of the same set of concepts. The real winners are computer users and businesses who can now unlock greater potential in their hardware and network by using a more powerful operating system with an incredible array to development tools. Notice how the Macintosh improved when it was injected with it's dose of open source unix goodness with os/x.
-- $G
Windows has no interest in "beating" Linux, since it already has a dominant role in the market. It's Linux that could hope to "beat" Windows.
Even if DRM were in the Linux kernal, As long as it's possible to recompile the kernal, let it contain all the DRM they want. You can always strip it out. That's what open-source can do.
There is not nearly enough love in the world, but there is far too much trust.
LSB burned down, then fell into the swamp...
DOS, windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, NT -- There's five vesions of microsoft OS from the same era. (even more if you count the different versions of DOS, and perhaps we should)
So how does your "so many versions of unix" argument jibe with that?
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Have you thought about mingw + cygwin? Cost: 0. No, you don't get a fancy IDE, but I have found VIM+MAKE is enough.
Ok, once again for the benefit folks in the cheap seats, let's review:
Windows 3.1
Windows 95
Windows 95B
Windows 95B
Windows 98
Windows Me
Windows NT Workstation
Windows NT Server
Windows NT Terminal Server
Windows 2000 Pro
Windows 2000 Server
Windows 2000 Advanced Server
Windows 2000 Server Datacenter Edition
Windows XP Home
Windows XP Pro
Windows XP Pro SP2
Windows XP Pro 64-bit
Windows XP Media Center Edition
Windows 2003 Server
Windows 2003 Server Small Business Server
blah... blah... blah...
OK, now, let's combine that with the various versions of IE
4
4.01
5
5.5
6
As one Windows C++ developer friend of mine described the process of working with these many versions: "Lions and Tigers and Bears, OH MY!"
Making most any reasonably complex app work on multiple versions of Windows is difficult at best and impossible at worst. That Windows is a panacea is jut plain wrong.
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
let the users sort it out.
There is no need to support all the different Linuxes, just do one and call it good. Hardware is cheap, applications can run over X, allowing application servers dedicated to specific apps, Linuxes are open so compatability tweaks can be done at any level. (Similar to the standard system load performed by most companies these days)
I've spoken to a few major software development teams and they don't get this at all. They see a support nightmare with all the different versions. Open scares the hell out of them because they don't have any real control over what users do.
Why bother with all of that? Let the users do what they will and support those that play ball. The community will evolve whatever is necessary to handle the exceptions and it won't cost a dime. If your app sees wide use, you can bet there will be communities that form around it. Those folks will largely support themselves. In fact, starting such a community would solve the problem and focus the efforts in one known place. Sheesh.
Blogging because I can...
that was hilarious pardoy. not a troll
So you do agree with me. It does exist and we're talking about home users and not professionals according to the subject. Calling you a bigot? No you recognize the failures of both. It's only those, on either side, who can only recognize the flaws of one product and not the similar flaw in the other that I call bigots. I find both to be quite annoying.
Have a great weekend. And a safe one too.
i just installed 5 versions of linux & freebsd to test a java program. it took me several days.
google for 'fedora core' and 'java' some time then tell me its 'one click'. then i will know i have met an insane person.
try any random 50 programs from freshmeat or
happypenguin.org or sourceforge.
I'd honestly expect more from someone who worked at NASA and the DoD. Somehow, the author manages to confuse Unix with UNIX; two very different things. Unix is an idea; UNIX is a product that has earned the name from OpenGroup. Unix is Linux and FreeBSD and even Solaris; UNIX is just one of those things sold by SCO and Sun Microsystems.
It's true that Windows beat UNIX, though not because of technical superiority. Rather, it was the result of ruthless business strategy. The UNIX vendors fought each other (instead of banding together to fight the common enemy that could ruin them all), while Microsoft busily secured the PC platform. No wonder Microsoft rules the home office / small business world these days.
But Windows did not beat Unix. The Unix idea lives on in Linux and BSD, as well as Solaris. And these operating systems are not fighting each other. The 'infighting' among the BSD groups that the author refers to doesn't exist. The BSD groups have always been willing to help in each other's projects. They exist separately because they have different focus areas, not because they hate each other. Sun is opening more of its programs every day to other open source programmers (sure, not Java yet, but let's hold out hope). Linux is willing to share anything and everything with other FOSS projects. How else could you run Linux programs under FreeBSD?
This brings us to another of the author's reasons that UNIX failed - program incompatibility. For UNIX, he's somewhat right. Closed-down programs were un-portable in even the smallest variances between systems. But that's one of the reasons the open source community came into existence all those years ago, to share code so it could be used on more than just your own box. That's why the idea of the portable C compiler sprung forth like light from darkness. That's why the first Unix was written in C on the PDP-11. Portability! And that is exactly why this argument, which only barely applies to UNIX, doesn't apply at all to the modern, open source Unixen, like Linux and FreeBSD.
In short, this article is full of holes. Unix is not UNIX. It didn't take Microsoft to help many UNIX vendors throw themselves over the cliff. The BSDs don't hate each other. C is the language of Unix; C is that language of portability.
Thank you, Ken Thompson.
Windows beat Unix? Or was it really Linux that beat Unix? After all, what's the point of paying $3000 or so for some random Unix variant, when you can just get a very nice, free, GPL'd version?
I dunno; the principle for Solaris, which (to hear you tell it) lacks any package management or automatic dependency resolution, doesn't sound quite like the principle for, say, Debian, which, presumably, you could have done a single apt-get install foo for.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Oracle
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
"The amazing thing isn't that Windows beat the pants off Unix; it's that so many of the Unix companies survived until today."
Why is that so amazing? Unix sucks and it's expensive. Linux also sucks but it's "free." All of those cheap fucks that are too stupid to pirate Windows use Linux because they're cheap. A classic case of the "me" generation at work.
Nothing to see here.....
I second the comment that development on Windows is hard to get started in. What does Visual Studio cost again? All the linux development tools are free.
Linux succedes at all because you have many thousands of people writing code for it all the time. Most of it's crap, but the good stuff makes it into the distros. Most importantly, devs are motivated by real problems and by their own problems. At commercial development shops, including Microsoft, the programmers aren't network administrators, they simply can't be in touch with real world problems and they're writing code from somone else. That's why Linux is really succeeding.
AAAAMEN
The Dodge Viper is not ready for street racing because my 1982 Toyota pickup is rusted out and has bad compression.
Parent argument is that Linux is not ready for the average joe's desktop because manual installation of GUI software written for a different OS and Apache and OpenLDAP ON SOLARIS is difficult.
Sorry, but these are not things that the average joe needs to do on their desktop, and Solaris is not Linux
On Gentoo, a Linux distribution known for being cryptic and non-intuitive, these tasks are one line each ("emerge bluefish" and "USE=“ldap” emerge openldap apache" respectively). On other distributions like mandriva, both can be done via a GUI.
From Information Week dated Sept 5, 2005 "businesses spent more than $4 billion in the second quarter on Unix servers. Sales of high-end machines (priced at $500,000 and more) grew around 20% in the second quarter, while sales of midrange servers ($25,000 to $500,000) grew more than 15%".
If only I could lose like that.
Its also interesting that of the companies controlling "more than 90% of the Unix market", HP, IBM and Sun, only Sun seems to be mentioned at all in this forum. Slashdotters apparently need to open their eyes to the fact that there is a vast market for systems beyond desktops and hobby servers.
Why should he be modded down? Because he didn't use the best example of a fundamental issue that Linux also has? Linux, too, has recursive dependencies. Just because he used an older operating system does not make his statement any less valid. Linux has made the dependency issue more transparent, but it did not eliminate it. Just because you don't like how he presented his point doesn't mean it's not valid and therefore should be modded down.
I guess I must have missed the memo informing me that a software developer can write one binary that will run on any version of linux, running any kernel, with any libraries?
My company makes software, and does support linux, but even our developers only "support" specific versions of two distros, Red Hat and (recently) Suse.
Which I grant is still probably easier than developing for Solaris and SCO and AIX and whatnot, but still, it's not exactly compile once, run everywhere in Linux either.
If you have ever seen NeXT and OS X you would see immediately that they are one and the same. In 1993 NeXT users had email like out MS outlook.
Your Average Joe
NT, in particular, at that point, was a bad joke of a server operating system.
r y-of-computers tag-lines, I'm looking for actual information)?
Why is that, exactly (and no, I'm not looking for Slashdot Windows-is-the-biggest-piece-of-crap-in-the-histo
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
No, you obviously weren't around during the Unix wars, and you (and the mods who moderated you to +5) didn't even read TFA which mentions the fact that there were a dozen PC SysV Unixes available at the time, some of them popular. If you RTFA you'd have seen this:
You did get the part right about them being overpriced like SCO, costing about $300-$1,500, not counting low end Unix-like operating systems like Minix and Coherant that ran on cheap hardware but had little more than V7 compatability, much less being full-blown SysV operating systems like the ones mentioned ITFA. (Of course, Microsoft was even at one time in the propritary Unix business, "XENIX", which they sold to SCO when they wanted to get out of the Unix business.)I have the utmost respect for the collective entity that is Linux. However, articles like this seem a little delusional to me. Linux has been around for many years now as a completely free and fully functional operating system. Yet, it struggles to be adopted by those other than obsessive tech die hards. Why does a free product struggle in a market of products in the multihundred dollar range? Well, I'll leave it as an exercise.. but stop kidding yourselves. If Corvette's were free there would be none left on the lots, folks.
I had a feeling it was. Cool. We'll be colleagues starting next month, though I'll have nothing to do with the dbms development. (I'll be in the Dutch consulting branch.) :-)
Of course, you can: Use alien: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/answers.ph p?action=viewarticle&artid=393
Come to that, there's the Bloodshed C compiler http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html , also free. "Fancy" IDE and all! But that's still small potatoes compared to the support for some 10-15 compilers/interpretters shipping with major Linux distros (let's see, I have C, C++, objective C, Lisp, CLisp, Python, Perl, Ruby, Java (the gcj? I think I recall), Tcl/Tk, awk, sed, POVray scene description language, assembly (in a couple of flavors)...
Lets not forget MS came out with some deviant extensions, to rattle and muddy standards, to keep vendors infighting , and turning off potential developers who were wavering.
MS and Sony have a lot in common. They held certain innovations back, while a whole lot of people discovered a no-name player worked just as well.
Oil prices, Wage conditions, and interest rates affect Brand name premiums, and cause people to shop = good times over.
Linux is good value. Its #1 feature is that people have discovered Windows is no longer a click and forget setup, but a complicated headache riddled with security issues - and there is an alternative that does not nickel and dime you for mandatory extras.
Now people are demanding Linux applications. MS may put out SQL serverto Linux, seeing as Oracle, Google, and IBM/DB2 are making hay while the goings good. The Opera deal is a taste of things to come.
I would have thought it would be TCPA, but whatever...in any case, TCPA or TPM is not the same as DRM. There have been proposals to create DRM based on TCPA, but TCPA itself is really just public-key encryption on a chip. You are right that there is TCPA/TPM support in Linux (and has been for a while), but it has absolutely nothing to do with DRM. Software-based DRM schemes are based on public-key encryption too, but nobody is suggesting that GnuPG is a DRM system, are they? (Even though it could be used to build one.)
Wait - I though unix is unix is . . .
Did somebody lie to me? Who do I sue?
Yet another mainframe dinosaur laughing at all the friggin' primadonnas that built their own ivory towers long after we disassembled ours. Unix is way better than Windows as an OS yet the holier-than-thou crowd that surround so many unix systems made it so hard to use (like my crowd did way back when with mainframes) that the people that actually use (and pay for!) computing systems turned to (gasp) Windows. Surprise! It's the business, stupid!
"The bigger the lie, the more they believe." - Det. Bunk
Hello?? IBM is still in business and still selling AIX. HP-UX is still available and HP is still currently making PA-RISC chips to run it, despite future plans to only support Itanium. Tru64 is still around, despite changing hands to compaq and then to HP.
I don't think the playing field has simplified quite down to "Sun and SCO".
I'm as much rah! rah! Linux as the next geek, but let's be honest folks.
"Unix is such a better operating system than Windows hands down." The article doesn't include UnixWare, which was released at about the same time.
Here is why Unix failed. Novell decided to make UnixWare, and make it useable by the average person.
I was at Novell, and I put a floppy disk into the system. It didn't work. So I called up the developer, and he said "Oh, you have to mount the device to use it," and you have to specify the file system, blocks, etc. Now I ask you, What typical user is going to want to do this? It is completely unreasonable. If your answer is, like a friend of mines, that it is desirable, then you are building an OS for experts who believe that power is critical to their job.
Compare this to the little arrow that shows up on Windows and bounces on the start button and proclaims "Click here to start a program." This little feature helps a bunch of people to get going with Windows, and makes it a little easier for them. Also, it isn't much of an annoyance to me. I've forgotten about it 'till now.
My mother will *never* want or need to mount a floppy. She just wants to stick the floppy in and get at her information on the disk. OS nuances are completely irrelevent to her: she is a scientist, not a hack. She might need to know that her programs are stored under the "start" button, though.
The reason uSoft is successful with windows, and why they were able to extend to the server side and crush Novell and other Unix companies is Unix has an enormous learning curve. But one reason is that it is incredibly easy to get started. GUIs are easy to use for the first time. Sure, the data center will always want command line control and such, but when you are first trying something out it must be simple. Windows was always that. Unix has never been that, and I include Linux even today.
Now, the economics of Linux are great, its free! But even still as I understand things uSoft has been able to cut other deals with some of the big monopolies in order to *sell* windows, which I demonstrates the value of it to the purchasers.
Personally, I see no reason for a bunch of people interested in OSs and the like to build user friendly interfaces. Why would an OS person really care? The only reason I can think to go down this path for no compensation is out of hatred of uSoft. Well, it will be a sad day if all this hatred ends up beating down uSoft, not because I like uSoft, but just because I hate religious zealotry.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
Or you could write your program in Java and it will work on Unix, Linux, Windows, and MAC. It will just be slow as crap if you do any client server forms.
Yeah, seeing as I horked up Suse 9.3 last week by using *its* Yast installer GUI to install the X windows developer libs and headers from the Suse DVDs, and as a result KDE won't run any more (defaults into "twm" which looks like the world's first X window manager from the early 80s), I guess I have to agree with you, and add a point too.
People answer your argument by pointing out that Linuces like Debian have package management systems which will automatically resolve dependancies by going out on the internet and downloading the right libraries. That removes the horrible chore of tracking down the libraries manually, and replaces it with something far worse.
After you install application A, you have no way of knowing if previously installed applications B, C, D, and E will still work the same way. Or at all. Okay, so your auto-installer upgrades B, C, D, and E, and they break F G and H. I can see your box doing the internet treasure hunt thing for many hours before this all settles out, basically reloading a large percentage of your OS and apps. And when it's done, assuming it worked right (*cough* Yast *cough*), your old apps may work differently than before, due to the forced upgrades to new versions. Sure, the upgrades didn't cost you licensing fees, but re-learning them costs you time, as will dealing with file format incompatibilities with your old data files (you know, "old" as in yesterday, before you decided to install something new and mess up your whole computer). When I want to install a new Linux app, I get the source tar and build it. That limits me to small apps like Ethereal - I'm not waiting around for hours for OO or Firefox to finish building. Everything big had better come with the distro, or I won't bother. And I don't like upgrading distros, I do it no more often than every 2 years. It's a hassle to move all my data to a new OS, and reinstall apps.
This means that as far as I am concerned as a user, Linux is not an operating system. It is a monolithic computing environment which cannot be significantly changed except as a whole, at high cost (in time). MS Windows is an operating system; I can install major apps on it by point and click, usually in under a half hour. Linux is not, because I can't. One time I decided to install the latest Firefox. It failed to install on Linux. It always installs easily on Windows. It is not alone. Most open source apps are easier to install on Windows than on Linux. Isn't anyone in the kernel/library community embarassed about that? You should be! Don't tell me about how it's Mozilla's fault for not using the latest whizbang installer - this is Firefox, the most high profile open source program in the world. If they're not installable, how the hell can you expect anyone else to be? I guess that's one reason I do programming on Linux, and user tasks like writing documents and editing images on Windows. I bet I'm not the only one.
Inter-app library dependancies are really *bad* software engineering practice (it's called "coincidental coupling"), and are *not* acceptable in a modern consumer OS. Every app should have its *own* copies of the libraries it uses. Statically link, or install the app in its own directory with its own copies of all the dynamic libraries it needs. Make this so trivial to do that it's the default way apps get delivered. Have a stable ABI to the OS and GUI (possibly an OS/version isolation layer). That way every app will run, without changes being made to the system, at least for a 1-3 year "band" of OS versions. And hey while we're at it, how about let's use the ABI across the major distros, so app binaries run everywhere? Linux is supposed to be about sharing, right? Multiple copies of libraries waste disk space and memory. Disks and RAM are cheap. Users' time is not. Until the Linux app dev and kernel communities learn the value of users' time, in a deep way, Linux on the desktop is going nowhere.
And don't count on corporate IT to shove Desktop Linux down users' thr
WTF? ... but not Mac OS X.
So apparently now spouting out apple.com drivel is good enough to get a person modded up these days? Freaking rediculous! I didn't know it was a +5 Insightful.
If you haven't noticed Mac OS X is bairly a Unix by most peoples consensus. It has a Mach Kernel which had to be cut in half and made non-beautiful because most/all benchmarks indicated that its performance sucked. It only has typical Unix at parts of its userland functionality, and even in this situation it's not a typical Unix because it's filesystem and configuration is not close to standard. If you want Unix then I'll point you to Solaris, AIX, and maybe even FreeBSD and Linux
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
You could plot a graph of MS against linux showing MS's bend in functionality with linux's as a flat bar along the bottom and vice versa showing linux having loads of security, reliability and speed.
In 10 years: linux will have the functionality of Windows and Windows will have the security of Linux. But everybody is using Windows now and there is no reason to switch to something with such as bad reputation (in terms of actually trying to do something productive).
TFA was from way back when. Your comments on 2005 are irrelevant.
Infuriate left and right
If i remember correctly there was a court case regarding the removal of all Unix code from BSD?
Yes but it was a double edgec sword, the other party had to remove all BSD code from unix too, no wonder they settled, he!