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Virtues of Monoculture, Or Why Microsoft Wins
blackbearnh writes to ask, "Why does Microsoft win the development environment war so often, when we all know it's a lifetime lock-in to Windows? Perhaps it's because the open source community offers too much choice." From the post: "Microsoft offers the certainty of no choices. Choice isn't always good, and the open source community sometimes offers far too many ways to skin the same cat, choices that are born more out of pride, ego, or stubbornness than a genuine need for two different paths. I won't point fingers, everyone knows examples... The reality is that there are good, practical reasons that drive people into the arms of the Redmond tool set, and we need to accept that as a fact and learn from it, rather than shake our fists and curse the darkness."
that's basically what it says. "people dont want to be presented with a choice".
now i dont have a high appraisal of the general public and am not particularly fond of humanity in general, but that's insulting even for my outlook and sounds like monopolist propaganda.
"people (in a capitalist society) don't want choice"
"black is white"
"freedom is slavery"
then again we are presented with 2 viable third party candidates every election and nobody votes for them because they believe the propaganda of "a vote for a third party is a wasted vote".
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
How wrong you are, but then again you are already brain washed by visual studio. Visual studio is but one development tool that runs on a closed operating system. To the brain washed developer this seems ok but the power of Linux is the developer tools and the ability to use 100% of the platform to your advantage.
Lets use a little example here, say I wish to do something simple like take a html document and convert it to pdf and deploy it to a remote server some place. I simply call the installed tool called html2pdf using exec and again call exec to ssh that to a remote server half way across the globe. Now tell me using visual studio and windows how are you going to accomplish the same thing I just did with two lines of code? There are thousands of these little utilities that do little jobs by themselves, but string them together they can do anything very easily.
I programmed on windows for many, many years and with visual studio. Visual studio is a nice tool but it is a nice tool running on a closed platform.
Got Code?
Open Source software maintains its momentum as long as there is an itch to scratch. As soon as that itch is satisfied, the work stops. Even if the code is unsuitable for your average joe. Technically, this is where the commercial distributions are supposed to pick up the slack and do the rest of the work.
Oh yeah, like Gnome and KDE are so stagnant and the commercial vendors have better polish. Get real, only Sun has managed virtual desktops yet. Mac is intersting but the free desktops just blow it away. KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment and many others have more polish than any non free desktop.
Dipping down to polish shows just how far free software has come. The deniers used to say that free software could never make an easy to use GUI because they had no clue about Joe average. The above is a pathetic variant on that theme because many well documented free desktops that a 5 year old could use have been made. Before that, it was that free software can't make a well documented userland, a kernel, a compiler an editor and so on and so forth.
I dare you to compare the experience of installing Mepis to Vista, XP or OSX. Mepis is autoconfiguring and does everything in about 20 minutes, while the other systems force the user shuffling CDs for basic productivity software, drivers and other nonsense that should just come with the computer. The collapse of Vista sales is going to force Dell and others to ship gnu/linux and that will be the end of M$ - preconfigured easy to use and maintain gnu/linux systems will catch on and leave the legacy systems in the dirt.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
but fragmentation and a hundred different ways of doing things makes it hard to find the information you're looking for online, makes it hard to support (Helpdesk workers complain about having to support more than 3 versions of Windows!), and makes it hard for the user to choose.
Do you know someone who's actually done Linux support to verify these unfounded fears? The only problem gnu/linux helpdesk people have is trying to look busy.
There's one huge difference between free and non free software when it comes to support: free software all works together. Your buddies complain about 3 versions of Windoze because they don't work together - each has it's own arbitrary and insane limitations of a sort not found in the free software world. Different applications do or don't work with each in a nightmare of choices that don't work. I run KDE and Gnome applications on Enlightenment, they mix and match just fine. I can use perl, bash scripts and C together with other people's precompiled code without problem and they all port across distributions and platforms. This is how Mepis, Ubunto and many others are all able to build themselves out of the Debian, Red Hat and upstream repositories. Free software works because it's free.
I've been hearing this FUD about "confusion of choice" for a while. As usual, it's designed for people who've never taken so much as a peak outside their favorite non free OS. Anyone who's run free software for more than six months knows it's nonsense.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
For instance, the only reason we've not released a port to linux - a free version, of course, we'd like to give back to the community - is because there is no standard GUI layer. It's a hodgepodge of these widgets and those widgets, this license and that license (really meaning, these liabilities and those liabilities.) Windows provides all that. Free. Built in.
Sure, everone knows that M$ licensing and development is far less complicated or expensive than gpl code. Why, you should see how much I have to pay my accountants and lawyers to keep track of the terms on gcc, kde, gnome and so on and so forth. The burden this passes on to my users is just unimaginable. I'm going to give all of that up right now and buy OSX, Vista, Visual Studio and half a dozen software packages that I need to get real work done on these real platforms. Apt-getting is just too complicated. I give up, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, I am truly sorry that I have deprived your companies of well earned revenues over the last seven years that I've been without your spiffy, easy to use, license, develop and distribute software. What was I thinking as I simply did my work without worry or cost?
The day the linux core gets BUILT-IN windowing and graphics, and I do NOT mean just xwindows or xwindows plus yet another sometimes-there and restrictively licensed widget set, is the day we make a port that we will release to the community.
apt-get install kdevelop. Pay attention to the recommended and suggested packages and go. It's that easy. There are others that may be easier, but KDE's package will be more familiar to you. Hope to see your work soon, Happy hacking!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That's what wins in the long term. It's not raw freedom and choice, it's making intelligent choices and then sticking with them.
Does this somehow rule out free software? I'm not sure what kind of point you are trying to work through but I remember hearing a lot of "right tool for the job" back when there were not enough excellent free software tools for all jobs like there are now. Today the line is "there's too much choice and it's too confusing, hard to glue together and maintain."
Good choices for me will never include M$ toy languages that break your work every two or three years when they push out a new version and never do very well between. I don't care how easy it looks, it's always a loser.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You're right, Access was version 2.0 when Office was at version 4.3. It's been so long since I did Access that I had forgotten. However, I do remember that Access 2.0 -> Access 95 was easy, but Access 97 introduced huge changes and a 2.0 -> 97 port was an ordeal if you had any complexity at all in your forms and reports.
This is not 'every two to three years'. It's pretty much double that.
Who cares if it is 2-3 years or 6-8 years? The point is the same: by the time you get rather familiar with a Microsoft API or platform and develop a few decent projects in it, they introduce a new release that often requires a lot of work to move to. The languages they have seriously broken are mainly the VB family. But the APIs, gee there are an awful lot to pick from.
Also, VB is not a toy language to those of us who make our living using it.
I wasn't the one who originally said VB was a toy language. (Although as far as language features go, it is rather lacking.) Nonetheless, I have written my own VB 6.x stuff and it was the right tool for those jobs. I refused to move to VB.NET which is supposedly 5 years old already.
Please note that nobody can just sit on something for 14 years.
The Unixes did. curses, X11, sockets, IPC: all of these APIs are 15-20 years old and still in wide use today. Perl 4.x code from 1993 generally runs OK under Perl 5.8.8 in 2007.
Are you seriously suggesting that Microsoft should have retained all backwards compatibility for that long?
Well, yeah. Minor changes to incorporate new technologies (ala Winsock 1.1 -> Winsock 2.x) are OK, but seriously breaking a platform while providing little in return (ala Access 2.0 -> Access 97) isn't.
Note also that most of Microsoft's problems with broken platforms wouldn't even be problems if one could easily install multiple versions of their products on the same system. Try having three versions of Office on a Windows 98 system; I honestly don't even know if that's possible with some combinations. In contrast, I've had three versions of IBM DB2 installed on a single AIX system with no trouble at all, and multiple versions of libc, zlib, freetype, mpich, etc.
Shit happens, but you fix it. I don't know about you, but that's my job.
My job is to use supercomputers to develop new materials. Fixing stuff that didn't need to break in the first place is a waste of time.