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The Linux Desktop and ISVs/OEMs
olau writes "Michael Meeks, who's worked on GNOME and LibreOffice integration for many years, now for SuSE, has some really interesting thoughts on the recent Linux desktop debate and suggestions for possible strategies. He points out that regarding independent software vendors (ISVs), the real issue isn't actually the quality of the tools but the size and attractiveness of the market, and perhaps that a solution could be lower barriers for paying or donating. Regarding OEMs selling hardware with software preinstalled, he points out that while a free OS + software sounds good for consumers, it's actually a problem for OEMs on razor-thin margins, since they lose the cut they get from the preinstallations. A possible countermove could be nailing robustness and hardware diagnostics for good, lowering OEM support costs."
At the end of the day, it's a lot easier if Grandma has an OS that other family members can help her with.
No matter how much I like my Linux Desktop, I don't want to be responsible for bringing non-tech-savvy people along. The rest of the family is fully capable of troubleshooting basic windows problems, more or less.
You have a sales team, you are trying to sell your product. That is hard enough. Now you need to push Linux too on their existing Windows infrastructure too...
Companies like consistency. Linux is a perfectly good OS. However we are a windows shop here, and don't want to support two platforms.
Companies will pay more money to keep a consistent environment. Those Linux servers will need to cost $500 less then their windows counterparts. You need to be less then the OS cost and less then the Its different cost, then you will need to deal with people who will just get the lesser cost system and put their own OS on it (legal/illegal/let the courts decide if they find out)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"family is fully capable of troubleshooting basic windows problems"
tee hee
... when you have children to feed and a mortgage to pay ... ... and the users expect all their software to be free?
Better off spending one's time addressing a market where people expect to have to pay for stuff, no?
What linux users expect all software to be free?
I guess I did not pay for all these steam games.
Where did you get that idea?
Linux is like water. Water is free and abundant, but the only way a business is going to make money off water is
a. take the good stuff (mt spring for example) for yourself and sell it (e.g. Evian)
b. give "free" water such a bad rap that yours is better (e.g. pollute the crap out of free water). But then sell basic tap water with good marketing (e.g. Dansi, Dannon, Arrowhead, etc...)
So a company like Microsoft can:
a. provide a niche OS, e.g. one that plays mpeg-4 AVC more efficiently... cause they OWN the IP (aka mpeg forum)
b. show how Linux sucks.
Bonus: Guess where Apple fits in this picture (think b., but adds favor to their water, e.g. Vitamin Water).
Lead the way with software people expect to pay for. Get solid tax software on linux, and they will come? If TurboTax won't migrate to Linux, then a competitor must arise...
Face it, if you don't run windows, you'll never, never, never ever have 100% office compatibility. Never. Microsoft wins here as well as being the De-Facto gaming platform. Yeah, yeah I know, Steam is coming to Linux... and Metro is brainded.. we'll see.
Apple has it's own gated-community take on everything from music to desktop. You drink one cup of kool-aid and do everything Apple's way, or leave. You don't need Windows. You don't need office. You don't even need to think for yourself. If you have a problem pay, pay, pay. The Apple store loves you.
Linux sounds great when you first hear about it. You hear about rock solid stability, No Internet Explorer. All the people who you think know more than you are running it. So, you go to buy it, but can't find it. You find out you have to download it. You go to download it and there are 1700+ different options. You ask a question on IRC "which distro should I download" and someone replies "Here!" and you find out about goatse and spend the rest of the weekend trying to wash your eyes out.
Dekstop or ISV, the real issue here is that there isn't a perfect solution. They all have their share of problems.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
The year of the Linux desktop was 1993 for me.
I don't want things dumbed down so point and grunt users that windows 8 is targeting will flock to GNU/Linux and make Linux "successful".
Just quit with the linux desktop troll stories. Yeah, a couple commercial Linux companies would love to get those users paying them, but for the community-- who the fuck cares?!
Think of the Internet (usenet etc.) before the stupid AOL users came along. Now think of what a bunch of stupid windows users will do to GNU/Linux. No thanks.
Isn't TurboTax all on the website now?
I know I paid to use it last year.
More software a linux user paid for!!! SHOCKING NEWS!!!
Ah, Slashdot. You've entered a new age when anti-FOSS/anti-Linux trolling is marked as "Insightful."
In fifteen years, I've purchased ONE application. It wasn't very good and since it wasn't open source I couldn't fix it. So I guess I'm one who expects all my software to be "free". (I contribute code, bug reports, etc., not cash) Funny thing is, I make a living mainly by SELLING software for Linux, but I never BUY software.
Since several years it is called SUSE.
It started as S.u.S.E., then became SuSE and then SUSE.
I understand that it is very hard to get right, but Editors: please try to edit and correct errors.
Ow hell, who am I kidding. These editors have no understanding what an editor is or does.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The real "At-The-End-Of-The-Day" is does the thing even install onto a drive easily? Or must one know the secret code, hidden file, magic mumbo jumbo to make it actually work? Windows is popular because it's USABLE. When these other OS are as usable as Windows, they'll begin replacing it.
Cranky educator.
Yeah, we really need a new old slashdot.
Oh well, all good things ....
Yeah, I'd like to see you make a "solid tax software" in a shop that doesn't have the resources that Intuit has.
You have no idea how insane the task is that you're talking about.
Isn't TurboTax all on the website now?
I know I paid to use it last year.
More software a linux user paid for!!! SHOCKING NEWS!!!
I'm a die-hard Linuxer and I also pay to use TurboTax online. I doubt if I'd buy the Windoze edition to run at home but running in my browser is just fine and there is the presumed added advantage that the on-line edition is up to date.
The quoted poster's implication is correct. Linuxers don't want everything for free; I pay for lots of value-added services, such as the aforementioned TurboTax, membership on a chess site, etc. I'm even going to BUY--- that's right, I said BUY--- the Linux edition of Scrivener when it comes out of beta.
That said, I do enjoy and benefit from the many free options I have such as LibreOffice, TaskJuggler, etc. etc.
Those are the 3 biggest issues for Linux desktop. So many distributions, some a little different, some very, very different. LSB is dead. The QA nightmare is significant. As a side note, games that find their way onto Linux from Windows, often enough have a number of .so's in their install directories.
The Linux GUI desktop libs suck. GTK sucks to use and rely upon. Qt is a mess. KDE(which relies on Qt) is the stuff of flame wars... too many choices and too many of them just plain suck. Even something that should be reliable as font query is a total mess under Linux. Fontconfig is JUNK. The config file is nasty-insanity and the API just plain sucks. Nothing for merging of fonts, etc.. it sucks so bad that Qt bypasses FontConfig, it only uses it to get a list of all fonts installed. Makes you wonder you know.
Linux desktop sound is painful. Atleast we are mostly past the growing pains of PulseAudio, but I cannot name any applications for money that write for PA, 99% time it's SDL dude.. which has a suck ass audio API. OpenAL is better, but lets not forget that OpenAL can be configured to pipe to SDL, PA, whatever. This happens often enough: OpenAL --> SDL --> PA.
Reliability of GL is another issue. Not so long ago, it basically was NVIDIA or bust, that is no longer true.. but with so many distros making Nouveau the default, what a failure. Comparing the closed source GL implementations from NVIDIA and AMD to the open source ones is shooting fish in a barrel, with a canon. In contrast, even the crapiest GPUs, i.e. Intel GPUs, have okay-ish DirectX drivers.... Mesa's infrastructure has a long ways to go before it can support all the features of OpenGL _3_ which is like a million years old. So yeh, open source GL implementations have so many cards stacked against them. The Linux DRM for the graphics stack is a bad joke.
Ironically, making games is more insulated from most of this crap except for the GL pain (and to a lesser extent the sound pain)... but when Steam comes to Linux, I'd bet they will simply say "Dude we only supporting Ubuntu"... not too sure what they will say on the GL drivers though.. but their Source engine is DX9 really which is OpenGL 2. Though I shudder to think what will happen when there are distros with X11 and distros with Wayland out at the same time... that will be ugly. If anyone says Wayland can exist with X11 (or even essentially rely upon it) you have no idea the nightmare waiting about GL in that situation is.
It is not that Linux is bad commercially (Android demonstrates it can be great), it is that Linux desktop for consumer is a fail-train.
http://www.rosettastone.com/learn-english
So are you, you double spacing troll!
I can think of 5 reason why (in no particular order):
1) Your company pays you to write software for linux
2) You have fun writing application for linux and do it part time (everyone needs a hobby, right?)
3) The software is good enough, that people donate money to help you work full time on it.
4) You sell support (or special edition cds or whatever) for your software, but your software is free.
5) You sell a commercial version of your software, that has additional components that are not included in your free version.
I am surprised you been on slashdot for so long, and still did not understand this.
I got my mom to use linux, and she's a Grandma. I got sick of having to re-install windows so I left for linux*, then told her that I wasn't really doing windows anymore because I no longer learned anything when i fixed problems on it. So she switched, loves it, when it has issues...at least I learn something.
*not having internet explorer is a feature!
(1) Well, people have certainly paid me to write software that runs on Linux, but it's always been proprietary stuff that runs on servers in turnkey systems and suchlike (in fact I'm doing one such project right now), never shrink-wrap desktop stuff for sale to end users.
(2) Erm ... I'm afraid that my hobby is flying little aeroplanes ... and my other hobby, being an elected politician, is even more expensive.
(3) Don't have sufficient marketing skills and expertise, in that I can make more money by writing C++ for Windows and being paid by the hour.
(4) I really hate that business model, where you can download the source code for something for free, but the only way to find out whether it will do the job you want or not is to pay a consultant hundreds of dollars to tell you, ie to answer your pre-sales enquiries (or spend thousands of dollars worth of your own time trying it out) ... I much prefer the alternative, where the pre-sales support is free (eg there are decent specs and other documentation) but the software costs a few tens of dollars.
(5) I realise that that does work for some people ... but it can't be that easy to get it right. I think I have never paid the extra for any such software (or service). If the free version is too crap to be useful, how can you trust that company with your money, as your only experience of them is that they produce crap software? On the other hand if the free version is wonderful there's no need to pay for the extras.
Thought this one was worth a try :-)
I do sometimes get things right.
I don't know why I even have to buy tax software. The government, local and Federal, author the tax code. Why isn't this just a government website? It doesn't have to be fancy. Put the damned 1040 online. Personally, I think that most people don't use half of the so-called features of tax software and would be glad to use the government stuff. Tax software, and the tax code for that matter, is simply a way to line the pockets of big business.
Exactly why Granddad is on linux! But it never actually breaks, so that's a bonus too.
Grandma wants nothing to do with computers, she says she's gotten along just fine without them for nearly a hundred years and sees no need for them in her life.
and the users expect all their software to be free?
Interesting contradictory fact. Scroll down and look at the payment statistics. Linux users evidently pay about twice as much as Windows users when given the choice. I have bought two bundles before, and both times the pattern was the same as with the latest bundle.
Artificial scarcity. It is the backbone of the American economy as well as many other corporatist nations. Since you can't make money off free stuff, stores won't carry it. Even when selling hardware, if they can make more money selling restricted software along with it, they will. Before if you got a discount from buying a pre-built computer with crapware on it, at least you could wipe it all and install whatever you wanted. Now with “secure boot”, they can push control onto the software level and control the entire software stack if the wanted to. Don't like that Windows 8 Crapware Edition on there? Too bad, you're stuck with it, and the Crapware Edition won't allow you to remove the crapware on it either, plus it comes with adware and spyware (when you purchased this computer, you automatically opted-in to provide us with “information for marketing purposes”) pre-loaded which you also can't remove. I can also see this entire system pushing out build-it-yourself computers since the pre-built one offers more money. Even if some semblance of DIY hardware is still available, at the very least the pre-built systems will ultimately cost less because the hardware vendors will get a cut of the marketing and data mining profits.
I just figured I would share the future in advance with everyone so that the reality would set in sooner: Start supporting vendors which sell pre-built computers that aren't locked down as well as standardized DIY hardware. Also, start supporting home fabrication projects which will soon be able to create primitive computers, because ultimately unregulated capitalism will always find some way to fuck you otherwise. DIY hardware is already horribly unstandardized and consumer-raping. If you live in a country which is regulated so you feel you don't have to worry - just wait, you will. There is meaning behind the saying with the roots and the evil. No, not the recipe for making evil root beer.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
Linux desktop, with browser, backed by web applications.
Five OEM systems and counting.
1) It depends on the company. Many companies understand the open source community and do fund stuff that help them market some of their other products.
2) After the initial ground work by one developer (or a small set of developers), the hobby developers can and do make an impact. By hobby I mean something like one hour a month, by hundreds (in some projects thousands) of developers (some of them would have worked on similar problems before and are really experts in them). You can contribute if you want to too, there are open source project that help RC enthusiasts (if you interested in UAVs, there are projects that help you build one too, you could contribute there if you are interested in)
3) Depends on the idea and how much scope you see for it.
4) I am not really familiar with this area, but if the software is truly open source, I assume there would competitors who can provide support at a much competitive rate.
5) Very often the commercial version, provides you immunity from being sued for patent violation, and provides components that make things much more efficient or cutting edge. I have never seen this model work when the free version is crap.
What would really help would be having a standard for defining interfaces, and a way for packages to be dependant on these interfaces that could be downloaded from the provider url.
This would help
a) having consistent and solid abi compatibility
b) easing the burden of making test suites
c) devoping documentation
367++ TOP FORTUNE 100/500 (or best 100 to work for per CNN Money) COMPANIES, EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS, &/or GOVERNMENT AGENCIES USING WINDOWS (over other solutions like Linux) both in HIGH TPM ENVIRONS, & FROM "TOP 100 COMPANIES TO WORK FOR" (per CNN Money 2011):
---
38 HIGH TPM & 99.999% "uptime" examples:
---
XEROX: Managing 7++ million transactions a day for office devices for its customers using Windows Server 2003 + SQLServer 2005 64-bit with 99.999% uptime!
NASDAQ: The U.S.' LARGEST STOCK EXCHANGE, Since 2005 has had Windows Server 2003 + SQLServer 2005 in failover clusters running the "official trade data dissemination system" for them in 24x7 fabled "5-9's" 99.999% uptime, doing 64,000 transactions PER SECOND (compare London Stock Exchange using Linux @ 3,000 per second)
FUJIFILM GROUP: Tracks data for its imaging, information, & documentation for its products & services using Windows Server 2003 w/ a custom SAP solution on SQLServer 2005, achieving 99.999% uptime.
HILTON HOTELS: Manages 1.4 Billion records a day for customers in 1000's of their hotels worldwide - for 370,000 rooms & catering services forecasts (switching from 6 *NIX systems to 1 Windows Server 2003 + SQLServer 2005 clustered failover system using a data warehouse with 7 million rows & 99.998% uptime).
MEDITERRANEAN SHIPPING COMPANY: Manages & Tracks 7 million containers out of 116 countries daily using Windows Server 2003 + SQLServer 2005 in failover clusters with 99.999% uptime.
SWISS INTERNATIONAL AIRLINES: Serves 70 airport destinations worldwide, with 6,500 employees + 110 branch offices via Windows Server 2003 & Active Directory with 99.95% uptime (all while growing their business 30% per year). THEIR PREVIOUS LINUX SYSTEM COULD ONLY HANDLE 250 concurrent users - the Windows one handles over 500++ users concurrently/simultaneously!
UNILEVER: Global consumer good leader, migrated to mySAP on SQLServer 2005 + Windows Server 2003 & scaled UP their operations by over 200% & yet saved money + have 99.999% uptime!
MOTOROLA: Using System Management Server, Windows Server 2003 & SQLServer 2005 to conduct inventory of 65,000 desktops from a single location (e.g. for system updates corporate & worldwide).
NISSAN: Uses Windows Server 2003 to manage 50,000 employees' email & calendaring (w/ out VPN, & using Exchange Server 2003) for local AND remote + mobile users.
TOYOTA MOTOR SALES: Reduced the # of techs needed per dealership (1,000's worldwide) from 7, to 1 using Windows Server 2003.
SIEMENS: 420,000++ people, 130 business units over 190 countries managed in Windows Active Directory
REUTERS: Managing 3,000 servers worldwide @ customer sites internationally (using only 4 managers to do so, remotely).
DELL COMPUTER: Managing 130,000 servers & 100,000 PC's worldside using Windows Server 2003 + 40 million customers' data worldwide.
LEXIS NEXIS: Searches BILLIONS of documents each second delivering news, legal, & business information.
HSBC: Deploys System Center solutions to 15,000 Servers worldwide & 300,000 desktops using Windows Server 2003.
RAYOVAC: Chose Windows Server 2003 over Linux to manage their infrastructure - saving 1 million dollars estimated in software, staffing, & support costs.
JETTAINER/LUFTHANSA/U.S. AIRWAYS: managing shipping to 3,000 flights to 400 airports every day.
CONTINENTAL AIRLINES: Manages crew communication systems, log on/log off, schedules, & shifts using Windows Server 2008 worldwide.
JET BLUE AIRWAYS: Managing 12 million flights & their data annually + ticketing, finance, & personnel too.
TIMEX: Using Windows + Exchange Server for remote personnel & executives (for their ENTIRE workforce)
7 ELEVEN STORES: Chose Windows Server 2003 over Li
Why is it that Open Source programmers are called hackers and every program like LibreOffice or eclipse is coded with hacks? I mean that's pretty damn insulting. I think all contributors to the Linux kernal or the open source software are professional programmers. I have used LibreOffice, eclipse, Kaffeine, vlc, bluefish, inkscape, gimp, blender, mame, mame32, dolphin emulator, pcsx, pcsx2, code::blocks, etc.. and these programs majority of the time run excellent maybe there are a few bugs here and there but no software is 100% perfect. Look at Microsoft's shitty OS buggy history.
And Microsoft has so called professional engineers and programmers with harvard degrees and yet they came up with buggy and crash prone shit like windows 3.0, windows 95, windows 98, windows Me, windows 2000, windows xp, windows vista, office 2000, office xp, office 2003, all these had major issues which i experienced at home and at work, talk about bugs. Windows xp sp3 did have horrible performance issues and also crashed when I loaded certain programs or transferred large files from drive to drive. Even with windows 7 I had to change in the bios ide compatibility mode to ahci so i would stop the damn freezing in windows 7 but with ubuntu in both ide and ahci no freezing on the same machine. And look at adobe products like photoshop which is still so damn fucking buggy and if you push it to hard it will crash.
There are tons of windows professional applications that are full of bugs and crash prone so stop bashing linux distros for being buggy or that it is written by hackers. I'm stuck with windows for now because of visual basic 6, visual studio 2010, netflix, some games and I mean cod4 modern warfare, and that's it.
TINSSAAFL. If you try to write applications for desktop Linux, you'll find the same problem as desktop Windows: the main vendor(s) will try to subsume the need for any other vendors for any of the mainstream software. This is a natural consequence of trying to lure in more people to use the software by offering more value added. It's only really by stepping outside that into a more niche market where you have a chance of being able to write and sell applications on the desktop. On the other hand, the Mac market is quite different. It lacks the mainstream dominance and funding of Windows and it lacks the OSS, write-once-use-in-any-distro of Linux. So, there's more room for more general applications.
In the end, though, you have to first ask yourself, "if I were a potential customer, would I want to buy my application and why?" More often than not a lot of people just have no interest in your application in the first place. And the rest remaining either don't see enough value in what you offer compared to the alternatives--freeware or OSS software or even other commercial offerings--or they do see the value and do buy your software. Sure, there's more of a mindset in the Linux world of "if I can't find a free alternative now, if I wait a while I'm sure a free one will appear". But for people who have used Linux for years? We'd love to have some decent applications to feel the gaps where OSS fails, either in not producing applications at all or doing them badly.
Sure, there's a risk that it'll be a big failure to try to target the Linux community--especially if you focus on just them--, but then every such venture is a risk. It's not like most Windows developers hit it off big either, and it has nothing to do with freeware Windows software or piracy; it's just that people aren't interested in what you offer at the price you ask--and possibly not at any price. Your best bet would be to support Linux users in addition to Windows and Mac users, anyways, presuming that the added cost is reasonably low; and developing for QT should make it relatively easy, usually.
In short, I don't think you're doing yourself any favors by blaming potential customers.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
I, anonymous coward, who provides the majority of comments on slashdot, do hereby swear I shall not comment on another post regarding the linux desktop until 2013, and after than, no more than one a month.
Seriously folks, if we just stop commenting, they'll stop running the damn things, since the comments are pretty much the only thing anyone comes to this site for anyway
mod up if you agree and want others to participate
Srsly. That would invalidate the cost/margin argument.
If you don't want crapware, download an ISO and reinstall, just like you can with Win7.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
... when you have children to feed and a mortgage to pay ... ... and the users expect all their software to be free?
Better off spending one's time addressing a market where people expect to have to pay for stuff, no?
I bought the Linux Edition of Corel WordPerfect 8 a while back. No, I don't expect everything to be free. But companies also have to make the effort to support Linux. Soon it will be required if they want to keep certain market segments as Microsoft is destroying itself.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
What's the killer app? That's what makes something desirable and compelling.
So, what can this Linux thing do that Windows can't do? What? It's free? So what, Windows is free too.(It comes "free" with the PC.)
A few years ago, there were many things that you could do with Linux that you could not do easily or at all with Windows. During that time there was a massive influx of Linux users, even if they were mostly technical types. Today, there are few if any things that Linux can do that Windows or OSX can't. In fact, there are now lots of things that Windows does insanely easily that Linux, more specifically apps available for Linux, can't do at all.
Bring out another killer app on Linux that Windows doesn't have and you will see Linux adoption spike. Think that your 0.02% market share makes you big enough to purposely screw around with the desktop, after people begged you not to and without any killer apps, and you get what the Linux Desktop is getting now.
Abandoned.
In my 19 years of Linux experience, I have only seen the issue you claim, once. When ATA drives using sata drivers renamed devices to sd. However, even that single instance caused no one issues who referred to drives by uuid or label in their fstab- the recommended practice (or for luns that used md, lvm, etc.) so for many (of that small number of users) who's hardware was affected, even that was a non-event. This also would only have affected a rather small percentage of the linux boxen at the time.
So, I think you are just trolling.
Not sure why you were modded up. /. seems to be going to hell lately with tons of troll linux on the desktop stories, and even greater numbers of microsoft windows crap posing as stories-- I mean really, MS changing their logo made the front page?!! How much is M$ paying you Timmothy? Seems either a bunch of MS shills or a bunch of windows fan-boys found out about this site called /., and have destroyed it.
ABI
Another Microsoft marketing guy.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@novell.com)
Figures...
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Given that both have been around since at least 2004, would either of these be described as a success on the Desktop, if described a failure then why would that be also? It's also inexplicable that in that whole piece, there's no mention of the litigation issues promulgated by a convicted monopolist against Open Source. Given it took me about two hour to install and fine-tune Linux on this cobbled-together-desktop, it puzzles me how you could describe the "transaction costs" as too high. Just how high can two man-hour every half-year be? I would of course test the configuration internally before shipping my tens of thousands of machines .. :)
AccountKiller
"No matter how much I like my Linux Desktop, I don't want to be responsible for bringing non-tech-savvy people along"
'Desktop Linux has been as easy to use as any of the mainstream desktop operating systems for over a decade. How easy is it? My 79-year old mother-in-law, Hulvia, can use it. -year old mother-in-law' link
You could try the LyX the document processor
Self-publishing with LYX
AccountKiller
I forgot to add, the 3rd option, donations, is becoming more and more popular with kickstarter (remember how dispora got $200,000). If you have an real idea that people would find useful. Linux, free-as-in-beer, and donation depend is not a bad model at all. You can find a number of such tools getting funded on kickstarter.
That's the logic behind most all ancient artwork. Donations worked there for 100s of years. Nowadays we are likely to see it even more with kickstarter & Google-like companies
Suggestion for Michael Meeks: work more on LibreOffice and less on Gnome.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The better question is: why write applications for one OS? Wouldn't a software developer with children and a mortgage want the largest customer base possible?
I've been running Linux for a decade and a half, both at home and at the company I founded. I've bought many thousands of dollars worth of software over the years on Linux, primarily Engineering apps such as Eagle, VariCAD, FPGA tools, and the like. Most of these apps are built on cross-platform toolkits, and run just fine on Windows, Mac AND Linux. It's not that hard to do.
Personally, I got tired of these OS wars years ago. Fortunately, the Internet is slowly making the 'which OS' question a moot point in the not-too-distant future.
But do web sites that need real power use Windows? eg. Google, Amazon?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Windows users are known to be the biggest software pirates who don't want to pay for anything
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
1) Your company pays you to write software for linux
Yeah, but will the company want to pay him to write the same thing once and port it to different revisions of Linux, or different combinations of Linux/X/glibc/Qt/GTK+? Most ISVs would want to write a software version once that would run on Linux version n, n++ and so on. Subsequent versions of the software would be enhanced features, not merely more ports
2) You have fun writing application for linux and do it part time (everyone needs a hobby, right?)
Yeah, but how much fun is it writing the same application once, and struggling to port it to a myriad #platforms and software combinations?
3) The software is good enough, that people donate money to help you work full time on it.
Why not just straight-forward sell it for a reasonable price, say $20-50?
4) You sell support (or special edition cds or whatever) for your software, but your software is free.
I agree w/ the GP's response on this one
5) You sell a commercial version of your software, that has additional components that are not included in your free version.
I am surprised you been on slashdot for so long, and still did not understand this.
Again, like he said, it's hard to draw a balance b/w making it so good that add-ons won't be needed, vs making it so bad that the user won't want to trust him w/ his money.
1) Your company pays you to write software for linux
Yeah, but will the company want to pay him to write the same thing once and port it to different revisions of Linux, or different combinations of Linux/X/glibc/Qt/GTK+? Most ISVs would want to write a software version once that would run on Linux version n, n++ and so on. Subsequent versions of the software would be enhanced features, not merely more ports
Er, why would you want to port a Qt application to GTK+, when it will run just fine? But I understand you point, companies do not pay for porting to varying platforms, but this is where the community (of hobby devs) usually takes over.
2) You have fun writing application for linux and do it part time (everyone needs a hobby, right?)
Yeah, but how much fun is it writing the same application once, and struggling to port it to a myriad #platforms and software combinations?
Not fun, but you always find volunteers doing this on many many open source projects.
3) The software is good enough, that people donate money to help you work full time on it.
Why not just straight-forward sell it for a reasonable price, say $20-50?
Why not just straight-forward accept donations and then build your project (aka kickstarter)
4) You sell support (or special edition cds or whatever) for your software, but your software is free.
I agree w/ the GP's response on this one
I have responded to GP.
5) You sell a commercial version of your software, that has additional components that are not included in your free version.
I am surprised you been on slashdot for so long, and still did not understand this.
Again, like he said, it's hard to draw a balance b/w making it so good that add-ons won't be needed, vs making it so bad that the user won't want to trust him w/ his money.
Again responded to GP, but many projects have successfully used it. I guess proof is in the pudding.
Ubuntu was the perfect tool for some friends who just use their PC to browse and chat online. It worked perfectly. The fucking Ubuntu went to Unity and fucked it all up. I have raged as a nerd often enough about the Gnome 3 and Unity shit but it was with the geek installs for people who just needed a PC to launch a browser that it has the biggest effect. Just installed XP back from the rescue partition and told them that IT hates them and doesn't want them to use a computer.
OSX and Windows 8 are just as bad.
It took people years to get used to the standard "windows" method of doing things. DON'T FUCKING CHANCE IT JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE SOME FANTASY OF MOVIE INTERFACES IN YOUR DISEASED MIND.
I am getting more and more pissed of at it, to the point I think the designers of Windows 8, Unity, Gnome 3 should have their hands crushed and told to "adapt" to their new future of disability. It is new and exciting!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Try this, right click taskbar to kill a frozen app. Oh, you can't? THEN IT AIN'T THE FUCKING SAME.
Gnome 2.0 worked, it wasn't pretty, it wasn't nice but it worked and gave users control. The new attempts are all "oh it is so shiny and nice and friendly... a crash application not closing you say? That can't happen, our new applications can't crash, we wrote all new code and didn't test it all before releasing it so how can you possibly have the need to close a crash app when it isn't possible they crash?"
FIX GODDAMN NAUTILUS BEFORE DOING ANYTHING ELSE GNOME TEAM.
Gnome logic: Our current code base isn't perfect after years of development, so we create an entirely new one and simply remove every feature people rely on. Something that ain't there can't be broken after all. Then we release it without testing and all will be well.
Well it fucking isn't. Gnome 3 and Unity did more to hurt Linux on the desktop then anything MS could ever have pulled. And there is a connection between Gnome and MS through that moron who came up with Mono.
It is paranoid to think the clusterfuck that is Gnome 3 and Unity couldn't have happened by accident?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If only _someone_ would make a non-retarded LaTeX to HTML converter.
Even better, if someone else would make things like LyX really work with alternate document type macros, particularly SFFMS (which I used to write my novel because it will actually produce printed paper drafts in the absurd formats publishers want like double-underline for italics).
Currently I use Kile on KDE for editing my latex documents.
---
But _really_ *where* is the word processor that just saves its text in reasonable HTML. You know where paragraphs are in angle-p-angle "paragraph" tags?
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Give yourself a remote account. Give grandma her own account that can only write in her own directory. Do remote maintenance at will. Back up her shit to something at your house because grandma is gonna break or lose that shit to her own activities someday. Do stealth maintenance.
In short, nuke that family shit from FOSS Orbit _before_ it can fester.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I get paid major bank to work on software for Linux. That some of it goes out to be free is no skin off my teeth.
See free software isn't "I'm gonna write some POS and hope someone buys it" development model. Those days are dead mostly anyway. Its "Some guy wants these features put on that 'free' bit because he actually has a use case, and he's gonna pay me to meet his needs then give it away so neither of us get stuck paying upkeep and he can have me do something newer and better".
Who want's to spend 40 years doing maintenance on a some accounting or word processing software anyway. There are people who are writing better gear because they need to process words and account for money. And since they really make their money counting money and processing words, giving the bycatch code out as the "whole cost" of getting the whole pre-mod app is a huge win.
It just won't lead to "another microsoft"
That closed source model was a fluke anyway, the preceding 40 years were open source. The next twenty five or so was a grand experiment that largely failed except for a few really unexpected cutthroat operators, and now its back to the more natural state of only paying for what you need.
In a current version of word I don't use 90% of it, and I'm a technical writer and novelist, but I paid for it all back when I was that foolish. Same can be said for any person or company that has ever bought that slag. So now there is this free stuff that was made by someone who actually needed it, so it's not so much slag, and given away to others who _might_ need it, and then gotten back greatly improved by the supporters and the adders on.
That's lots of money feeding lots of people, and nobody is wasting their time or money playing the "trade secret" and "big P.R." games.
What's not to love?
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
...orary software-for-money model.
See, thing is. Software was originally written by people who had to actually do things other than write software. It was all open soruce anyway. Not just Unix whith its original sharing stuff, but all the software that came before. In the seventies when IBM delivered you a copy of DOS and TSO and CICS for your big-iron mainframe it came on two sets of tapes. One was the ready to run binaries, and the other was the "you bet your ass you are going to find something you are going to need to tweak and recompile" sources.
Microsoft's bizzare model of selling software and keeping the source secret worked for lack of meaningful competition. The just imposed it onto the PC. And IBM, the company that put the whole bios source in the technical manual, didn't care because they just wanted to kill the Apple II and they then expected to dump the PC just like the other lugables they had put out to kill other small competitors.
The monkey got in the barrel when Business People took the "Personal Computer" and made it into a Business Computer surrogate.
That killed the multitude of brands in computing available and then left IBM supporting their business base with what was designed to be a throw-away. There's a reason that the AT used the stupidest mode of the interrupt controller and had to gang up on IRQ2 and bump its original occupant to IRQ9 and such. The chip they used had way better configurations but IBM had already glued their hourglass to their table on many technical shortcuts.
So flash forward. Microsoft never managed to escape software (windows and word) despite constantly trying to, because secrecy doesn't lead to good service or products. As larger more open systems in every other area of technology passed Microsoft by, lots of people wanted to be The Next Microsoft, but even Microsoft doesn't really want to be Microsoft. They just don't have any idea of how to be anything else. So they survive on a constant diet, cosisting of the flesh of their "preferred partners" and washed down by the secret bitter tears of the windows users who have learned to eat their gruel and like it mister.
But out here, we are back to people writing the software they need to use. After all, who better to know how it should work? And they do so knowing that the free-as-in-liberty materials they used to do so were _not_ free as in cash. Instead of paying Microsoft $10,000 for a development kit, and $2 per unit shipped, negoatiated up front to make a Windows CE monstrosity, they know they have to "pay" for their zero-cash initial outlay with 'here, have this URL full of code" for each unit sold.
Who cares? They are selling those units. Money is being made. People who want to sell you a phone have _no_ _interest_ in being in the "phone operating system development" business. So why would they care if you can replace the OS using the code they got for free and gave away for free? You bought the phone and good riddance till you decide you want the next one!
Same for military gear. Same for office suites. Same for business software. Same for scientific software.
People want to do business and science. Those few freaks like me in the mix who want to do software just find someone who wants to do that business or science and say "hey, buddy, I'll make that thing do what you want for a little green"...
What could be more natural.
The artificial scarcity attempt will fail, it will do horrific things to the U.S. economy as it fails, but the world will soldier on and in another 30 years the U.S. will come begging at the world technology table, with a black eye, and pretending to have no memory of chasing and seducing That Harlot DRM they went home with even when their friends tried to tell them they would regret it...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Don't feed the hosts file guy. He'll drag you down to his level and then beat you with experience.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Linux is like water. Water is free and abundant, but the only way a business is going to make money off water is
a. take the good stuff (mt spring for example) for yourself and sell it (e.g. Evian)
b. give "free" water such a bad rap that yours is better (e.g. pollute the crap out of free water). But then sell basic tap water with good marketing (e.g. Dansi, Dannon, Arrowhead, etc...)
Odd, I thought companies making things like boats, fishing rods, lures, bate, sails, paint, etc,etc were all making money off Water.
1) Your company pays you to write software for linux
Yeah, but will the company want to pay him to write the same thing once and port it to different revisions of Linux, or different combinations of Linux/X/glibc/Qt/GTK+? Most ISVs would want to write a software version once that would run on Linux version n, n++ and so on. Subsequent versions of the software would be enhanced features, not merely more ports
Er, why would you want to port a Qt application to GTK+, when it will run just fine? But I understand you point, companies do not pay for porting to varying platforms, but this is where the community (of hobby devs) usually takes over.
Problem is that once a company has ported an app to, lets say, Mint 12, it would expect it to work seamlessly in Mint 13, 14, and so on. Let's say it makes something called Acmeworks 1.0, which was developed on/for Mint 12. Now, later, it might choose to develop Acmeworks 2.0 and make Mint 15 its target platform - that is standard practice.
However, if the company has ported Acmeworks 1.0 to Mint 12, and finds that 1.0 doesn't work on Mint 13, that's a major bummer. B'cos it would like to leverage its work over as many versions as possible, w/o having to reinvent the wheel every time. That's one pain point, but what makes it even worse is that the breakage could be due to anything - due to using Linux 3.5 instead of 3.2, or using a different Qt version, or a different glibc, or who knows what else. So debugging why it doesn't work becomes an expensive proposition in terms of time, which is why companies wouldn't want to do it. What's worse - let's say, it developed Acmeworks 1.2 for Mint 13, and released it, and later found that 1.2 doesn't work under Mint 12. Now, they are forced to maintain different versions of the app for different versions of the OS. Oh, and let's say, later, somebody tells them that hey, 1.2 works w/ Mint 13 for KDE, but not w/ Cinnamon. They have to do 1.2.3. This is just w/ Mint. Multiply that w/ the top 3 or 4 distros (never mind all 100) and see how hairy it becomes.
Even hobbyists would prefer doing fun stuff - in the above example, a hobbyist would prefer working on Acmeworks 1.5, or 2.0, or 2.5, and not fixing bugs in 1.0. It's this stuff - fixing bugs, porting software, et al, which are not fun jobs, and where companies need to pay people to do it. And when Linux serves to make that task more difficult, guess what happens in the end.
2) You have fun writing application for linux and do it part time (everyone needs a hobby, right?)
Yeah, but how much fun is it writing the same application once, and struggling to port it to a myriad #platforms and software combinations?
Not fun, but you always find volunteers doing this on many many open source projects.
True, but then accept that support would be spotty. When someone asks you 'Does Acmeworks work under Linux', you have to play 20 questions w/ him and ask him things like which distro, which DE, which libraries, et al, None of which have to be asked in case of Windows or OS-X. The other thing about volunteers is lack of accountability - nobody's paying them to do this, so why should they prefer that over, say, their actual jobs, or other personal responsibilities?
3) The software is good enough, that people donate money to help you work full time on it.
Why not just straight-forward sell it for a reasonable price, say $20-50?
Why not just straight-forward accept donations and then build your project (aka kickstarter)
Two words: cash flow. Donations have a huge uncertainity factor about them. Sales implies a given revenue that, amortized over the estimated number of copies sold, would cover the cost of development, and enables him to pay the rent
Problem is that once a company has ported an app to, lets say, Mint 12, it would expect it to work seamlessly in Mint 13, 14, and so on.
This is a bit of a strawman. The big toolkits have had pretty good backwards compatibility for at least a decade.
When you see people rushing to support a new version of GTK+ or Qt, it's not because it's actually necessary, it's because of the urge to always exploit the latest and greatest.
In any case, as Michael Meeks point out, this is probably less important than you think. Most in-house business apps are web-apps these days anyway, and for ISVs what mostly matters is whether the market is attractive or not. If you're earning good money, anyone will tolerate a bit of hassle.
You both fail, I see no mention of a car.
No. This "new age" only exists because a lot of people have becomes tired and fed up with Linux continually being talking about on Slashdot as some sort of "savior" operating system that's somehow superior to Windows, despite its many many flaws that don't seem to get acknowledged. Now there's push-back, and the traditional Linux gurus don't like the fact not everyone is listening to their bullshit anymore.
I'm enjoying this critical analysis of Linux period we're going through. It's the only way we'll be able to analyze the legitimate reasons why it's failing to secure any mainstream share, rather than just the usual "Microsoft monopoly" BS. It's a lot more complicated than that.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
I read this article: "ZOMG, can't make money off something that is free! Must...vote...with...wallet!" Unregulated capitalism is the actual problem here, and voting with your wallet won't work. Without regulation, and since vendors are corporations who only care about money, you as a citizen and consumer would end up paying for the free software as the vendor would pass the "loss" of them not making as much money as they could have if you would have purchased the non-free software option to you. This is why corporations = fail, and unregulated capitalism = fail.
All the downmods in the WORLD can't hide this (lol) -> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3110069&cid=41346029
* Best part is, from now on? I can always throw THAT link above, right back in your face next time you try your "trolling" weak illogical ad hominem attacks on myself (rather than points or facts I list) & off-topic b.s. again!
(I love it... since I KNOW that you will, and you'll "fail" again, even moreso!)
APK
P.S.=> Keep blowing your mod points from your "alternate registered 'luser'" sock-puppet accounts to *try* to "hide" that YOU RAN (vainly, this brings it right back into view) & YOU FAILED, "Forrest" ("Run, Forrest - RUN!!!", lmao)...
... apk
DOS. TSO. CICS. == That's all IBM mainframe stuff from the sixties and seventies. Always came with source tapes.
Forth, the language, made by an astronomer, eventually extended into Postscript, e.g. that thing that runs all those printers.
All the platform-agnostic products like Open Office or the entirety of the platform agnostic elements of the GNU Suite.
Really, software used to be always be open sourced.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press