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Why Windows Vista Ended Up Being a Mess (usejournal.com)
alaskana98 shares an article called "What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider's Retrospective." Ben Fathi, formerly a manager of various teams at Microsoft responsible for storage, file systems, high availability/clustering, file level network protocols, distributed file systems, and related technologies and later security, writes:
Imagine supporting that same OS for a dozen years or more for a population of billions of customers, millions of companies, thousands of partners, hundreds of scenarios, and dozens of form factors -- and you'll begin to have an inkling of the support and compatibility nightmare. In hindsight, Linux has been more successful in this respect. The open source community and approach to software development is undoubtedly part of the solution. The modular and pluggable architecture of Unix/Linux is also a big architectural improvement in this respect. An organization, sooner or later, ships its org chart as its product; the Windows organization was no different. Open source doesn't have that problem...
I personally spent many years explaining to antivirus vendors why we would no longer allow them to "patch" kernel instructions and data structures in memory, why this was a security risk, and why they needed to use approved APIs going forward, that we would no longer support their legacy apps with deep hooks in the Windows kernel -- the same ones that hackers were using to attack consumer systems. Our "friends", the antivirus vendors, turned around and sued us, claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power! With friends like that, who needs enemies?
I like how the essay ends. "Was it an incredibly complex product with an amazingly huge ecosystem (the largest in the world at that time)? Yup, that it was. Could we have done better? Yup, you bet... Hindsight is 20/20."
I personally spent many years explaining to antivirus vendors why we would no longer allow them to "patch" kernel instructions and data structures in memory, why this was a security risk, and why they needed to use approved APIs going forward, that we would no longer support their legacy apps with deep hooks in the Windows kernel -- the same ones that hackers were using to attack consumer systems. Our "friends", the antivirus vendors, turned around and sued us, claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power! With friends like that, who needs enemies?
I like how the essay ends. "Was it an incredibly complex product with an amazingly huge ecosystem (the largest in the world at that time)? Yup, that it was. Could we have done better? Yup, you bet... Hindsight is 20/20."
In hindsight, Linux has been more successful in this respect. The open source community and approach to software development is undoubtedly part of the solution. The modular and pluggable architecture of Unix/Linux is also a big architectural improvement in this respect
Try to run a 2.4 binary on modern linux. No fucking way. 2.2 or 2.0? You have to be out of your bloody mind.
Backward compatibility is absolute bullshit for Linux.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Linus with the Kernel is always right though. Keep that C++ shittery out of the kernel. Maintain your patches or it disappears, etc.
The thing is open source's enemy is the GPL, and I'm not talking about "the GPL in general" but those that use the GPL as a bible to preach at others with.
If I want to release something, fuck your licences. I would sooner release something into the public domain than have have the GPL assholes shut down projects that incorporate my thing because it got tainted with GPL code by someone else later. The GPL is viral, and while it may come from a good place, the people who use it to beat each other over the head certainly are not.
The BSD licence is at least better in this regard, but even that has detractors because the two difference OSS licence models are for two very different things. Libraries should be BSD (eg FFPMEG), end-software should be GPL (eg Gimp). It's because that end software needs to be maintained without being forked into another product *cough OpenOffice* due to licence bullshit. GPL software gets forked for political reasons, and when you don't share your contributions you get beaten up. Hence you don't make libraries GPL, people will simply not use it. My favorite example of GPL fuckery is libav/ffmpeg are two forks of the same fucking thing, and now to use ffmpeg you need both.