And what exactly is the advantage to the free software community of having a large number of people using a no choice, no options, dumbed down Linux. What does that do for anyone?
Huh? There are very few distribution forks that were based on choice of packages. Where they did fork was on things like dependencies for packages which change compile options.
Be careful here. Windows is less of a moving target for binaries, not for software. I'm running software written in the 1970s and 80s all the time under Linux and Darwin without any real problems.
Linux is not friendly environment for complex commercial software which relies on distribution as a mechanism for revenue. Linux is not a friendly environment for binary only software.
It just isn't. The people that lead the community don't really want to change that. What they are willing to do is tolerate some limited levels of binary only software in non crucial ways but only as a stop gap.
The first issue is ideological the next is technical.
Slackware as the last holdover from the previous generation. While Gentoo didn't exist yet that's what has filled the Slackware niche (which brought ports to Linux)
RedHat - 1/2 way between GPL + commercial Caldera - ISVs and fully commercial. Debian - fully free Mandrake - focus on desktop not server. Suse - Bring in European issues. TurboLinux - Brining in Asian specific issues
I'm not seeing much harm there. It looks like they all managed to advance the cause quite a bit. They also worked together RedHat + Debian backed Gnome, Mandrake + Suse + Caldera backed KDE. That was a huge advance that has paid off.
They are using the term in the sense of business model = method or providing specific services or goods at a particular fixed unit cost to a specific population.
The city of Philadelphia wasn't willing to spend tens - hundreds of millions to make this really work. At $20/mo the cost is getting close to what a wired connection (cable / DSL...) costs in which case most people would rather go wired. This should have been free and well funded to be a real experiment.
Most Americans support some form of free healthcare. A free limited health care system that provides a minimal level of public health would get strong support and some support from both parties. Lets not forget that McCain campaigned on $5000k / person health insurance. The real issue has always been how to provide supplemental coverage.
The thing is it is not just your kid that matters. The high levels of interest by other parents positively impact your kid because it changes classroom dynamics. That's why I pay for private schools.
1) It is based on C so it has low level OS interactions. This means I need to trust the application author and it puts my entire system in danger
2) Generally C++ were part of the event driven model. This works for non linear processing. Many web apps are still fundamentally linear.
3) C++ is designed for high efficiency of hardware but is rather indifferent to programmer time. That is applications need a fairly large base to be cost effective in terms of number of users. On the other hand they can be quite large and complex and still run well on limited hardware. In today's market hardware is generally overpowered which is why computer prices have been falling so drastically for the last 10 years. The goal (with the exception of multimedia) to save money on the programmers not the hardware.
4) C++ if fundamentally text based and does not have a naturally display mechanism.
How is this a good fit for the web or the types of apps developed for the web?
I disagree. The very first fillings in this case had dozens of factual errors and easily disproven facts. There was no point ever where SCO sounded plausible.
People who believed SCO / McBride did so in spite of the facts and evidence not because of them.
You also have a low number, I'm shocked you don't remember this. Back then people didn't talk about the JVMs separately generally they were referred to by the Netscape version number. It wasn't until the Sun / Microsoft lawsuit and people having to download the JVM themselves that this changed.
For example look at the press releases regarding Navigator 2.0.1 security flaws from March 1996. They don't talk JVM version they talk 2.0.1 vs. 2.0.2
I used several system that had OS9 on them but almost never used OS9 apps. Certainly there was usage in the 10.0 days but by 10.1 most Mac users were on OSX with possibly some OS9 apps used infrequently. Sort of like the way they use Windows apps today.
There are consumer surveys, business desktop survey, browser hits.... which are used to poll the marketplace even for a free product. A good example of interest is Dell which has off and on sold various Linux based systems (and before that SCO systems) since around 1991.
I notice the low number so you've been around. Do you remember how fast Microsoft's JVM was compared to Netscapes? J++ was also very fast. Microsoft always felt the biggest problem java had was speed. Sun conversely felt that compatibility across platforms (in particular Solaris) was more important so speed took a back seat to compatibility.
Then Java caught on with the enterprise app crowd which was writing huge apps not simple applets so runtime speed became important but load speed wasn't.
They have ported it to PC hardware. What they haven't ported it to is generic hardware. And they shouldn't, it cost Microsoft billions to support random hardware.
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Windows and Mac also have a hierarchical file system. At least on the Mac open office uses the same hierarchical menu structure as any other Aqua app.
We've had windows looking desktops for 13 years. For example
http://www.xmission.com/~sa/fvwm-themes/redxp2.png
And what exactly is the advantage to the free software community of having a large number of people using a no choice, no options, dumbed down Linux. What does that do for anyone?
Huh? There are very few distribution forks that were based on choice of packages. Where they did fork was on things like dependencies for packages which change compile options.
Unix has been using /opt for large packages which are willing to install there own trees for over a decade.
Be careful here. Windows is less of a moving target for binaries, not for software. I'm running software written in the 1970s and 80s all the time under Linux and Darwin without any real problems.
Linux is not friendly environment for complex commercial software which relies on distribution as a mechanism for revenue. Linux is not a friendly environment for binary only software.
It just isn't. The people that lead the community don't really want to change that. What they are willing to do is tolerate some limited levels of binary only software in non crucial ways but only as a stop gap.
The first issue is ideological the next is technical.
Lets go back say 10 years so that we have the advantage of hindsight.
RedHat
Caldera
Debian
Mandrake
Slackware
Suse
TurboLinux
Slackware as the last holdover from the previous generation. While Gentoo didn't exist yet that's what has filled the Slackware niche (which brought ports to Linux)
RedHat - 1/2 way between GPL + commercial
Caldera - ISVs and fully commercial.
Debian - fully free
Mandrake - focus on desktop not server.
Suse - Bring in European issues.
TurboLinux - Brining in Asian specific issues
I'm not seeing much harm there. It looks like they all managed to advance the cause quite a bit. They also worked together RedHat + Debian backed Gnome, Mandrake + Suse + Caldera backed KDE. That was a huge advance that has paid off.
They are using the term in the sense of
business model = method or providing specific services or goods at a particular fixed unit cost to a specific population.
The city of Philadelphia wasn't willing to spend tens - hundreds of millions to make this really work. At $20/mo the cost is getting close to what a wired connection (cable / DSL...) costs in which case most people would rather go wired. This should have been free and well funded to be a real experiment.
Most Americans support some form of free healthcare. A free limited health care system that provides a minimal level of public health would get strong support and some support from both parties. Lets not forget that McCain campaigned on $5000k / person health insurance. The real issue has always been how to provide supplemental coverage.
The thing is it is not just your kid that matters. The high levels of interest by other parents positively impact your kid because it changes classroom dynamics. That's why I pay for private schools.
Where have you soap boxed on this? I'd be interested in reading examples.
Have you seen Apple's market share recently? That argument made sense a few years back. It is getting harder and harder to support with time.
Try using Safari vs. firefox. I still regularly have mainstream sites that perform differently between them.
OK lets take C++
1) It is based on C so it has low level OS interactions. This means I need to trust the application author and it puts my entire system in danger
2) Generally C++ were part of the event driven model. This works for non linear processing. Many web apps are still fundamentally linear.
3) C++ is designed for high efficiency of hardware but is rather indifferent to programmer time. That is applications need a fairly large base to be cost effective in terms of number of users. On the other hand they can be quite large and complex and still run well on limited hardware. In today's market hardware is generally overpowered which is why computer prices have been falling so drastically for the last 10 years. The goal (with the exception of multimedia) to save money on the programmers not the hardware.
4) C++ if fundamentally text based and does not have a naturally display mechanism.
How is this a good fit for the web or the types of apps developed for the web?
That is not exactly how it happened. Early in this case I wanted to give the history and I wrote (been edited quite a bit since) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldera_OpenLinux .
There never was any plausible reason to believe IBM had leaked code.
I disagree. The very first fillings in this case had dozens of factual errors and easily disproven facts. There was no point ever where SCO sounded plausible.
People who believed SCO / McBride did so in spite of the facts and evidence not because of them.
You also have a low number, I'm shocked you don't remember this. Back then people didn't talk about the JVMs separately generally they were referred to by the Netscape version number. It wasn't until the Sun / Microsoft lawsuit and people having to download the JVM themselves that this changed.
For example look at the press releases regarding Navigator 2.0.1 security flaws from March 1996. They don't talk JVM version they talk 2.0.1 vs. 2.0.2
I used several system that had OS9 on them but almost never used OS9 apps. Certainly there was usage in the 10.0 days but by 10.1 most Mac users were on OSX with possibly some OS9 apps used infrequently. Sort of like the way they use Windows apps today.
There are consumer surveys, business desktop survey, browser hits.... which are used to poll the marketplace even for a free product. A good example of interest is Dell which has off and on sold various Linux based systems (and before that SCO systems) since around 1991.
Google Docs does this really well with shared version control. I've used it several times to do this sort of thing.
I notice the low number so you've been around. Do you remember how fast Microsoft's JVM was compared to Netscapes? J++ was also very fast. Microsoft always felt the biggest problem java had was speed. Sun conversely felt that compatibility across platforms (in particular Solaris) was more important so speed took a back seat to compatibility.
Then Java caught on with the enterprise app crowd which was writing huge apps not simple applets so runtime speed became important but load speed wasn't.
They have ported it to PC hardware. What they haven't ported it to is generic hardware. And they shouldn't, it cost Microsoft billions to support random hardware.
What year are you having OSX and Linux coming "out of the gate" with the same following?