Install both and try each -- it's free. All the major distros support both. It's kind of like asking someone which web browser to use or whether a song is a "good song" or not. You aren't going to get anywhere.
The trade secret approach would be dead in the water. Trade secrets provide protection against leaks, where employees disclose information that they shouldn't, but not protection against people reverse engineering, rediscovering, or reimplementing something.
The only thing left is patents.
It would be interesting to see if this approach works. If the case is won by the DVD CCA, it provides a strong argument against the DMCA -- patents alone would provide sufficient protection for at least some copy control technologies. If it's lost, then they've lost one more layer of protection.
I'd have to see the patents, but I'm a little doubtful that they really have CSS patented. The mechanisms involved are not revolutionary. Patents don't protect an end product -- just a particular process that yields that end product -- so I'd be suspicious that a patent would either not cover the work being done or would not be valid.
Why would someone on a Mac need to edit VS 6.dsw files??
I worked on one project on a cygwin system with LF line endings, and have had people throwing project snapshots they had checked out on non-Windows sytems around. It was a huge pain in the ass.
I agree with _some_ of what you say, but, how can you give up context-sensitive (and extremely thorough) help at your fingertips?
What, for the POSIX API? I have man pages. For the Win32 API? I keep about 12 viewports going when I'm developing, and usually have at least two devoted to documentation, with a tabbed browser window open to the appropriate docs for any high-level library I'm using.
Drawing a UI is not just a novelty, either. It's a hell of a lot easier and a hell of a lot faster. Sometimes people will hand-code things, but that's the slowest way to do things. The productivity enhancement just from drawing a UI and double-clicking a button to wire up an event is worth using an IDE by itself.
Rapid Application Development tools to graphically build GUIs are not specific to IDEs. I've used glade on Linux, ResEdit on the Mac, and the-name-escapes-me-because-it-was-too-long-ago, a free Win32 GUI RAD tool back in the day. All of these are standalone, and not components of an IDE.
It's really quite amazing how many of the good coders I know don't use an IDE -- they use an editor and compiler -- maybe vim or emacs and gcc or Visual Studio or something to compile.
I think a major reason many Windows developers are such Visual Studio fans is that Visual Studio's CLI tools are a pain in the ass to use. The MS virtual terminal really sucks, as does the shell. MS basically killed off all the non-MS compilers back in the day. MS's compilers are the only ones left in wide use on Windows. Since it's a pain in the ass to use the CLI tools, and Microsoft gives you an editor with their GUI front end...programmers end up liking Visual Studio.
I do know one Windows developer that likes the (expensive) Visual Slickedit, though I'm not sure whether it's a full IDE or just an editor. It isn't a compiler, that's for sure.
I've always been rather appalled by Microsoft's IDEs. (The only other IDE I've used is Metroworks on the Mac, and while I didn't strongly prefer either IDE, I really like non-IDE work much more.) Among other things:
* Managing multiple build configurations in VS is a PITA. You can have options that apply globally, or options that apply to individual configurations, but not options that apply to sets of configurations. You can't add and remove object files to a project based on build configuration.
* Incompatibility across versions. Try using VS 6 and a few versions of VS.NET for different modules. GNU Make's syntax doesn't change *nearly* as often as Microsoft's project file syntax (and I'm suspicious that they do so to force upgrades). Versions are not backwards compatible, so once you transition to a newer version, you're stuck.
* Bugginess. VS.NET 2002 has more bugs that I can count (note:.NET 2003 seems to be better).
* Stupid file formats. Ever tried checking VS 6's.dsw files into a CVS repository? They look like text, they sound like text (and CVS autodetects them as text), but VS 6 barfs all over itself if it doesn't have CRLF line endings. Try adding someone working on a LF ending cygwin system or a Unix box or a Mac into your development mix, and all of a sudden, you realize that all those deltas in your repository have to be thrown out. Yuck.
* A pain to set build options. Metrowerks' IDE's build prefs GUI was *much* more logically laid out. You should be able to find basic build options in a GUI within a week of using it. A month after I started using VS, I was *still* wasting huge amounts of time finding various build options in VS. That's silly.
* Can't generate nice graphical call graphs, a la ncc/codeviz.
* Relatively slow -- this is the make system, not the compiler itself. GNU Make is much faster than Microsoft's make system.
* Creates a *ton* of files in projects created. I'd expect a project file, full stop. They have project files, workspace files, cache files,.vcproj files, file extensions changing from version to version...argh.
* The compiler has stopped supporting the current C language.
The only really nice things that I can think of about Microsoft's dev tools are:
* The editor supports very good function completion -- a lot of people cite this as a killer feature. Emacs has etags and fume-mode related functionality. Both are more of a pain to use, and less featureful in some ways (like not showing types of a function being completed). On the other hand, I have had nastiness where the editor got confused about where a constant was defined, and I spent ages tracking down a bizarre bug with two identically-named constants in two projects.
* The debugger/compiler support source-level modification of running programs when one is debugging. God only knows what awful hacks were done to get this working, but apparently it works well enough for general use.
Really, a lot of the people that I know have used Borland's ancient IDE (I ha
The other poster is correct. You're pretty far off on the GNOME/.NET relationship. There is one GNOME player that likes C# a lot -- Ximian. Not tht Ximian is insignificant, or that Miguel doesn't have weight in the GNOME community, but what Miguel and Ximian do defines "what GNOME is doing" about as much as private projects of TheKompany define what KDE is doing. Miguel himself has stated in *multiple* interviews that C# is *not* being merged into GNOME, that Mono is *not* part of GNOME, and that GNOME is *not* pushing C#. He has a bunch of people that want a rapid development language *and* happen to do commercial work for GNOME, which means that Mono will probably have GNOME bindings. End, full stop, you cannot claim more. There are already Java bindings for GNOME, so by the "support" metric, and if the desktop environments *have* to have a single preferred high-level-language (and I think that that's a ridiculous idea), Java would be ahead, not C#. Heck, more people write GTK apps with Python than with Java *or* C#.
most tech stocks trade in a range and undergo stock splits if they go out of this range - i presume at one time sun and redhat had comprable stock prices if not market caps (something that would be well known to people following the shares)
Okay, that's a reasonable point. There might be some correllation with a recent high/current price argument (though I still think that a 52-week-high/current ratio would be a lot more reasonable), but while this might be accurate for order-of-magnitude, a multiplier of three is not much. Lots of folks comfortably trade at ten times what someone else does without doing a split.
Who listens to this gasbag? He's almost worse than Jonkatz. Why is the open source community allowing such an obnoxious self-righteous psychopath to be its mouthpiece? If I were Scott McNealy I would tell him to go fuck one of his gun nozzles.
I don't believe guns have nozzles.
The only sense that I can make out of it that makes ESR out to *not* be very foolish in writing this letter is if he's thinking in a rather long-term, egocentric manner. He might expect that Microsoft's C# will beat Java, and Sun has had it. That way, when it happens, he can say "Yeah, I predicted that back in Febuary '04! Too bad Sun didn't listen to me. I'm sure they'd still be in business then!" and point to his nicely documented open letter.
He *is* getting more than a bit self-important, though. The last time I heard about him, he was advocating a "hacker symbol". Dammit, ESR, shut *up* for a while, and go have fun writing code or politicking or *something*. It takes forever to build up credibility, and a couple of silly open letters and articles to blow it. That may not be just, but such is life.
Just because open source is a good idea does not mean that open letters are always a good idea.
ESR, if you wanted to do this and actually do it *right* and maybe have an impact, you would have been *much* better off writing a high-quality open letter in combination with a few other major open source/free software figures, and somebody high up at IBM. People like that. That would let them catch flaws (many eyes, no?), give you more weight, and ensure that you have a good representative view of the open source community. Now you blew it, and it's too late to take it back. Unlike software (and even your rather unusual web pages), letters do not have revisions.
Java is ahead of C# in the vast majority of ways that count.
Please list these. I am not aware of them. I do not doubt their existence, but because C# is an MS project, I have avoided it. I know of a number of problems with Java, some at a fundamental level, and I'd like to see how you think Java is better than C#. I've heard fairly upbeat things about C# when compared to Java from the (rather distinguished) language people I've talked to. Any input that you could give would be appreciated, as I would very much like to dislike C#.:-)
Okay, ESR is writing an open letter to a CEO of Sun. Why the *hell* is he comparing Red Hat and Sun by *share price*? Share price means effectively nothing when comparing company worth -- market capitalization is what should be looked at, as it takes into account the number of shares. RHAT's market cap is impressive, but it's still 1/6th Sun's, not the three times Sun's value that ESR implies when comparing share prices.
So, there are two possibilities that I see here.
A) ESR is unaware of the difference between share price and market cap. This seems a pretty awful knowledge hole. If he doesn't know, he just made himself look pretty dumb in front of some major business folks while advising them on business strategy. It's pretty embarrassing to consider that ESR can't even have had a savvy person read over his letters before he tries to speak for the open source community.
B) ESR knows what the difference is, and is hoping that "three times" sounds better. Since there is no *way* that ESR can fool a CEO into blindly going along with him (if there's one thing a CEO of a publically traded company knows, it's stock value), he must be putting this in the letter for the masses of people that are completely unversed in market economics, which pretty means *maybe* some high school and below kids. This is nothing more than a propaganda job. I'd view this as extremely disappointing, coming from someone who I consider capable of putting out good, straight arguments about open source. Propaganda does not work well on online forums. A few people inevitably punch holes in it, other folks spread the problems, and your argument is left without any meat. It happens to Microsoft all the time.
Either way, it's a disturbingly unprofessional job. It reads like some of the worse "I just sent this in to the company" Slashdot posts. For someone who is concerned about the business credibility of open source, ESR sure as hell isn't holding up his end of things.
He compares, in an incredibly simplified manner, three projects that Sun has done (throwing out all but one factor -- whether they were open source), and then claims that Sun should free Java. That's absurd. Sun execs will have gone over this in far more detail many times before, and the only thing this does is ensure that ESR emails go in the wastebasket. The fact that this letter is open makes it doubly embarassing.
I have deep respect for the work that ESR has done, and I like his famous study "The Cathedral and the Bazar". However, I really wish he'd refrain from writing open letters, or at *least* show them to a couple of people before blasting them off.
What if that happened and nobody found out? I believe this is a legitimate worry, and am working on developing a security model for version control tools, Majestic.
This is very interesting. Frequently, folks do not realize the massive problems with security that CVS has. I look forward to reading your paper -- security architecture is an interest of mine.
In fact, Apple's resolute decision to stick with PPC is going to pay some real dividends in the next 12 months while the x86 world flounders.
[snort] I've heard that before. I was even in your shoes, hoping that Apple didn't move the Mac to x86, and went with CHRP years and years ago. If you have visions of Apple's systems outperforming x86 systems anytime soon, file those with the sugarplum fairies and leprechauns. Apple does not sell systems based on CPU performance. Nothing wrong with that -- how well the CPU does is only one metric of a system -- but there's no point in buying into Apple marketing hype.
1) Open Office is good enough. Open Office used to kind of suck. A lot of bugs have been fixed in it, and you can sit down and actually do work in it. Office applications are the big barrier out there.
2) Big companies are backing Linux. IBM's been behind Linux for a while, and now Novell, HP to some extent, etc. The mainstream folks now are willing to go with Linux.
It will still take time. There is no magical 12 month window. However, Linux users are increasing. Not many folks move from Linux to Windows, and there's a steady flow of users to Linux.
Remember that about ten years ago, there were just a handful of Linux users looking out at the wide world and what might happen. I'd venture to guess that the number of Linux users has done better than double each year, and that's pretty respectable growth.
Remember when Linux wasn't a serious server OS? There were folks that said that it was a toy, and that you needed a real UNIX system if you wanted to do serious work. Well, damn, Linux seems to have tromped all over and overrun those "serious UNIX systems" on the server.
Has Linux become a major desktop player yet? No. Has it gotten more desktop users each year? Yes. Has it gained more corporate support each year? Yes. Is the software getting better faster than Windows? You bet.
And as for the link to Syllable...get real. All the complaints you listed, *especially* the ones about market share, apply tenfold to AtheOS. Hell, I'm a geek, and *I* didn't know that there was an AtheOS fork.
No, BSD is a blessed version of the old school source, Linux is a clean re-implementation. They're both good, but OS X definitely ain't a Linux distro.
For years, the IT industry has had Microsoft to gripe about. A single company that doesn't produce particularly reliable or good products with a stranglehold on the industry. With them gone, will life get massively better, or will folks find something else to gripe about, I wonder?
I've responded to a post from Adolf Hitler and Bill Gates in the last ten minutes or so. Good old Slashdot.
Why do game companies port to Mac, but never Linux?
Good question! There are a number of excellent reasons:
* Financial differences. Many people using Linux (especially on x86) are using it because they like using a free-as-in-beer UNIX system. Mac users were willing to throw down a significant amount of extra money for proprietary hardware and their OS. Conclusian -- many Mac users may be willing to spend more money on software.
* Interest differences. Linux has traditionally had few games. This means that folks that habitually buy games generally either use Windows or have maintained a second Windows boot and are willing to purchase Windows versions of their games.
* CPU Infrastructure. Partly because Linux often replaces Windows on older boxes when Windows no longer runs well on a machine, and partly because there aren't a lot of CPU-cyle-eating gamers on Linux, there are a surprisingly small number of high-powered Linux machines sitting around. I upgraded my PII/266 to a PIII/550 3 months ago only so that I could watch DVDs and do software decoding in real time. I upgraded to a P4 after that only because the motherboard died. Even on Windows, unless one is running games, it's increasingly harder to justify buying new hardware. On Linux, which runs well on old hardware and for which few games (and almost *no* high-system-requirement games exist), there are few high-end systems.
* 3d Graphics Infrastructure. Because there are few games, there is little demand from customers for good, up-to-date 3d drivers. NVidia provides only binary drivers, ATI does not support any hardware 3d above the 9200 (and even the 9200 has still-being-worked-on open-source drivers -- try using texture compression in Neverwinter Nights with a non-CVS DRI). Matrox has provided poor support for their products since the G450/G550 era. Many distros do an incomplete or poor job of setting up 3d out-of-box. With poor 3d support and most new games coming out requiring 3d cards, it's a rough area to sell games in. Most of the games that have sold well for Linux are 2d.
* Software Packaging. This is a huge pain in the ass for most commercial vendors of any Linux software. Ideally, a vendor wants to hand you a CD that you can pop in your drive, click something, and any required software is installed. This is easy to do for Windows -- you pull out InstallShield or Nullsoft's installer and whip something up. On Linux, some people only use tarballs. Some use DEBs. Some use RPMs. There are various downloading-and-dependency-handling front ends for each (apt-get, yup, yum). None of these deal very well with third-party-packages wanting to use them for stuff that isn't in the original distro vendor's distribution -- they usually require the user to manually, as root, modify a repositories list somewhere on his sytem. The installer can't just dump a file in a directory like/etc/yum/repositories or ~/.yum/repositories. Furthermore, apt-get and yum tend to slow down and not parallelize repository checking, so if there's one slow repository added, all tasks done with them are much slower (this is especially true for yum, which by default checks for updates from repositories on every run). There is no standard for autorun on Linux (admittedly, for good security reasons, but it's still a potential issue). You can't just stick in a CD and have an install window come up. There is no standard front-end to use that can deal with RPM/DEB/what-have-you. Folks may use a front-end like Loki's installer (which doesn't work in text-only mode and doesn't enter anything into the RPM/DEB/what-have-you database, breaking the systemwide packaging system by allowing the newly installed software to break if a library it depends on is removed). Many vendors just provide big shell scripts that kind of sort of do the right thing. It's pretty atrocious.
Furthermore, if you *did* want your content censored (*and* you were still reading Slashdot), I'm quite sure that there are censoring proxies out there that you could install and use.
When I was working on my CS degree I purchased copies of Matlab and Mathematica, I also would have purchased Maya (went to the lab instead) if it had been less than $400 for the student version. All my windows friends found them on irc/p2p.
There is an open source clone of MATLAB called octave. It seems to work well, but MATLAB's image processing toolkit has not been reimplemented on it, so I couldn't use it for the computer vision stuff I was doing.
I used Mathematica remotely via X11 from university boxes. No license fees.
Our main supplier who sells apple hardware to lots of other architects says that they have had a massive interest in OSX migration since MyDoom was released.
And a big hand to whoever wrote MyDoom. More traffic on the Internet sucks, but this is the kind of long-term benefit that I can live with. If Microsoft loses a quarter-million seats to more stable, secure platforms, I'd consider MyDoom to be well worth the annoyance caused.
My iBook looked good the first time I turned it on. And every app looks like it belongs in my desktop environment, rather than out of some random other person's.
Having color all over one's interface is not good for a color matching point of view. I remember, back when I cared about Apple products (i.e. pre-Apple blowing away all the clones and consigning themselves to a niche forever) that graphic designers frequently used gray desktop backgrounds, and sometimes went as far as Radius-style professional prepress monitors -- black and with a hood -- to maintain an absolutely neutral environment to do serious color work in. Now there are lots of little pulsing colored shiny things all over the place with colors blasting out of constantly resizing pixmaps, instead of the refined, muted pre-OS X styles.
Linux is for cost-saving businesses, the hobbyist wanting desktop UNIX on x86 and possibly, soon, the home user.
The home user will, I think, be low on the list of markets for Linux to enter.
I agree with hobbyist UNIX users, and that was the first area that Linux took off among, something like ten years ago.
You didn't mention serving Linux and BSD are *the* server machines. They are overwhelmingly dominant at ISPs, handing out web pages, files, and sitting behind databases. Solaris is steadily losing market share.
Linux (and BSD) are both cheap (free) and reliable. They are very popular for any kind of environment where you have many machines chewing away on a big job -- distributed rendering, massive (Google-style) database work, clustering.
Cost-saving businesses wanting Linux desktop use are *very* new, in the relative scheme of things, and most still use Windows. Getting a system with Windows 2k installed just isn't all that expensive. It's awesome that this market is starting to go to the Light Side, but it's got a way to go.
I dunno how many graphic designers are still using Macs -- a lot, but not as many as once were. Apple picked up a lot of fans, but it seems that, in the same era when Windows NT was taking a lot of market share from UNIX machines for CAD and 3d work, because NT was cheap, it was taking a lot of market share from Apple, because NT was stable.
I have heard that the Mac is still pretty popular with music folks. No idea -- I don't know any music types. The open-source Linux audio world has been improving by leaps and bounds (high quality synchronization with the JACK sound server for pro sound applications, MIDI composition apps, wave editors, software synths, etc), but many projects need work and need to be packaged by the major distros, and there is still little commercial support that I know of.
A big chunk of the things OS X provides just don't provide a lot of benefit for business users. It has a lot of eye candy and visual flair, but that doesn't translate into productivity improvements, and means higher hardware requirements (and Apple hardware already has a premium). Not a big appeal for cubicle workers. It has GUI frontends for a lot of config tasks (which are, from what I've seen, more polished and comprehensive than their Linux GUI equivalents -- and these differ from distro to distro). However, for large businesses at least, it's usually feasible to have competent UNIX people, who aren't afraid of a text editor (granted, "feasible" is not always equivalent to "actually has":-( ) to configure advanced bits of the system. Apple provides some home tie-ins, like technical support for iPod users and iTunes -- again, a cute home feature, but not the sort of thing that a corporate IT department cares about. Apple might make a play for the general business environment with easy-to-configure servers, but I really don't think that that's where they've aimed themselves. It certainly isn't what they're throwing marketing budget at.
Slashdot Mirror
Install both and try each -- it's free. All the major distros support both. It's kind of like asking someone which web browser to use or whether a song is a "good song" or not. You aren't going to get anywhere.
The big deal is antialiasing. Try using the antialiasing patch in gtk1 -- gtk1-aa actually runs more slowly than gtk2.
You think that's a big CPU cycle eater, try Mac OS X. Whee!
KDE is uber-customizable. Gnome is focusing on KISS usability issues.
[grin] I think you've got that backwards, but whatever makes you happy...
IANAL.
The trade secret approach would be dead in the water. Trade secrets provide protection against leaks, where employees disclose information that they shouldn't, but not protection against people reverse engineering, rediscovering, or reimplementing something.
The only thing left is patents.
It would be interesting to see if this approach works. If the case is won by the DVD CCA, it provides a strong argument against the DMCA -- patents alone would provide sufficient protection for at least some copy control technologies. If it's lost, then they've lost one more layer of protection.
I'd have to see the patents, but I'm a little doubtful that they really have CSS patented. The mechanisms involved are not revolutionary. Patents don't protect an end product -- just a particular process that yields that end product -- so I'd be suspicious that a patent would either not cover the work being done or would not be valid.
Why would someone on a Mac need to edit VS 6 .dsw files??
I worked on one project on a cygwin system with LF line endings, and have had people throwing project snapshots they had checked out on non-Windows sytems around. It was a huge pain in the ass.
I agree with _some_ of what you say, but, how can you give up context-sensitive (and extremely thorough) help at your fingertips?
What, for the POSIX API? I have man pages. For the Win32 API? I keep about 12 viewports going when I'm developing, and usually have at least two devoted to documentation, with a tabbed browser window open to the appropriate docs for any high-level library I'm using.
Drawing a UI is not just a novelty, either. It's a hell of a lot easier and a hell of a lot faster. Sometimes people will hand-code things, but that's the slowest way to do things. The productivity enhancement just from drawing a UI and double-clicking a button to wire up an event is worth using an IDE by itself.
Rapid Application Development tools to graphically build GUIs are not specific to IDEs. I've used glade on Linux, ResEdit on the Mac, and the-name-escapes-me-because-it-was-too-long-ago, a free Win32 GUI RAD tool back in the day. All of these are standalone, and not components of an IDE.
It's really quite amazing how many of the good coders I know don't use an IDE -- they use an editor and compiler -- maybe vim or emacs and gcc or Visual Studio or something to compile.
.NET for different modules. GNU Make's syntax doesn't change *nearly* as often as Microsoft's project file syntax (and I'm suspicious that they do so to force upgrades). Versions are not backwards compatible, so once you transition to a newer version, you're stuck.
.NET 2002 has more bugs that I can count (note: .NET 2003 seems to be better).
.dsw files into a CVS repository? They look like text, they sound like text (and CVS autodetects them as text), but VS 6 barfs all over itself if it doesn't have CRLF line endings. Try adding someone working on a LF ending cygwin system or a Unix box or a Mac into your development mix, and all of a sudden, you realize that all those deltas in your repository have to be thrown out. Yuck.
.vcproj files, file extensions changing from version to version...argh.
I think a major reason many Windows developers are such Visual Studio fans is that Visual Studio's CLI tools are a pain in the ass to use. The MS virtual terminal really sucks, as does the shell. MS basically killed off all the non-MS compilers back in the day. MS's compilers are the only ones left in wide use on Windows. Since it's a pain in the ass to use the CLI tools, and Microsoft gives you an editor with their GUI front end...programmers end up liking Visual Studio.
I do know one Windows developer that likes the (expensive) Visual Slickedit, though I'm not sure whether it's a full IDE or just an editor. It isn't a compiler, that's for sure.
I've always been rather appalled by Microsoft's IDEs. (The only other IDE I've used is Metroworks on the Mac, and while I didn't strongly prefer either IDE, I really like non-IDE work much more.) Among other things:
* Managing multiple build configurations in VS is a PITA. You can have options that apply globally, or options that apply to individual configurations, but not options that apply to sets of configurations. You can't add and remove object files to a project based on build configuration.
* Incompatibility across versions. Try using VS 6 and a few versions of VS
* Bugginess. VS
* Stupid file formats. Ever tried checking VS 6's
* A pain to set build options. Metrowerks' IDE's build prefs GUI was *much* more logically laid out. You should be able to find basic build options in a GUI within a week of using it. A month after I started using VS, I was *still* wasting huge amounts of time finding various build options in VS. That's silly.
* Can't generate nice graphical call graphs, a la ncc/codeviz.
* Relatively slow -- this is the make system, not the compiler itself. GNU Make is much faster than Microsoft's make system.
* Creates a *ton* of files in projects created. I'd expect a project file, full stop. They have project files, workspace files, cache files,
* The compiler has stopped supporting the current C language.
The only really nice things that I can think of about Microsoft's dev tools are:
* The editor supports very good function completion -- a lot of people cite this as a killer feature. Emacs has etags and fume-mode related functionality. Both are more of a pain to use, and less featureful in some ways (like not showing types of a function being completed). On the other hand, I have had nastiness where the editor got confused about where a constant was defined, and I spent ages tracking down a bizarre bug with two identically-named constants in two projects.
* The debugger/compiler support source-level modification of running programs when one is debugging. God only knows what awful hacks were done to get this working, but apparently it works well enough for general use.
Really, a lot of the people that I know have used Borland's ancient IDE (I ha
The other poster is correct. You're pretty far off on the GNOME/.NET relationship. There is one GNOME player that likes C# a lot -- Ximian. Not tht Ximian is insignificant, or that Miguel doesn't have weight in the GNOME community, but what Miguel and Ximian do defines "what GNOME is doing" about as much as private projects of TheKompany define what KDE is doing. Miguel himself has stated in *multiple* interviews that C# is *not* being merged into GNOME, that Mono is *not* part of GNOME, and that GNOME is *not* pushing C#. He has a bunch of people that want a rapid development language *and* happen to do commercial work for GNOME, which means that Mono will probably have GNOME bindings. End, full stop, you cannot claim more. There are already Java bindings for GNOME, so by the "support" metric, and if the desktop environments *have* to have a single preferred high-level-language (and I think that that's a ridiculous idea), Java would be ahead, not C#. Heck, more people write GTK apps with Python than with Java *or* C#.
Nothing at that location.
most tech stocks trade in a range and undergo stock splits if they go out of this range - i presume at one time sun and redhat had comprable stock prices if not market caps (something that would be well known to people following the shares)
Okay, that's a reasonable point. There might be some correllation with a recent high/current price argument (though I still think that a 52-week-high/current ratio would be a lot more reasonable), but while this might be accurate for order-of-magnitude, a multiplier of three is not much. Lots of folks comfortably trade at ten times what someone else does without doing a split.
Who listens to this gasbag? He's almost worse than Jonkatz. Why is the open source community allowing such an obnoxious self-righteous psychopath to be its mouthpiece? If I were Scott McNealy I would tell him to go fuck one of his gun nozzles.
I don't believe guns have nozzles.
The only sense that I can make out of it that makes ESR out to *not* be very foolish in writing this letter is if he's thinking in a rather long-term, egocentric manner. He might expect that Microsoft's C# will beat Java, and Sun has had it. That way, when it happens, he can say "Yeah, I predicted that back in Febuary '04! Too bad Sun didn't listen to me. I'm sure they'd still be in business then!" and point to his nicely documented open letter.
IIRC, he's still maintaining fetchmail.
He *is* getting more than a bit self-important, though. The last time I heard about him, he was advocating a "hacker symbol". Dammit, ESR, shut *up* for a while, and go have fun writing code or politicking or *something*. It takes forever to build up credibility, and a couple of silly open letters and articles to blow it. That may not be just, but such is life.
Just because open source is a good idea does not mean that open letters are always a good idea.
ESR, if you wanted to do this and actually do it *right* and maybe have an impact, you would have been *much* better off writing a high-quality open letter in combination with a few other major open source/free software figures, and somebody high up at IBM. People like that. That would let them catch flaws (many eyes, no?), give you more weight, and ensure that you have a good representative view of the open source community. Now you blew it, and it's too late to take it back. Unlike software (and even your rather unusual web pages), letters do not have revisions.
Java is ahead of C# in the vast majority of ways that count.
:-)
Please list these. I am not aware of them. I do not doubt their existence, but because C# is an MS project, I have avoided it. I know of a number of problems with Java, some at a fundamental level, and I'd like to see how you think Java is better than C#. I've heard fairly upbeat things about C# when compared to Java from the (rather distinguished) language people I've talked to. Any input that you could give would be appreciated, as I would very much like to dislike C#.
Okay, ESR is writing an open letter to a CEO of Sun. Why the *hell* is he comparing Red Hat and Sun by *share price*? Share price means effectively nothing when comparing company worth -- market capitalization is what should be looked at, as it takes into account the number of shares. RHAT's market cap is impressive, but it's still 1/6th Sun's, not the three times Sun's value that ESR implies when comparing share prices.
So, there are two possibilities that I see here.
A) ESR is unaware of the difference between share price and market cap. This seems a pretty awful knowledge hole. If he doesn't know, he just made himself look pretty dumb in front of some major business folks while advising them on business strategy. It's pretty embarrassing to consider that ESR can't even have had a savvy person read over his letters before he tries to speak for the open source community.
B) ESR knows what the difference is, and is hoping that "three times" sounds better. Since there is no *way* that ESR can fool a CEO into blindly going along with him (if there's one thing a CEO of a publically traded company knows, it's stock value), he must be putting this in the letter for the masses of people that are completely unversed in market economics, which pretty means *maybe* some high school and below kids. This is nothing more than a propaganda job. I'd view this as extremely disappointing, coming from someone who I consider capable of putting out good, straight arguments about open source. Propaganda does not work well on online forums. A few people inevitably punch holes in it, other folks spread the problems, and your argument is left without any meat. It happens to Microsoft all the time.
Either way, it's a disturbingly unprofessional job. It reads like some of the worse "I just sent this in to the company" Slashdot posts. For someone who is concerned about the business credibility of open source, ESR sure as hell isn't holding up his end of things.
He compares, in an incredibly simplified manner, three projects that Sun has done (throwing out all but one factor -- whether they were open source), and then claims that Sun should free Java. That's absurd. Sun execs will have gone over this in far more detail many times before, and the only thing this does is ensure that ESR emails go in the wastebasket. The fact that this letter is open makes it doubly embarassing.
I have deep respect for the work that ESR has done, and I like his famous study "The Cathedral and the Bazar". However, I really wish he'd refrain from writing open letters, or at *least* show them to a couple of people before blasting them off.
What if that happened and nobody found out? I believe this is a legitimate worry, and am working on developing a security model for version control tools, Majestic.
This is very interesting. Frequently, folks do not realize the massive problems with security that CVS has. I look forward to reading your paper -- security architecture is an interest of mine.
In fact, Apple's resolute decision to stick with PPC is going to pay some real dividends in the next 12 months while the x86 world flounders.
[snort] I've heard that before. I was even in your shoes, hoping that Apple didn't move the Mac to x86, and went with CHRP years and years ago. If you have visions of Apple's systems outperforming x86 systems anytime soon, file those with the sugarplum fairies and leprechauns. Apple does not sell systems based on CPU performance. Nothing wrong with that -- how well the CPU does is only one metric of a system -- but there's no point in buying into Apple marketing hype.
That's smack dab in the middle of the desireable Linux user area. He's got a master's in CS, he knows tech, and Linux is $0.
Yes, but there are two big factors that changed.
1) Open Office is good enough. Open Office used to kind of suck. A lot of bugs have been fixed in it, and you can sit down and actually do work in it. Office applications are the big barrier out there.
2) Big companies are backing Linux. IBM's been behind Linux for a while, and now Novell, HP to some extent, etc. The mainstream folks now are willing to go with Linux.
It will still take time. There is no magical 12 month window. However, Linux users are increasing. Not many folks move from Linux to Windows, and there's a steady flow of users to Linux.
Remember that about ten years ago, there were just a handful of Linux users looking out at the wide world and what might happen. I'd venture to guess that the number of Linux users has done better than double each year, and that's pretty respectable growth.
Remember when Linux wasn't a serious server OS? There were folks that said that it was a toy, and that you needed a real UNIX system if you wanted to do serious work. Well, damn, Linux seems to have tromped all over and overrun those "serious UNIX systems" on the server.
Has Linux become a major desktop player yet? No. Has it gotten more desktop users each year? Yes. Has it gained more corporate support each year? Yes. Is the software getting better faster than Windows? You bet.
And as for the link to Syllable...get real. All the complaints you listed, *especially* the ones about market share, apply tenfold to AtheOS. Hell, I'm a geek, and *I* didn't know that there was an AtheOS fork.
No, BSD is a blessed version of the old school source, Linux is a clean re-implementation. They're both good, but OS X definitely ain't a Linux distro.
For years, the IT industry has had Microsoft to gripe about. A single company that doesn't produce particularly reliable or good products with a stranglehold on the industry. With them gone, will life get massively better, or will folks find something else to gripe about, I wonder?
I've responded to a post from Adolf Hitler and Bill Gates in the last ten minutes or so. Good old Slashdot.
/etc/yum/repositories or ~/.yum/repositories. Furthermore, apt-get and yum tend to slow down and not parallelize repository checking, so if there's one slow repository added, all tasks done with them are much slower (this is especially true for yum, which by default checks for updates from repositories on every run). There is no standard for autorun on Linux (admittedly, for good security reasons, but it's still a potential issue). You can't just stick in a CD and have an install window come up. There is no standard front-end to use that can deal with RPM/DEB/what-have-you. Folks may use a front-end like Loki's installer (which doesn't work in text-only mode and doesn't enter anything into the RPM/DEB/what-have-you database, breaking the systemwide packaging system by allowing the newly installed software to break if a library it depends on is removed). Many vendors just provide big shell scripts that kind of sort of do the right thing. It's pretty atrocious.
Why do game companies port to Mac, but never Linux?
Good question! There are a number of excellent reasons:
* Financial differences. Many people using Linux (especially on x86) are using it because they like using a free-as-in-beer UNIX system. Mac users were willing to throw down a significant amount of extra money for proprietary hardware and their OS. Conclusian -- many Mac users may be willing to spend more money on software.
* Interest differences. Linux has traditionally had few games. This means that folks that habitually buy games generally either use Windows or have maintained a second Windows boot and are willing to purchase Windows versions of their games.
* CPU Infrastructure. Partly because Linux often replaces Windows on older boxes when Windows no longer runs well on a machine, and partly because there aren't a lot of CPU-cyle-eating gamers on Linux, there are a surprisingly small number of high-powered Linux machines sitting around. I upgraded my PII/266 to a PIII/550 3 months ago only so that I could watch DVDs and do software decoding in real time. I upgraded to a P4 after that only because the motherboard died. Even on Windows, unless one is running games, it's increasingly harder to justify buying new hardware. On Linux, which runs well on old hardware and for which few games (and almost *no* high-system-requirement games exist), there are few high-end systems.
* 3d Graphics Infrastructure. Because there are few games, there is little demand from customers for good, up-to-date 3d drivers. NVidia provides only binary drivers, ATI does not support any hardware 3d above the 9200 (and even the 9200 has still-being-worked-on open-source drivers -- try using texture compression in Neverwinter Nights with a non-CVS DRI). Matrox has provided poor support for their products since the G450/G550 era. Many distros do an incomplete or poor job of setting up 3d out-of-box. With poor 3d support and most new games coming out requiring 3d cards, it's a rough area to sell games in. Most of the games that have sold well for Linux are 2d.
* Software Packaging. This is a huge pain in the ass for most commercial vendors of any Linux software. Ideally, a vendor wants to hand you a CD that you can pop in your drive, click something, and any required software is installed. This is easy to do for Windows -- you pull out InstallShield or Nullsoft's installer and whip something up. On Linux, some people only use tarballs. Some use DEBs. Some use RPMs. There are various downloading-and-dependency-handling front ends for each (apt-get, yup, yum). None of these deal very well with third-party-packages wanting to use them for stuff that isn't in the original distro vendor's distribution -- they usually require the user to manually, as root, modify a repositories list somewhere on his sytem. The installer can't just dump a file in a directory like
*
Furthermore, if you *did* want your content censored (*and* you were still reading Slashdot), I'm quite sure that there are censoring proxies out there that you could install and use.
In the Windows/PC world, machines are obselete after 3-4 years or so.
Only Windows. When Windows can't usably run on a machine any more, a lot of folks turn that second computer into a Linux server.
When I was working on my CS degree I purchased copies of Matlab and Mathematica, I also would have purchased Maya (went to the lab instead) if it had been less than $400 for the student version. All my windows friends found them on irc/p2p.
There is an open source clone of MATLAB called octave. It seems to work well, but MATLAB's image processing toolkit has not been reimplemented on it, so I couldn't use it for the computer vision stuff I was doing.
I used Mathematica remotely via X11 from university boxes. No license fees.
Our main supplier who sells apple hardware to lots of other architects says that they have had a massive interest in OSX migration since MyDoom was released.
And a big hand to whoever wrote MyDoom. More traffic on the Internet sucks, but this is the kind of long-term benefit that I can live with. If Microsoft loses a quarter-million seats to more stable, secure platforms, I'd consider MyDoom to be well worth the annoyance caused.
My iBook looked good the first time I turned it on. And every app looks like it belongs in my desktop environment, rather than out of some random other person's.
Having color all over one's interface is not good for a color matching point of view. I remember, back when I cared about Apple products (i.e. pre-Apple blowing away all the clones and consigning themselves to a niche forever) that graphic designers frequently used gray desktop backgrounds, and sometimes went as far as Radius-style professional prepress monitors -- black and with a hood -- to maintain an absolutely neutral environment to do serious color work in. Now there are lots of little pulsing colored shiny things all over the place with colors blasting out of constantly resizing pixmaps, instead of the refined, muted pre-OS X styles.
Linux is for cost-saving businesses, the hobbyist wanting desktop UNIX on x86 and possibly, soon, the home user.
:-( ) to configure advanced bits of the system. Apple provides some home tie-ins, like technical support for iPod users and iTunes -- again, a cute home feature, but not the sort of thing that a corporate IT department cares about. Apple might make a play for the general business environment with easy-to-configure servers, but I really don't think that that's where they've aimed themselves. It certainly isn't what they're throwing marketing budget at.
The home user will, I think, be low on the list of markets for Linux to enter.
I agree with hobbyist UNIX users, and that was the first area that Linux took off among, something like ten years ago.
You didn't mention serving Linux and BSD are *the* server machines. They are overwhelmingly dominant at ISPs, handing out web pages, files, and sitting behind databases. Solaris is steadily losing market share.
Linux (and BSD) are both cheap (free) and reliable. They are very popular for any kind of environment where you have many machines chewing away on a big job -- distributed rendering, massive (Google-style) database work, clustering.
Cost-saving businesses wanting Linux desktop use are *very* new, in the relative scheme of things, and most still use Windows. Getting a system with Windows 2k installed just isn't all that expensive. It's awesome that this market is starting to go to the Light Side, but it's got a way to go.
I dunno how many graphic designers are still using Macs -- a lot, but not as many as once were. Apple picked up a lot of fans, but it seems that, in the same era when Windows NT was taking a lot of market share from UNIX machines for CAD and 3d work, because NT was cheap, it was taking a lot of market share from Apple, because NT was stable.
I have heard that the Mac is still pretty popular with music folks. No idea -- I don't know any music types. The open-source Linux audio world has been improving by leaps and bounds (high quality synchronization with the JACK sound server for pro sound applications, MIDI composition apps, wave editors, software synths, etc), but many projects need work and need to be packaged by the major distros, and there is still little commercial support that I know of.
A big chunk of the things OS X provides just don't provide a lot of benefit for business users. It has a lot of eye candy and visual flair, but that doesn't translate into productivity improvements, and means higher hardware requirements (and Apple hardware already has a premium). Not a big appeal for cubicle workers. It has GUI frontends for a lot of config tasks (which are, from what I've seen, more polished and comprehensive than their Linux GUI equivalents -- and these differ from distro to distro). However, for large businesses at least, it's usually feasible to have competent UNIX people, who aren't afraid of a text editor (granted, "feasible" is not always equivalent to "actually has"