Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 22nd May 2009 13:58 UTC, submitted by shaneco
Keith Curtis worked at Microsoft for 11 years, coding on Windows, Office, and at Microsoft's research department, before leaving the Redmond giant. Call it a revelation, call it giving in to the devil's temptations, but he's now a complete open source and Linux advocate, and in his new book, "After the Software Wars", he explains why open source will prevail against Microsoft's proprietary model.
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Member since:
2006-10-20
On the open source games side I'd argue that eventually Linux will take over from a gamer perspective. Look at how many mod teams exist on windows. If those mod teams combined with the best open source game engines like XReal, Ogre etc to create new games instead of modding proprietary engines we'd be much closer to market dominance in gaming. As an artist I find the biggest problem on linux to be a lack of tools which I can use. The gimp is a wonderful program and as a game artist it is totally adequate for my needs. Blender however is horrible for me. Not that it is a bad program I've seen what it can make and it is really well written. 3d modellers seem to be one field where people have different styles of development.
I like placing coordinates using X/Y/Z input boxes and I need to access those very rapidly Blender has too many steps to get to those tools for me to work efficiently in it. That doesn't mean that Blender should get a new interface but it does mean that I'd like my existing 3d tools ported or running in wine. Luckily for me my main 3d tool Caligari Truespace (ironically a Microsoft product) does run in wine.
I think over time as more people write clones of their favorite applications and as open engines gain features the proprietary engines can't implement gaming will take off on linux. Look at the space flight sim genre. It's been dying a slow death for ages under windows but on linux it's thriving. It's got freespace 1/2 native, most games in the genre from windows run in wine. There's a bunch of flight sims too X-plane, CSP, to name a few. All this in a time when Microsoft is sacking the entire flight simulator team and winding up the product. A product they've been selling for 20+ years. I think all the people whining about photoshop are just set in their ways. If people really want photoshop on linux someone should fork gimp, merge gimpshop into the newest gimp code which btw seems to concentrate the menus onto your current work space and just turn gimp into a total photoshop clone. I for one don't need it and am happy with the gimp for my uses. That said I would like it if creating paths were a bit more sane but that's not a photoshop issue.