I started out as a Mac user in about 1985 in a world which will be totally unfamiliar to almost all readers of OSNews. You wrote out your stuff by longhand, and a secretary typed it on a word processor. If you were lucky and able to manage it, you could dictate it. But you did not dictate into a dictating machine, because these were big heavy and expensive. You dictated it directly to someone who could 'take shorthand'. If you had a PC, it ran DOS. You looked for your files, and moved them around, started applications, one at a time, from the command line, and the command line was not pretty, it was green on black.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-01-11
I think you missed my point a la sarcasm. I was simply indicating that it is silly to assume an application won't get ported to Windows because Linux developers won't do it. I only used Windows zealots as an example because they had not been discussed yet. Equal time, I say.
"You might well find that the developers of these apps don't care to take sides."
That's rarely true. I develop applications that run on Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows; and I take sides based on technical merit all the time. I would say most developers only develop for either Windows or UNIX/FOSS, and that by default is taking sides.
Member since:2005-07-06
"I think you missed my point a la sarcasm. I was simply indicating that it is silly to assume an application won't get ported to Windows because Linux developers won't do it. I only used Windows zealots as an example because they had not been discussed yet. Equal time, I say. "
Sorry, my bad regarding mis-reading the sarcasm.
"That's rarely true. I develop applications that run on Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows; and I take sides based on technical merit all the time. I would say most developers only develop for either Windows or UNIX/FOSS, and that by default is taking sides."
Sure, but you develop for the platforms to further your applications' install base, not to further these platforms' agenda (for lack of a better word).
Member since:
2005-07-06
> "If Linux zealots were halfway bad as Mac zealots, Firefox
> and Thunderbird and OpenOffice and cygwin would NEVER
> have been ported to Windows."
>
>> Yeah, because we all know Windows zealots don't exist,
>> and if they did they wouldn't port those apps
Discount out the noise and the zealots. Think about the developers. If you were involved in writing these apps, wouldn't you want as many people as possible to use them? Linux != Firefox, Thunderbird, OOo etc., and it's a far stretch to equate the availability of these apps to other platforms as a measure of zealotry. It is also a far stretch to think that your average Windows zealot would port these apps just because they are zealous about Windows. You might well find that the developers of these apps don't care to take sides.