Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 7th Jul 2007 19:09 UTC, submitted by flanque
"Two years ago, the number of developers writing applications for the Microsoft Windows platform fell, while the opposite was true for Linux - this has now become a trend. Instead of the Web stealing away Windows Users, as people have predicted for years, it's Linux and handheld devices. According to analysts at the Evans Data Corporation research house, 64.8 percent of North American developers are writing software for Windows, down from 74 percent only a year ago. The decline in popularity of the world's most prevalent operating systems appears to coincide with the rise of Linux, as the number of developers targeting the open-source environment has gone up by three percentage points from 8.8 percent to 11.8 percent in the same year."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
* Old-timeys not wanting to move onto .NET and seeking other, more platform-agnostic, languages. VB6/WIN32/MFC are gods in some places, there's VB6 code out there that won't ever be replaced.
Meh, I think the greater issue is this; although win32 is being depriciated unofficially (Microsoft would never admit to it, heck, they're still maintaining 16bit crap that should have been removed over a decade ago!) there are features in win32 they need and .NET can't/won't provide them.
Thats probably the big problem with closed source - you're at the mercy of Microsoft when developing, too bad developers don't see that, they're too busy bouncing around on pogo sticks at MSDN hypefeasts.
Incorrect. The operating system itself has some great technology - the issue is, large parts have to be completely re-written from the ground up again; take a look at the new presentation layer, for example.
At the end of the day, the question will persist - am I better off, if I need to do major re-writing to simply either go platform neutral or move the application onto the web in some form or another.
Hopefully it should also mean that having been opensourced it should allow longstanding bugs and issues to be resolved in a timely manner - the performance one being high on the list.
People don't care about the language or the platform, what pisses the end user off is when the application is slow, buggy and crash prone. I've yet to see a large Java application which doesn't suffer from atleast 2 of the 3 issues I outlined before.
What they think is cool is completely irrelevant. The end of the day, does it fullfil what the end user wants - thats the only matrix that actually matters.
I just dislike how this article tries to make a 1=1 comparison between falling Windows developer numbers and increased Linux developers. It's simply not that simple, and those two numbers are not that directly correlated on the person-to-person level.
Unfortunately I've seen this article used in other parts of the web to claim that it is now the year of the desktop (like every other year for the last 10+ years).
Of course developers are running towards Linux on the server, but at the same time, alot of server components are being written in things which are platform agnostic, for reasons far beyond the OS holy wars that exist - the technology enables quick execution of projects rather than the fuzzy feel good factor being able to run a certain operating system.
So server orientated developers - I'm not surprised; its been a major growth path for Linux for quite some time - even Linus said that the server isn't all that interesting, there are a fixed set of specifications, meet them, and voila, success. As he (Linus) said in an interview, the desktop is alot more exciting given its greater challenge.
The days when we start seeing big software houses like Adobe/Macromedia, Corel, Quicken, Sony, MYOB and the likes Linux (or some other opensource operating system) version of their applications, thats when I'll truely believe that there is a massive move within the IT industry to escape from the clutches of Microsoft in favour of supporting an operating system with a level playing field.