Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 25th Mar 2009 18:53 UTC, submitted by snydeq
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst questioned the relevance of Linux on the desktop, citing several financial and interoperability hurdles to business adoption at a panel on end-users and Linux last night at the OSBC.
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RE[5]: It's the Technology, the Developers and the Code Stupid
by moondevil on Fri 27th Mar 2009 12:43
in reply to "RE[4]: It's the Technology, the Developers and the Code Stupid"
Member since:2005-07-08
Couldn't agree more.
Turbo Pascal/C with Turbo Vision and later with OWL were very nice tools to use.
I still remember being like in Programmers' Heaven when I started developing for Windows 3.1.
On those days I hardly knew Unix and you had to be pretty rich to get a Mac in Portugal, so PCs were the only game in town.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Did you try to develop for anything else? Macs have always had some bizarre quirks and a complete disdain for backwards compatibility. The state of Unix at the time was several exceptionally expensive Unixes that followed the Unix 'standard' but had totally incompatible userspaces. IBM had no clue whatsoever what it was doing with OS/2.
DOS seemed like heaven in comparison, but I digress.
I'm afraid moping around over the past in denial of what actually happened isn't going to help desktop Linux acquire what it needs to move forwards.
DOS didn't become truly entrenched in the way that Windows did because of those very things I mentioned. Yer, there were lots of DOS applications around because it was just about manageable to develop for, but there was a time when Mac OS, a Unix or OS/2 could have prevented the almost complete monopoly that followed. They didn't because Windows came in and gave developers a reasonable development platform and an installation method that no other client system could provide.
1. Developers target a sizeable installed base.
2. Users want applications on their computers.
3. Developers need a way of developing applications and need far reaching APIs to do pretty much anything.
4. Developers need a way of packaging applications and getting them to users.
5. Users need a way of getting applications and using them.
6. Developers need to be confident that their applications will work in the next version of the platform they develop for.
7. Users want to know that their applications will still work when they upgrade.
8. Go to 1.
For a anyone else to get a slice of that pie it has to work out how to break into that cycle. By asking what my point was it reinforces to me just how clueless people are about what happened and why.