OT: Re: Linux-vs-Windows (was Re: Augury and reading ...)

[Fairlight]

Simon--er, no...it was John Esak--said:
> Well, I view the situation as far more than that kind of thing... how about
> expanding the scenario to somebody puts this great Linux desktop drop-in on
> someone's desk that has been using Adobe Photo Shop for the past 5 years to
> their work.  Will Adobe Photo Shop (off the shelf) run on SuSE's new client?

If you use WINE, maybe.  More likely with VMWare.  Last I heard, WINE had
made significant improvements, but I've never had the disk space and CPU
power on the same machine of my own to test a recent incarnation.  VMWare
is supposed to be pretty rock solid--I'd expect with 95% certainty that it
should indeed do it--if it can run StarCraft, it can run PhotoShop.

> Unless this new breed of Linux desktop clients allows the use of any of the
> zillions of readily available programs to be run without problem, they (it)
> will run into the same thing Apple has for the past couple decades. They
> have only a tiny percentage of any store's shelf-space... Unfortunately,
> people use these big mainstream products everywhere these days. I don't see
> how the new Linux desktop client will get past this obstacle.

Apple did that to themselves though.  It started with their
short-sightedness on hardware.  Starting as far back as the Apple 1, their
hardware was always proprietary.  The Apple 2e was fully documented as a
6502 (65c02 for the platinum edition), but they did odd things to it like
having proprietary registers that you could POKE and PEEK into and
generally access--that were -not- in clones like the Franklin 2e or the
Laser 128, or any other clone.

They took it to the next level with the first Macintosh systems, the
footprint models.  Motorola 68000-based systems, they couldn't even be
opened without damaging the hell out of them unless you took them to an
authorised service centre.  Apparently becoming one took a -lot- of money,
and with it came the special key to open them safely.  The key alone, if
you lost one (and may God have mercy on your soul when Apple found out--I
knew an authorised Apple dealer who did) cost something like $600 to get
them to replace it for you.  And it was just a piece of specially formed
plastic, basically.

But all the way through the 68040 series of Mac's, the systems's always
been proprietary.  The only smart thing they did was adopt SCSI, but they
did it really half-arsedly by removing the ground pins, so 50-pin SCSI was
25-pin SCSI on Mac's.  This has a really Bad Effect on some drives--to the
point where Kurzweil uses Apple's version of SCSI in its synths, and many
Seagate drives do not like to even work at all on them.  Mine has an IBM in
it, and that works, but my dealer actually had to stop even trying Seagate
for that kind of bus.

So, having deprived themselves of the ability to have clones (and I believe
this has remained true even through the PPC PowerMac's and all the new
iWhathaveyou's that they've released, there's -no- exponential outgrowth of
competing hardware, the cost of ownership stays high, and the amount of
hardware therefore stays artificially inflated.  Meanwhile, the iNTEL world
basically saw the cloning of darn near everything from at least the 80286
forward, if not earlier (I want to say earlier but am unsure of the facts
as I didn't follow it until the 286's).

Jobs repeated his mistakes at NeXT, going with proprietary hardware (the
nice black gear that was good for its day (68030/040 depending which
models), but which even my P100 laptop can outperform.  They, also, had a
problem with attracting a large software base, despite having an extensive
development kit specifically for NeXTStep's API.

Apple's lack of capitalisation has less to do with the quality of their
products than it does with their continued insistance on remaining a closed
hardware platform over which they maintain an iron-fisted control that
only serves to hurt them.  With a higher cost of ownership (especially in
the past), a niche market (mostly graphic arts, desktop publishing, and
music professionals and enthusiasts, prior to OS/X), and the attendant lack
of multitudes of clones and even official units out in the Real World,
developers have seen it largely as a waste of investment to write for Mac,
by and large.  This should probably change from OS/X forward.  But the
historical trend is not something they can reverse in a few short years
after 20+ years of hurting themselves.  The only places this isn't true
are in their niche markets.  There's a plethora of MIDI software for Mac.
You're hard-pressed to find more than a few for PC (although more have been
ported/written in recent years).  The best are still on Mac.

But by and large, it's not considered a good bet to port to the platform.
If you look at the Mac and Windows isles in any CompUSA or store of your
choice, the shelf-space ratio is probably about 2:10 or so.  And the Mac
stuff costs.

Linux is basically in the same boat--seen as a long-term investment plan
for development houses.  And those that have done it in the past (Corel
and WordPerfect Corp. with WordPerfect, Adobe with PageMaker [but NOT with
PhotoShop!!!]) have dropped support for Linux and even SCO in some cases.
There are different historical reasons, obviously--mostly due to linux's
relatively new status as a stable and increasingly enterprise-class OS.  It
doesn't have Apple's history of mistakes, no.  But then, I doubt you can
get WordPerfect for text-based Motorola SVR3 anymore, either.  They gave up
on that after 5.1 or 6.2 or so.  Last I saw for Motorola on a 3B2 was 5.1.
I know they had it for linux through 6.2 but I thought it went away after
that.  Maybe they'll reconsider eventually.

It's about market share, return on investment, and the almighty dollar.  My
favourite scene in John Carpenter's "They Live" is the scene where he puts
on the glasses and sees all the subliminal messages, and the best one of
all is seeing one guy holding money, and the message that's hidden on it
reads:  "This is your god."  Too apropos.

But it's a misnomer that people won't buy software for open source OS's.
That's entirely a fallacy.  In fact, people clamor for legitimate software
for the platform--developers (or more likely their CFO's) are too skittish
and buy into the mythos that people won't pay for applications to run on a
free OS, to be bothered to develop for it.  So they'll lose out, and we'll
get things like OpenOffice, the plethora of things on FreshMeat,
SourceForge, et al, and it just takes longer to get them.  But they -will-
come.  It's a matter of when, not if.

The -dumbest- thing I've seen someone do is actually write a game and
-only- release the multiplayer network engine for linux, but not the
player interface.  So you have linux servers for Half-Life, but you can't
actually play it on linux, despite the fact people would -readily- shell
out $50 per copy.  Wanna know why?  Doom and Quake were ported initially
internally--Dave Taylor at iD did the original ports, and later after he
left iD, someone else in the linux community stepped in to help them.
But they were straight-up in C, and the only differences were the device
drivers.  It was readily portable to X11 and even SVGAlib if you knew what
you were doing, and they did.  But VaLVE based Half-Life's UI entirely on
Microsoft Foundation Classes.  There's no equivalent of that for any *nix.
So there was never a Half-Life client port (and thus no CounterStrike mod,
etc.) for linux natively.  Mostly the same reason (I gather) that seeing
an fP ODBC on *nix is unlikely at best--they used an M$-centric library
to do it, from what I heard on the grapevine.  Things like that don't
make portability very accessible.  That's not a slight on fP.  In fact,
it's actually a slight on VaLVE, because VaLVE flat-out took a hell of a
shortcut and should have known better after seeing what iD had done years
earlier.  It was short-sighted, at best.  They could have made even more
money than they did.  And dollars to donuts says they do the same thing
with the upcoming Half-Life 2, not having learned a thing.

Strange things have always happened concerning linux app development--both
good and bad, timely and untimely.  It has a better track record than Apple
so far, IMHO.

> P.S. - By the way, when did this become the Linux Forum?? :-) Isn't it
> appropriate to put OT on any of this stuff anymore?

I didn't start any of the threads.  :)  I think this all started from the
SCO -> Linux fP migration question.  I stuck OT on this one though.  :)

mark->
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