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On 14 May 2004 at 20:27, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
Linux has had this problem twenty times over in trying to behave like all the different Unices out there *at* *the* *same* *time*. Following this logic, Linus should have dumped the idea of Linux and gone with forking Plan 9 instead - which while very appealing on technical grounds, it ignores how much worth legacy compatibility is worth to people.
GNU/Linux almost complies to an international standard called POSIX. Why would you want to throw away that standard and implement some non-standard, proprietary API which changes every few years? Don't you like open standards?
That was actually my point - legacy standards are worth a lot to people. The Windows API is also pretty ancient & very stable, there's a lot of Windows 2.x and 3.x stuff in there still plus smatterings from OS/2. Of course Windows NT also provides a POSIX subsystem which was wonderful back in the day.
I don't think that running windows binaries is going to be an issue in less than one decade, probably 3 to 5 years.
Precisely why Microsoft are going down the managed code route. They're going to try and get all new development over to that new proprietary API with proprietary tools & programming languages. By the time Linux is fully up to par, all the latest apps will be incompatible again.
Linux is up to par with what? Do you mean wine instead of Linux?
I meant it in two ways - Linux in features terms and Wine in Win32 compatibility terms. Not cloning Windows makes the job of keeping up much tougher.
Are we talking about the same system here? I can run my Win95 and often my DOS binaries unmodified on the latest Windows. A Linux binary from 1996 stands *zero* *chance* of running unmodified on the latest Linux.
I know from other people that most games written for win 9x work poorly or not at all on XP. Even microsoft can't make XP fully compatible with 9x, and we should be able to do so without specs, source code and knowledge of the internals? I don't think so.
Almost every *application* for DOS runs fine on NT. Games less so I agree, but then Microsoft's WOW team set a target of being able to play DOS Doom in the subsystem and then it'd be considered done. Business apps were their primary concern and these run very well.
The guys at ReactOS know most about the difficulty of cloning Windows so I'll leave it to their interviews to comment. However the DDK gives a surprising amount of information.
When you say "It's making sure you're always behind the first guy" I think you're ignoring how non-techies value computers. Non-techies want something they can buy some peripheral or application for with reasonable assurance it'll work - Linux doesn't and never will do this - it has more of the market now than MacOS X yet its peripheral support is far less. That's because Linux is good for techies (who are able to maintain their own kernel modules) and servers (which have a very limited set of hardware configurations).
Linux will never do that? And how do you know? Can you look into the future?
There are some things Linux is naturally strong at. There are other things it is naturally weak at. If you balance the effort required to turn a weakness into a strength against the rewards for investing the effort then yes, you can see into the future.
I can't see Linux ever penetrating more than 2% of the home market period. I can see it making maybe 25% of office desktops which are basically glorified typewriters. I can see it gaining 75% of servers though once the giant lock is expunged from FreeBSD it'll be unstoppable for servers. We'll see if I'm right or wrong in five years time but go look at RedHat's recent marketing strategy if you want to see corroboration.
One arena I can't guess is embedded devices. Either WinCE or Symbian will grow or Linux will shrink. Very hard to call right now.
Which resources? FSF doesn't have any resources for this at all. And I think the FSF had created enough serious change and is still doing so
- or do you want to say the FSF didn't create a change the last 20
years? Do you want to say that the increasing number of GNU/Linux users isn't a change?
The self-appointed leaders of the free software movement could begin by publicly encouraging ReactOS and its ilk instead of decrying it as encouraging further lock-in into MS's evil grip (complete nonsense, but who am I to disagree with RMS?). That alone sadly enough would cause developer resources to flock to cloning Windows.
Regarding how much change the FSF has caused, well yes they have been successful in a way the more free BSD culture never was. I don't think they themselves know why that was but I do notice that they think it's because their worldview is the right one and therefore they have been given some divine mandate. I among many others find that attitude disturbing and worry where it's going. For sure, their actions don't seem to be those which most proactively advance the causes they profess to believe in.
And about the patenting stuff, I don't think there will be software patents in Europe.
Our best and only chance was via the parliament because it's something we can influence. The council of ministers is effectively closed to our voice and there's little we can do about it (that's why the old left in Britain disliked the EU, it's fundamentally anti- democratic). I personally am resting easy until the directive returns to the EP when I'll either campaign for a yes or no vote depending on whether it's good or not.
However my comments were referring to the globe. Microsoft is quietly patenting key parts of Linux and if it ever needed to, it could sue everyone using Linux for patent breach though not in the EU if the parliament amended directive were passed. Bye bye Linux if that happens.
Cheers, Niall