Erik Steffl wrote:
Kent West wrote:The result is that the vendor chooses not to go down that path, and Linux remains a niche product ratherlet's see another example.
<snip>
so there you go, windows will remain a niche product blah blah blah...
Calling a product that has 3% of the market a "niche product" seems to make sense to me. Calling a product that has 90% of the market a "niche product" doesn't make sense to me.
You keep looking at this from the customer's point of view; the customerdo you work for MS?
Nope.
why did you snipped my suggestion on how to deal with the issue FROM VENDOR SIDE and then you complain I don't look at it from vendor side?
Because I mistakenly was overly aggressive in my snipping, and because I misunderstood what you were saying. Up until this point, it seemed to me that you were looking at things from the customer viewpoint rather than the vendor viewpoint Here's your paragraph just before your bullet points:
I
don't understand it. if you (they) think that it is acceptable to buy computer with windows just to make sure that the client has OS that software company supports why wouldn't it be acceptable to buy computer with redhat linux? if you are willing to have a dedicated machine then you can have a dedicated machine that plays nicely with other linux machines...
The paragraph seems to start out from the customer's viewpoint; I assumed that it ended from the customer's viewpoint. After re-reading the paragraph in light of your response, I'm no longer sure that it starts from the customer's viewpoint (it was the "if you ... think that it is acceptable to buy computer..." that made me think that). Immediately after this paragraph was:
depending on the circumstances (not all solutions are possible/desirable in all situations):
- statically link everything- provide your own shared libs (do not install in system dirs!)- have an experienced sysadmin set up the machine- develop portable software, do not depend on random quirks of kernels/libs
Not being a developer/programmer, I did not pay enough attention to these bullet points to recognize that three of these things are vendor-oriented.
There was no intended slight on what you had to say; merely ignorance/misunderstanding on my part. I apologize.
-----Karsten made the very interesting point in one of his posts that the entire Oracle enterprise database software was ported to Linux with a single make command (although Paul indicates that the reference is not easily found, and I haven't bothered searching for it).
What this indicates to me is that vendors could write for all the nix's rather trivially, if they would just bother to do so. If that's the case, then yeah, the claim that there is no single Linux is a red herring.
My impression (as a non-developer) for several years has been that the differences between various distros of Linux is a problem for vendors of non-open software. Perhaps then, the problem is not that there's no single version of Linux for vendors to standardize on, but rather that there's a _perception_ among vendors that there's no single version of Linux.
Part of this perception stems from earlier attempts with installing VMWare on a Debian box. The installer had to compile kernel modules, which involved me getting the headers (nope, that wasn't enough; get the full source), etc, and even then, the version of VMWare I last tinkered with wouldn't work with the newer kernel (2.6 maybe? it's been a while) that I had recently installed. So in that experience, VMWare wouldn't work on my particular "version" of Linux.
1) Could the vendor have made the installation more bullet-proof? 2) Without lots of resources to do so?If the answer to these two questions is "Yes", then the original claim of not having a single Linux is probably just an excuse for lazy vendors. If the answer to either question is "No", then the original poster has a valid claim. I don't know the answer to these questions, but it'd be interesting to hear from developers who would know.
-- Kent