Kent West wrote:
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.
it's not about the percentage but about the line of reasoning plus a little bit of kidding on the side.
anectodal evidence against anecdotal evidence - not much reasoned in the end, what my example was meant to imply is that you cannot generalize from one example (intel fortran does not determine fate of linux)
not very strong argument but I also wanted to suggest that version incompatibility _exists_ in other OSs (that are not really niche, as you point out)
also note that linux is niche on desktops but not on servers, the original poster didn't talk specifically about desktops so one could also argue that linux already is not niche product.
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:Idon'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).
oh, that was a response to particular case that original poster mentioned, about the comapny that makes customer buy a machine for their software.
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/libsNot 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.
oh ok, it wasn't connected to the previous, it was my take on what vendor could do, I guess I could have titled it appropriately so that it's clear.
-----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).
I too remembered oracle but can't find it, however I have found (Informix and linux port: we just typed make):
http://slashdot.org/articles/980801/0948200.shtml ...
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?
well, WMWare is not a good example (to generalize from, it's fairly unique) because it is very tricky to emulate a processor, it is much closer to kernel than most other apps.
There are few classes of problems that you can run into and there are different solutions for each:
- specific kernel features: most apps should not care about kernel but some do - e.g. real time (or almost real time) apps (multimedia, games), apps using unstable (I mean changing API, not crashing) kernel interfaces (like alsa was until fairly recently etc.). As linux matures this is getting better. This is hard for developer (vendor) to fix, what they can do is clearly state what they need and try to work without the feature (e.g. provide alsa and oss support, don't rely on specific processor features being available etc.)
- specific versions of libraries - if nothing else they can provide statically linked binaries (that's what netscape did when motif wasn't free) or provide the specific version of shared libs they need - loki did this, I think it worked pretty well (as far as I can tell, I only had one game and few demos) - they provided some openGL libs but were able to work with yours as well - again, this is mostly problem for the libs that are constantly changing - in desktop world the situation should be much better once gnome and kde mature
- write portable code - can't exaplain in few sentences but it is possible to write fairly portable code if you know what you're doing, it's not much harder but you have to know what's portable... added benefit is that portable code is usually much cleaner (= has fewer bugs, is easier to maintain, easier to port to even more platform etc.)
one big adavantage is to use gnu development tools - they themselves are ported to almost everything and therefore it is easier to port apps build using gnu (because gnu itself is sort of platform)
there are other development environments that are ported to number of platforms that provide sort of platform - pretty much all interpreted languages - perl, java, python, ruby, php etc. (usually performance suffers but portability increases)
there is a huge number of applications that already work across large number of platforms, they do not have big development teams dedicated to support of the specific platforms. Check e.g. freshmeat.net - almost all the software is easy to compile not only for various version of linux but for various proprietary unixes as well (where I worked before we had solaris, fairly old version and still, I got everythig that I wanted (compiled from downloaded source) - gvim, tomcat, fvwm, mc, number of gnu utils (grep, find), perl, aterm etc.).
it is slightly more complex with binary only software but the above rules still apply. In unix world it is fairly easy to create a sandbox for application with all the needed libs (kernel might be a problem but then again there are only few types of apps that should care)
erik