On Friday 23 July 2004 03:59 am, Ryo Furue wrote: > machine, the company makes the costomer buy one. (The sofwares so > expensive that the cost of a lowly Windows machine is nothing.) > > Unfortunately, uniformity and community efforts don't come together.
That *is* true. Linux is hell as a target for commercial software. Part of that is by design, I think. We treasure diversity and choice, and we treasure open source software. If everything is open source, diversity is not a problem. That's what package maintainers are for. But it's true that there's a whole realm of software nobody is likely to develop for Linux because of the diversity. I had to sit by and watch my father build a network of Windows NT boxes because I couldn't write and THOROUGHLY test the software he needed for the cash registers at his workplace. It causes problems with hardware too. Some vendors are hell bent on keeping their sacred little details under their collar. While there are some relative success stories, like the NVIDIA drivers, there are many more situations with winmodems and winprinters and the like that create pure driver hell for anyone not running Flummy Linux 1.2.3. This even affects people running Flummy Linux 1.2.4 or 1.2.2. Binaries-only drivers suck! Ultimately, however, I don't think we can have our cake and eat it too. There *is* a price to pay for running Linux, but Linux wouldn't be Linux if all the was to it was a new version of Red Hat every four years. -- Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621 http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
