Hi Josh, Sadly that is not going to happen. While I am a big Linux proponent I also realize the majority of the world's developers won't touch Linux for a number of reasons. Some of them are down right due to licensing issues that essentially bars commercial developers from the platform.
For example, the GPL is fine if a developer is willing to develop his or her software as free and open source, but if not the GPL because a cosmic pain in the butt for a commercial company. Let's say a developer wants to port some commercial program from Windows to Linux and sell it. However, a number of the libraries he or she needs to use are licensed under the GPL. They either have to release their software as open source, the same as the libraries, or have to write commercial libraries free of the GPL. Since nobody wants to do a lot of work rewriting libraries and if they are in the business to make money they won't release their software as open source. So right their Linux has shot itself in the foot by attracting commercial developers just by having too much of its libraries and core dependencies under the GPL. Another key problem for developers is market share. There are many people world wide running Linux, but they are fragmented, not unified, because they all use different distributions of Linux. As it result it makes it painful to create and distribute any piece of software that will safely run on all distributions of Linux. If a developer says he or she is only going to support say Ubuntu they are ignoring potentially millions of potential consumers by not supporting Fedora, Arch, Slackware, and so on as well. It makes it very impractical to market a product when one is dealing with upward of a hundred different versions of the same operating system. Fortunately, for a target group such as the VI gaming community it isn't quite that bad. I already know that most VI users are probably running Ubuntu or a Ubuntu derivative like Ubuntu Gnome, Vinux, etc or they have Arch or Fedora. That helps narrow the field somewhat and it would be possible to develop audio games for the majority of blind Linux gamers. Not so if one is a big company selling to the mainstream. The point here is that we are dealing with fragmentation and that is generally bad when a company is trying to develop software for a large number of consumers that could be running one of potentially hundreds of distributions of the same software. Its impossible to test them all or directly support them all. That is why a lot of Linux software comes in source format so if there isn't a specific build for your platform you can create a build yourself. If there isn't source available it puts the onus on the developer to create builds for a specific Linux platform if problems are encountered with the generic build. That said, I have been looking at this problem, and there may be a way to minimize the problem. by using something like Mono it might be possible to have a .NET application for Linux that is a build once run everywhere type of product. However, I have no idea how reliable that is across multiple versions and distributions of Linux since I haven't seen a lot of software for Linux actually use Mono. Bottom line, if you think everything is going to switch over to Linux in our life time you are dreaming. I don't believe that is going to happen because it is not in the best interests of most companies. You'd have better luck betting on Apple's Mac OS X being the next big thing. On 10/25/14, Josh k <[email protected]> wrote: > ok then if ms won't do those things then I hope everybody and all > developers will start switching to ubuntu gnome. NVDA for ubuntu gnome > or a better orca and more voices available in its app store. and if I > want to run windows I'll run windows xp or windows7 in a vm on the > ubuntu host until everything is all switched over. --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
