-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: RIPEMD160 On 2011.07.12 05:24 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > Rather than taking advantage of that convenience, commercial vendors > put barriers in the way and try to carve out little walled gardens. > Did they not learn anything from AOL? DRM and activation schemes will /always/ make things harder, but that is the cost of doing business, at least in the minds of commercial software vendors.
There are actually a lot of good freeware (proprietary, but zero cost) apps out there. Some even better than open-source alternatives. I avoid commercial apps, though, since they tend to be far inferior to the alternatives (inconvenience aside). > Where is the Windows equivalent of yum or apt-get? Why isn't there a > central repository of independent and third party Windows software? If Microsoft made such a repository, how much of the repository would be high-quality open-source software, and how much would be commercial shovelware? Attempts at independent repos have been made, but they all fail because there's no effort among developers (especially developers of proprietary software), to package their software this way. These attempts also fail because they fail to gain support from users (a catch-22 where users don't bother because there's not much in the repo and there's not much in the repo because users don't bother). > It seems clear to me that it is the major open source communities > that aim for convenience, at the cost of the opportunity to sell > licences. The developers of open-source projects often aim to please the user rather than make money. You'd think pleasing the user and making money would go hand-in-hand, but history has shown that the latter can be achieved with little thought of the former. > That might have been true, oh, 20 years ago, but today, that's far > less of a rule. Linux distros make interoperability far simpler. Some > level of savvy is needed, but it is remarkable how much Linux > software Just Works. At first, Linux had to learn how to crawl and then walk. Now it's doing gymnastics. :) > In my experience, two categories of Linux software are generally hard > to deal with: one-man projects (usually stuck on version 0.2b for the > last seven years), and big, popular projects that have been taken > over by developers from the Windows world (I'm looking at you, > Firefox). YMMV. Firefox (and Thunderbird with it) are falling into the same trap that many fall into when they become popular. This is more prevalent among commercial apps, but it's not too surprising considering Firefox's popularity. The trap is making things shiny. That is, using UI designs (and to a lesser extent adding neat, but generally useless features) that appeal to the computer-illiterate masses who cling to something that looks neat, regardless of how useful it ultimately is. AFAICT, Mozilla's problem isn't that incompetent Windows-centric devs took over, but rather that Google and MS were stepping up their game with their respective browsers and is desperately trying not to lose market share. - -- CPython 3.2 | Windows NT 6.1.7601.17592 | Thunderbird 5.0 PGP/GPG Public Key ID: 0xF88E034060A78FCB -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAwAGBQJOHC4EAAoJEPiOA0Bgp4/Lgm0IAOT+/LQNalPHm5pvt4ilF1yt RM9fPBSgAF5k9U8jWBuQy/V6QJ/a1Sfkzu8ulZ8TyAYS64quucIqTwMJugdTUmct KsGbDsyXg0FObMxNiKKFuZblVYOtnULkYtYZOxeE33qy+85X6NMuFUv7ARHaLi/3 1Bdmnsj43hRrzJ1Rwb8x+xbOmiq+fJ7199loPQ+unSu7s37NJoL1e1vFNnsmGz8A Jg58Q0MbGiwettPdM9ZySYWgTJhiawtEX4SF6YiQqf22e04OyPWyxUfejixnZNoQ 7vbksr9k8PQzuTlG2y3G1pJx6XGrxgOQuEoVjInMGbZW0tx43paJLEWCOcd38FI= =3FGv -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
