Porting free software to Windows [LWN.net]

Porting free software to Windows

Posted Dec 16, 2004 10:04 UTC (Thu) by rakoch (guest, #4666)
Parent article: Porting free software to Windows

Both sides have their points and any could be right. A behavior that can really hurt OpenSource is to develop OpenSource apps primarily on proprietary OSs and then do a half hearted port to Linux/BSD or even developing against proprietary libraries. Doom3 is such an example - it runs way better on Windows. To a lesser extend, but still - OpenOffice. It uses less memory, is more responsive and loads faster on Windows. Anyone who has to choose where to run OpenOffice based on usability issues only will run it on Windows. Another examples are Database Admin GUIs. All those create incentives to switch to Windows. That's the same as many vendors of proprietary apps do - shipping buggy Linux versions of their Windows Apps in old versions. We can't blame them, though. Windows is their bread and butter.

Ideally it should be the other way round - develop an OpenSource app on *nix first and then port to Windows so Windows users have a old version that's lacking some non-essential features. That wouldn't be a deliberate creation of crippleware - the porting process itself takes care of that. But *that* creates incentives to switch to a free platform.

-Rudiger

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Porting free software to Windows

Posted Dec 16, 2004 11:07 UTC (Thu) by juanjux (guest, #11652) [Link]

Doom3 definitively doesn't run far better on Windows. If you have your card and your system OK it should give noticeable more fps than on Windows on the same computer, at least that is what I've experienced in the two computers I've tested it. A better example would be eMule -> aMule (which has less features.)<br>

Porting free software to Windows

Posted Dec 16, 2004 13:18 UTC (Thu) by rakoch (guest, #4666) [Link]

Anandtech appears to disagree:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2241&p=1 ff

I'd like to add something to my OpenOffice comments: This application makes it possible in the first place to use Linux on general purpose desktops where we have to deal with MS Document formats. So even though the Windows version is slightly smoother the net effect of this particular app is that users switch to Linux. So better not to blame Sun too loud ;)

-Rudiger