Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice [LWN.net]

Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice

Posted May 10, 2012 14:10 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596)
In reply to: Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice by smokeing
Parent article: Fragmentation on the Linux Desktop (Is it Normal?) (Datamation)

And that strategy works fine if you are producing (1) free software (2) that does not need to be kept up to date.

In the real world people need to sell proprietary software for a living, and the lack of a decent way to package that up for end users to buy, install and use, has kept Linux on the desktop back all these years.

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Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice

Posted May 10, 2012 17:31 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

And why is that? For years, all we heard from Miguel de Icaza and the GNOME top table was "ISV, ISV, ISV!" We also heard it from other projects who favoured inferior permissive or weak-copyleft libraries to superior copyleft libraries (I'm thinking of OSAF's Chandler product) because of all the ISVs who would be building proprietary software on their work.

So why didn't all those people championing this lucrative ISV ecosystem get something done to make packaging and deployment easier? It's not as if those people had no skills, influence or money to do the work.

Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice

Posted May 10, 2012 22:00 UTC (Thu) by smokeing (guest, #53685) [Link]

works fine if you are producing (1) free software

In point of fact, this is precisely what I am busy with: produce free software (johnhommer.com/academic/code/aghermann). And so also do countless people small and large, for the common good.

(2) that does not need to be kept up to date

Maintainers will do it, for some considerable time even after upstream goes AWOL. If there is a sustained demand, they will try really hard; eventually it will be adopted, or someone forks/starts from scratch an alternative, better package serving the same purpose (the story with stow/xstow comes to mind).

If in all appearances, a project dies and no one seems to care, then perhaps the purpose is no longer valid, or has never been in the first place (think sundry 'ext2 defragmenters' of around 2000).

In the real world people need to sell proprietary software

I do programming full time for a living. The single big product we do, has one big university for a single customer, such that we not so much sell the *product* as, rather, sell our time and expertise to please this single customer. Barring idiocyncrasies of certain middlemen in my case, this model works remarkably well.

You seem to advocate the proprietary, closed-source model instead. Why do it here? I give you some people do closed source, some even meet with success (Angry Birds?). I, for one, in this same real world, don't, neither in my capacity as user nor as a developer, and I don't feel obliged to accommodate the (inferior) alternative.

the lack of a decent way to package that up for end users to buy, install and use

Skype is shipped as a deb file in two flavours, statically linked with Qt and standalone. Just don't tell me it's hard to install a deb. The essential problem, again, is this is not distribution done right.

has kept Linux on the desktop back all these years

I smell slashdot here, thank you.