--- In digitalradio@yahoogroups.com, "ab2kt" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > As the Linux software has developed, and the possibility of moving > away from Windows has progressed, a surprising number of technically > super-competent hams have started coming out of the woodwork to pound > on the code. The unifying theme has been an aversion to Microsoft and > Windows.
I've just never understood this. Linux is a decent OS, and the fact that it's (ostensibly) free is wonderful. But Windows is... what... a couple hundred buck OS (far less if it came to you via a bulk purchase agreement), and while it's true that Microsoft wants to take over the world, so do the Red Hats and Mandrakes of the Linux universe. But, technically speaking, Windows is a reasonably solid OS as well. Given that both Linux, Windows, the Mac OS, and every other contemporary OS out there these days has literally thousands of bugs, I wouldn't try to get into which OS is "better" than another one, but my experience is that all of these OSes can be perfectly usable, productive, and reasonably programmer friendly. > The fact that so much ham software is joined at the hip to > Redmond seems to have been a real impediment to quite a few folks > otherwise capable of making significant contributions. To some degree it's just "success breeds success" -- there are more developers for Windows, so there are better tools out there for programmers, which attracts more programmers, blah, blah. In particular, Visual Basic was something of a "killer app" for Windows development -- I've yet to see anything close to it for fast, easy development on Linux. And gcc coupled with gdb is a joke compared to Visual Studio! (I'm not much of a Linux developer at present, but as far as I can tell, some of the best Linux IDEs available are commercial ones. Hmm...) > Also, speaking only for myself, I can say that the public > contentiousness surrounding the HF email issue is a real negative. Yes, it is. I do find it interesting that "radio with Internet e- mail" seems to be the "breaking point" for so many people... I suspect that many of them started getting nervous decades ago with autopatches, their blood pressure measurably increased with packet mail, and they really started losing it once IRLP caught on... but WinLink seems to be the straw that broke their backs. > In any case, the notion that the "open source developers" are a > distinct group from the "closed source developers" is laughable. > They're the same people. Yes they are. > And, I have to say, the people who work both > sides of that fence tend to be a good bit more punctilious about > originality, fairness, and more specific IP issues, than those who > pursue their work behind closed doors. It's not just software houses. I've spent this week down at IMS in Long Beach, Florida and in the proceedings there's a little article lamenting the fact that there are far fewer papers from industry with any meat in them, and even a lot of the university papers end up being somewhat "censored" due to having been funded by private interests. What is it they're teaching all those business school kids these days anyway? "You too can be Bill Gates?" (forget about the fact that he had enough business genius he just up and quite engineering school, much less never having gone to business school in the first place...) ---Joel The K3UK DIGITAL MODES SPOTTING CLUSTER AT telnet://208.15.25.196/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digitalradio/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
