On Tue, 2007-01-30 at 21:05 +0000, Bob Ham wrote:
Further to that, something constructive: perhaps you could try telling
your customers why *you* chose linux, rather than trying to find reasons
to tell them *they* should.
My reasons, from back in about 2000, were "cost" and "interesting".
First off the license costs were not hard to sell. And secondly that I
personally wanted to program in Linux. I thought it would be interesting
--- and it has been fun. Also the company was kind of a crapshoot and I
wanted the professional experience on my resume if I needed to go get
another job. Embedded Linux sounded good to me.
I want to stick with Linux and hoped there were some measurable
performance differences to tout. Sounds like there aren't, really.
And now for some more kind of Dilbert-esque background for the curious...
A couple of years ago, we tried answering this question by measuring the
time between a midi impulse on a rigged midi cable and audio output on
an oscilloscope. We tested Receptor vs Windows 2000 running VStack. The
Receptor was not more responsive but was less jittery in its reponse.
We engineers didn't feel that the results were carefully enough
generated to be publicly announced, but we felt that our hunch was being
confirmed.
Then I made some perhaps loose comments about how Linux is less bloated
than Windows. True, but not quantifiable.
Then there is the general (and vague) perception among many in the music
biz that Windows is not for pro audio.
All of these factors led our non-tech people here to start saying that
our OS was better. Being an engineer, and not being able to quantify
"better", I would cringe when they would say that and qualify endlessly.
But I also couldn't prove anything either way, so I kind of left it.
As time has passed, I have found that I was naive about the costs of
Wine (VST compatibility, Linux (hardware compatibility, especially USB
and firewire audio/midi devices) and the costs of getting programmers
productive on Linux as a development platform.
Now it is time for a leap to a newer OS --- 2.4 isn't giving us SATA
drive support and our Wine is getting old (vinegar? %). Our code could
do Windows pretty easily. Should I push for that, or move to a newer Linux?
There you have it. Life in the software business.
By the way, I appreciate all of the comments. I expected it might be a
loaded question! ... mo
