Here are my thoughts on our support of PLplot on the Windows platform stimulated by some recent discussions on list and also off list with my wife, Barbara, who is a keen advocate of software freedom. :-)
I abhor Microsoft company tactics and proprietary software which is why I have never used Microsoft software. However, I have used the wine version of the Windows platform which is free in both senses, available on Linux and Mac OS X, and becoming a small but still important Windows platform in its own right as it gradually nibbles away at the Microsoft share of that platform. Thus, even for free software purists the existence of wine justifies our ongoing efforts to support PLplot on the Windows platform. Furthermore, there are enormous numbers of developers that use some form of Windows platform. Just look at MinGW download statistics at SourceForge which shows their automated installer is downloaded ~3500 times per day with their complete downloads (spread over many different packages by that installer) average one quarter million (!) per day. These numbers should be compared with the PLplot current download statistics which are typically ~25 per day. So I think Windows has the potential to be PLplot's most heavily used platform which justifies on a completely practical level our support of PLplot on Windows. Furthermore, as a free software advocate I also like the whole idea of populating the Windows platform ecology (whether proprietary or free) with high-quality free software such as PLplot to help advertise the advantages of such software and to help weaken Microsoft (as opposed to the Windows platform). Finally, I like the idea of helping out my fellow PLplot developers with their Windows platform support burden. In sum, the above reasons motivate my extensive testing of PLplot under MinGW/MSYS/wine and why I hope to extend that testing to the Cugwin/wine platform. Once I get all my MinGW and Cygwin wine testing done and have written up the results on our wiki, I hope others here with similar motivations will help out with additional Linux/wine and Mac OS X/wine testing of their own. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fulfilling the Lean Software Promise Lean software platforms are now widely adopted and the benefits have been demonstrated beyond question. Learn why your peers are replacing JEE containers with lightweight application servers - and what you can gain from the move. http://p.sf.net/sfu/vmware-sfemails _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
