[ale] Ernie Ball says F.Y. to Microsoft

[Jim Philips]

Irv Mullins wrote:
> On Wednesday 20 August 2003 03:33 pm, hbbs at comcast.net wrote:
> 
>>http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html?tag=fd_lede2_hed
> 
> 
> Interesting. Also note how he accurately points to the greatest factor that is 
> preventing Linux from gaining wider acceptance:
> 
> "But the developers need to start writing the real-world applications people 
> need to run a business...engineering, art and design tools, that kind of 
> stuff...They're all trying to build servers that already exist and do a whole 
> bunch of stuff that's already out there...I think there's a lot of room to 
> not just create an alternative to Microsoft but really take the next step and 
> do something new. "
> 
> Then take a look thru freshmeat and tell me he's wrong.

The other problem that many open source Linux programmers often have is 
that they can't resist the temtptation to do something obscure. Example:


Xmonkey--programmed entirely in the doohickey programming language. For 
those not familiar with doohickey, it does all of the same things that 
you can do in C and C++ (but that wouldn't be any fun). Along with 
doohickey, you will need the doohickey-Gtk bindings, version 1.9210976 
or higher. You can build Xmonkey without installing doohickey-xml2, but 
you will lose 80% of the functionality. Before installing doohickey, 
please install any 12 of my favorite CPAN modules. You must also install 
the sdfhjg libraries (which haven't been updated since 1999). These may 
require you to downgrade your existing glibs and clibs, but no 
biggie...and so on.

And if some Joe user is smart enough to get through this ordeal, he may 
find that he doesn't even like Xmonkey. I wish Freshmeat--or 
somebody--would rate open source programs for complexity of 
dependencies. A system like:

standard Gnome2 + _______________________________
standard KDE +    _______________________________

I just went through an ordeal like the one I described above and it 
makes you wonder if the people who do these things don't secretly hate 
Linux and want to destroy it.


_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale