Just a hint. If you are a key player in a project promoting open source tools for native Windows, stop calling them Microsnot and stop calling the API Woe32. You're really just hurting your project's credibility especially when the tools are in such need of some.
Anyways. Just a knee jerk reaction to watching one of the "real" open source project mailing lists. I hear about the rawness that people on these lists can show but to experience it first hand, really makes me wonder what they are trying to prove. Yeah they are hard core techies and for a lot of these projects that's what's needed to be as good as they are. Maybe I've been in the corporate world too long, but it really turns me off. Especially when I'm worried whether the project will survive and am thinking of helping out. It's certainly something that's not acceptable on the Eclipse mailing lists I peruse.
As much as people bash Microsoft and as much as I love Linux and other alternative platforms (including QNX Neutrino ;), I can't join in the bashing. What's the point? What are you hoping to achieve. Microsoft changed this industry. The vast majority of developers I know are running Windows as their main development platform. That wasn't true 10 years ago when Solaris (or rather SunOS) and Unix in general ruled the shops I worked at. Give Microsoft the credit their due. We all know open source is a better development model for core technologies. We don't need to rub their noses in it.
BTW, I'm sitting outside on a nice 21 degree Celsius evening here in the outskirts of Ottawa enjoying the fire on my deck with my favorite beverage in hand listening to a Trance Internet radio station and surfing the net on my laptop via my wireless router after spending a nice evening with my wife and sons. Life can't better than that for this techno geek who always seeks to take the high road...
Hi Doug,
ReplyDeleteI think that dissing Microsoft has to be an age thing. So many young programmers these days only really know about Windows and Linux so it's natural for them to see them as good guys and bad guys.
I've recently moved back to embedded programming and it's pretty refreshing to not be coding for either Windows or Linux (although Windows runs my development system).
One of the young programmers who works for me now writes derogatory comments about the tcp/ip stack we are using and occasionally Eclipse/CDT so maybe inexperienced programmers just need _something_ to complain about whereas us old-timers just go and get a beverage and sit out on warm evenings...
If Doug is suggesting that older programmers do not share the disdain for Microsoft as younger ones, I would use myself as a counter example. I started programming in 1970. The first OS that I was aware that I was using was IBM's OS/VS1 in the late 70's. I later used their even older OS/DOS. Since then I've used a lot of OS's.
ReplyDeleteWhen the IBM PC came out, Microsoft established that a poorly written OS, with many bugs, and lack of services could be a major commercial success. This was through sheer marketing prowess. Yes I do give them credit for this, while pointing out that the major anti-trust suit against them suggests they didn't do it honorably.
I was quite fortunate to have come across QNX back in 1984 as a panacea, and it has been so ever since.
Since then, Microsoft has established that an OS that consistently performs in a manner that can only be described as arbitrary and random can also become a commercial success. This as you well know has caused the loss of endless man-millenum as we users of Windows have had to futz, re-install, repair, recover, etc.
I do not think my comments would be fair were it not for the fact that OS's from Microsoft are the only OS's that I've ever used with these properties. I'm not saying that I've never run into an OS bug, just that such bugs were repeatable, and not considered acceptable.
I'm sorry if this comes off as just another rant against Microsoft. There's plenty of that already on the Net. It's just my feeling that were it not for an accident of history, the current state of software would be many years ahead, and I empathize profusely with anyone else who feels this frustration.