commercialware blues, was: Re: [nylug-talk] LSB/FHS filesystem silliness, developer silliness

[jh]

Spencer Ogden wrote:
> jh wrote:
>> Yes, I knew that (and thanks for pointing that out), but when a fairly 
>> large developer is asking questions like "What's a Gentoo", and trying 
>> to claim that my "odd" distribution isn't following generally accepted 
>> conventions... it is time to ensure that they're wrong ;)
> 
> I'd go further and say it's time to find another developer/product.
> 

I'd normally agree with you. The truth is, however, that there's a lot 
of things that you cannot do with straight open source. Imaging 
toolkits, bar code stuffs, PDF functionality - I could go on.

So, you're stuck with a commercial offering from which there are very 
limited choices, sometimes just one. Sometimes you just say screw it, 
and end up with a Windows based solution because you just have no choice 
in the matter.

Some of it is just terrific overall - like, the PDFLib guys. Just 
fantastic, and I'm speaking from experience as a happy customer. But 
other folks, not so much.

Common things that I run into:

* "What is a python|perl|ruby?"
* "Why would my clients want bindings for python? No one uses it!"
* "It only runs on Red Hat version {something old}"
* "Who uses 64-bit Linux anyway? Why would you want to?"
* "Yes, we charge more, and have less features on the Linux version"

A good example: Look up Gear for Linux. It is just an amazing CD/DVD 
authoring and burning package - it is more industrial strength than 
anything else on the market. I make DVDs with huge numbers of tiny 
files, and only Gear can get it done (and quickly). Pity that the Linux 
version costs $600 - a bit out of my budget. Pity that it cannot find 
any fonts installed on the system, so that the GUI gets ugly and 
squinty. Pity that I had to go with the cheaper Windows version.

I won't even get into some of the horrible things I've seen that do 
function - scary install scripts that run as root, one package that 
wanted to create kernel modules for the sole purpose of copy protection, 
etc.

Makes me wonder how much of the current lack of Linux commercialware is 
due to the publishers making it just so damned unpalatable. Things sure 
would be easier on Windows for us, but then again, only from a dev point 
of view.

jh