User forums > General (but related to Code::Blocks)
pro's and pre's of compilers
thomas:
--- Quote ---Freedom with a bunch of catches isn't really free.
--- End quote ---
Freedom should never be confused with anarchy. Freedom is something very precious that is all too easily lost. The "catches" imposed by the GPL are there for only one reason. To protect freedom. Without these "catches", companies like for example Microsoft or SCO would just copy the code, put their brand onto it, get a patent pending, and finally sue the original authors. They still do that, but the GPL makes it a lot harder for them. It is not for no reason that Darl McBride and Bill Gates are the two most hated men on earth.
--- Quote ---
Look at what happened when they tried to post about codeblocks on the gcc forum. :) Where was the freedom there?
--- End quote ---
google codeblocks site:gcc.org = nil
No idea?
EDIT:
Ah, think I found what you mean, Danny Smith's coment on the MinGW forums? That is correct, but it is an entirely different issue if you read it closely. This is about distributing MinGW, not compiling with it.
And he is technically right, too. The GPL says "if you distribute copies of such a program, [...] you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code".
Well, that is not a problem really, is it. If you have a link to Sourceforge on your site, they can get the source. There is nothing in the GPL that says you must sacrifice ten thousand gigabytes of transfer bandwidth for sources.
All they really ask is that you give people a fair deal and the same rights that you are given too.
Vampyre_Dark:
:shock: Little correction here:
I'm not adverse to using GPL programs, I use a few. However, most libaries and stuff made for gcc are under the gpl, and you end up forced into it. You also end up with a lot of users who refuse to use your program and some goto the point of slandering it if you don't release the source. :? That's really a shame, because it turns a lot of people off of the whole thing. (I know this does not represent everyone!) A lot of this stuff chases a lot more of us little indy guys away from supporting linux than you probably realize.
AkiraDev, if you were referring to Linux making more than a the tiniest dent in the windows world. I highly doubt it. There are a few hurdles to get over that never seems like it's going to happen.
- Lack of drivers
- Lack of high quality software
Everyone seems to hide in their little corner and release a bunch of apps. You end up with a bunch of little second and third rate applications, and never any really good ones that can compete with the professional ones. If a lot of these little teams, or solo guys teamed up, instead of everyone wanting to do it on their own, there could be some real killer apps. eg: The newest Gimp release still doesn't even come close to measuring up to my 6 year old paint program. Which is too bad, because I really want that thing to take off. As it stands now, I only use it when I need one of the few filters it has, and then I paste the result into my other paint window.
So why switch? There are not many apps of equivalent quality to those on the 2 other dominant OSes.
AkiraDev:
--- Quote from: Vampyre_Dark on August 17, 2005, 03:24:14 pm ---AkiraDev, if you were referring to Linux making more than a the tiniest dent in the windows world. I highly doubt it. There are a few hurdles to get over that never seems like it's going to happen.
- Lack of drivers
- Lack of high quality software
Everyone seems to hide in their little corner and release a bunch of apps. You end up with a bunch of little second and third rate applications, and never any really good ones that can compete with the professional ones. If a lot of these little teams, or solo guys teamed up, instead of everyone wanting to do it on their own, there could be some real killer apps. eg: The newest Gimp release still doesn't even come close to measuring up to my 6 year old paint program. Which is too bad, because I really want that thing to take off. As it stands now, I only use it when I need one of the few filters it has, and then I paste the result into my other paint window.
So why switch? There are not many apps of equivalent quality to those on the 2 other dominant OSes.
--- End quote ---
Lack of drivers: I agree that this is the biggest downfall for _users_.
Lack of high quality software: This is what I was pointing out. Linux has become a OSS-only environment, and a lot of developers help to spread this prejudice you speak of. No disagreement there. I was merely pointing out that the whole GPL/LGPL foundation of Linux is a prime factor for it's lack of high quality software (I'm correlating commercial software with high-quality, naturally), since it becomes needlessly hostile to commercial companies, not due to actual license restrictions, but rather due to prejudice from fundamentalists.
I wish that a few BIG software companies would start SELLING high-end software for Linux, that would really stimulate it's growth.
P.S.: It is still growing and getting better, nonetheless, just slower than one would like.
Vampyre_Dark:
--- Quote from: AkiraDev on August 17, 2005, 03:37:52 pm ---Lack of drivers: I agree that this is the biggest downfall for _users_.
--- End quote ---
Why the special treament on the word users? Joe User is the most important one to impress if you want real growth.
Growth in the server room doesn't mean mainstream user growth. Linux is still brutal to the non tenchical users. It needs to stop branching off into 5,000 distros and make 1 really good one. And the OSS devs need to start pooling their knowledge into killer apps. We need equavalent or better apps for everything that can be done in Win or Mac. They focus on ease of use, while Linux caters to the tiny percentage of people who like to spend their night compiling a kernal or gui when they could have gotten it precompiled and went on with their computing. IMO the whole linux movement goes around in circles and never becomes any better than it was before at becomming a mainstream OS.
:) I'm happy this didn't go down the negative road I thought it would.
thomas:
Hmm... I have not compiled a Kernel ever since Fedora Core 1.
The only significant driver problem I ever had (and still have) is nVidia's video drivers. That's clearly nVidia's fault, though.
Contrarily, Linux works off-the-bootdisk with my RAID controller while Windows needs a driver floppy disk. First, this can be quite a problem if your computer has no floppy drive. And then, you are then prompted with 3 alternative drivers for 3 chipsets. Honestly, I have no clue which exact chip I have on my board. I just want it to work, and with Linux, it does.
Linux has lost a lot of its brutality alltogether. My old mother still has to try hard not to use the mouse as a microphone, but even she is able to use SuSE these days. :)
Your objection on the huge number of distributions is certainly a problem in some way, but note that diversity is also one of Linux's great strengths. Think of INSERT (or Feather, or Knoppix, or...) for example. You can have a Linux rescue system with X and a full suite of backup tools (or OpenOffice, or...) on a creditcard-sized cdrom or on a memory stick. That is pretty darn cool.
Show me a WindowsPE that fits on a 64MB stick :)
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version