bg says...

> The rise of the *BSDs and Linux have had the potential to open people's mind to the fact that more than MS and Apple exist in the computing world.

DOH. I never knew there was anything else.

The remainder of this pile of very un-fresh manure is snipped.

Let's set aside the whole Microsoft-Linux thing for a sec, shall we? Let's substitute something that's less emotionally charged, like Jews and Palestinians, or Serbs and Croats. Go ahead, just do the global substitution and reread any *nix screed you choose. I'll wait.

What you'll find is that the name-calling and finger-pointing are interchangeable. What the arguments amount to is propaganda. Strip out the specifics, look at the style, and it's just spew. There's no objectivity, no logic, no viewpoint other than "my way or the highway."

In that latter respect, the *nix crowd is no better than the Microsoft crowd. I'm tired of hearing about it. I'm tired of the *nix crowd treating me like I must be one of the ignorant unwashed, just because I haven't become a religious zealot just like them. They don't want me to have a choice, no matter what they say. They're afraid that I might actually have rational reasons for choosing not to use *nix.

I'll tell you what I want, and what *nix has spectacularly failed to deliver. I want a computing environment that's free of religion. I want a computing environment whose defining characteristic is value and productivity. I want a computing environment in which all players involved understand that the operating system doesn't bleeding matter. I don't use a computer for the joy of using its operating system. I don't use an operating system for its ideological purity. I don't use a system or product just because someone else tells me to, whether "someone else" is Bill Gates or Richard Stallman.

I'll tell you the other thing I want, and which *nix and friends have also spectacularly failed to deliver. I want desktop applications that do the work I want to do and need to do. Professional-quality, which is not defined by the license, or by arrogance, but by the fact that professionals choose the tool and rely on it to get their own jobs done. And I'm very specifically not talking about computer professionals; I'm talking about writers and graphic artists and others who realize that a computer is a tool, nothing but a tool, and only a tool.

As an example beyond *nix, there are reasons why Gimp hasn't replaced Photoshop as the tool of choice for professionals, and they all come down to one thing--Photoshop gets the job done in ways that Gimp can't even comprehend. Gimp is somebody's hobby; it's a bleeding toy, along with most of the rest of the half-baked alternatives that *nix-blinded mullahs tell us we must use because the alternative is eternal damnation of our souls. By comparison, Photoshop has to measure up to real, demanding requirements and expectations. It has to deliver, or it would cease to exist. Gimp has no such constraint, and it's a much weaker tool because of it. And this is only one example of what does exist for Windows and Macintosh, and does not exist for *nix. There are many more, aside from anything sold by Microsoft.

Here's another thing that matters, and that's a stable, semi-predictable development environment. The *nix community spends more time squabbling among themselves than they do on application compatability, and the result is that many real, serious commercial desktop applications avoid it like the plague. Photoshop has been ported to *nix, you know. By Adobe. And they abandoned it. Why? Because the development environment and system interfaces didn't measure up to their needs, nowhere more than in X-windows' color management and screen/window interfaces. (And that's from a *nix advocate who works for Adobe.)

There is only one thing that matters, and that is the ability to get the user's job done to the best of the user's ability. That the "user's job," whatever it might be, could just possibly extend beyond compiling and networking and computers-as-an-end-in-themselves is something that the *nix crowd utterly fails to comprehend. They can't even spell "user." "User" is a four-letter word. Standards are good, unless they're defacto (i.e., user-accepted) standards. Users are evil; users are liable to choose Windows or Macintosh if left to their own choices; users aren't to be trusted. *nix knows what users need better than users do.

At least one of the pillars of arrogance has been brought down; Mozilla has proven beyond any shadow of doubt that open source does not result in better code quality, or in less bloated software, or in efficient software, or in timely delivery. Mozilla failed to deliver a lot of other things, too, like necessary (and pre-existing) function (LDAP, anyone?), and usability. It played its part in killing Netscape just as much as AOL, and Microsoft, and Netscape itself. And Mozilla isn't alone. PHP? Lousy error handling, and it's become frozen in its tracks as far as development goes. Perl? An abdication of design. MySQL? Doesn't even conform to SQL '87; so much for standards compliance. Not a single software company has managed to build a commercial success on top of open source. Failures mount, but the arrogance remains.

*nix is a socialist and religious statement. It is, emphatically, not an environment where either economics or user requirements are acknowledged to exist. Until *nix decides to acknowledge the rest of the world of computing, or until it acknowledges that *nix, like all other systems, has its limitations and its niche, and that it is only one among many, then a *pox upon its many *houses. *nix is full of *sound and *fury, signifying *nothing. *nix is nothing more than it was 24 years ago when I first encountered it, a system for geeks, by geeks, and about geeks, with delusions of grandeur and entirely too much arrogance.

Quantifiably too much arrogance: equal to Microsoft.

It's been said that those who fail to understand *nix are condemned to re-invent it, badly. Those who fail to understand the *nix community are also condemned to re-invent it, badly.