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Editorial: The Advent of Longhorn and OSS Considerations

Posted by dave on · 1 comment
OSnews; By Phil Crosby 		Mail this story
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Longhorn's arrival will indeed be monumental, as their research teams are finally producing something worthwhile. The OSS world has much to do in preparation for this release; this version of Microsoft's OS will not simply offer trivial UI "enhancements" that appeal to users, as it has done in the past - they are really targeting both users and developers very forcefully this time around.

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Comments (1)

adodson ·
I could be wrong, but the author indicates his inexperience and the shallowness of his point of view here...

Quoting: Many are hesitant to embrace something from Redmond, and argue that such a development environment is not needed, and the current trend of application development (using assorted libraries and languages such as C and C++) will serve Linux and its related software well into the future. While this may be true for current OSS developers, the fact remains that the developer base will not grow by leaps and bounds until something more modern and familiar is commonly used. I for one did not start developing for the GNOME platform until the arrival of Ximian's .NET implementation, Mono. As soon as C# hit my eye, GNOME gained one more developer that would have otherwise been absent from the GNOME developer base.


So, what are his comparisons based on? I understand that he is relating his personal experience and preferences, but how can he make statements like "...the fact remains that the developer base will not grow by leaps and bounds until something more modern and familiar is commonly used."?

Microsoft's plans may prove to be a dual-edged sword. If the new desktop requires some learning curve for users, and breaks some backwards compatibility with applications, there may be more incentive to consider other options instead of conitinuing on the upgrade treadmill. Let's hope those IT purchasing decision-makers haven't forgotten the pain of Licensing 6.0, Microsoft's bitch-slap of it's customer base during the worst economic times.
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